By David Dodge, GreenEnergyFutures.ca
The Energy Futures Lab is a very unassuming collaborative effort to solve some of the most contentious energy and political issues in Alberta.
While Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2024 is aptly “polarization,” the Energy Futures Lab pushes beyond the seemingly impenetrable boundaries of polarization to solve for net-zero.
And they do this by bringing all the right people, from all sides of the spectrum together to have difficult discussions and come up with solutions.
“The Energy Futures Lab is a non-profit organization that was formed 10 years ago, to … depolarize some of the conversations that we’re having around the energy transition,” says Maureen Kolla, project lead for Alberta’s Electricity Future at the Energy Futures Lab.
Each year, the lab recruits 40 fellows to the lab for one-year terms. This is about to change to two-year terms to ensure some continuity.
“Over the last 10 years, we’ve had about 300 to 400 folks, leaders within the energy system from oil and gas, to electricity, to artists, to city, municipal folks,” says Kolla.
The lab facilitates difficult conversations to arrive at solutions to find what Kolla calls the “radical middle.”
Finding the “Radical Middle”
Tristan Walker of Massif Consulting is a former energy manager from Pincher Creek who is one of 40 fellows in 2024.
The Energy Futures Lab “seeks to bring together a diverse narrative and allow for voices from different perspectives to come together to try and shape an energy future that is equitable for everybody,” says Walker.
The lab has been very successful over the last 10 years, convening those conversations and coming up with a wide variety of solutions that have been adopted in many energy policies and actions you see today.
The lab started talking about the concept of net-zero almost a decade ago before the concept became what Kolla calls a “trigger word,” and the lab’s work has influenced provincial and federal strategies that now use the concept.
It’s hard work, done in a collaborative way that cuts through polarization without earning a lot of accolades or attention. The news cycle is instead dominated by populist rhetoric that often pits people and industries against each other.
“You might have people that say, ‘I really want renewables,’ and other people who say, ‘I don’t want anything to do with that side of things.” But there they are – people from oil and gas, the renewable industry, and a host of others in the lab finding ways to have the conversations that are so desperately needed to find solutions.
Getting to a net-zero future
The key question the Energy Futures Lab seeks to answer is clear in its mission and vision material.
How can we leverage Canada’s assets and innovation capacity to accelerate an inclusive and equitable transition to a prosperous net-zero future?
“Obviously, the path to net zero is a big one,” says Walker. “Within that, there’s a lot of potential impacts – you can talk about jobs, you can talk about cost, energy affordability, you can talk about energy security, and then obviously there’s just the social impacts as well.”
Through lengthy discussions, the facts and differing perspectives begin to come together. “It’s one of those things where a rising tide lifts all boats,” says Walker.
The Energy Futures Lab focuses on five “innovation challenges,” one of which is “Alberta’s Electricity Future.”
“Within Alberta’s Electricity Future, we co-created with about 50 different organizations a vision of what we think Alberta’s Electricity Future can look like that really centers on people, businesses, and communities,” says Kolla.
“What we’re trying to do is set a vision that Alberta can align behind for the future of the electricity system,” says Walker.
Out in the polarized public sphere, these discussions tend to focus on an all-or-nothing outcome, but the fellows in the lab gather information about market trends, diverse goals and outcomes, and arrive at that “radical middle” Kolla referred to.
A Vision for “Alberta’s Electricity Future”
And that’s exactly what the Alberta Electricity Future group did, and they produced a report they called “Leading the Charge: A Vision for Alberta’s Electricity Future.”
It is not a roadmap but rather a vision for a decarbonized energy system that produces a net-zero future “one that firstly eliminates or reduces greenhouse gas emissions produced – direct and indirect – and addresses the remaining emissions through the use of offsets and removal technologies.”
A graphic in the report details the “forces creating momentum for change” that is so essential to understand.
Anyone who looks at the chart realizes quickly that the future is one where our energy comes from a diversity of sources to deliver resiliency, customer choice, consistency, and affordability and one which enhances economic opportunities, investor confidence, and job creation.
Walker says after working through the process, he sees a future energy system that consists of a “mosaic of things.”
The future grid is a “mosaic of things”
We’re going to have to do a combination of demand-side management, new generation, and things like carbon capture and utilization could be a factor, he says.
“Renewable energy is critical. The fact that you can generate electricity without a consistent input is pretty spectacular,” Walker says.
Importantly, Walker says the electricity group will unearth the investment and economic potential of many of the solutions.
Much of the work of the fellows and that of the Energy Futures Lab is nose-to-the-grindstone, behind-the-scenes, and uncelebrated work.
But this sort of messy, collaborative work is a model for how to solve some of our most vexing problems.
Kolla says the Energy Futures Lab is having an impact and that its work on geothermal, bitumen beyond combustion, hydrogen, battery metals, carbon capture, investment, and net-zero are influencing government and sector priorities.
The work is unsexy, rarely gets headlines, and yet serves as a model on how to get beyond polarization and solve big issues such as energy transition, decarbonization, and the creation of a successful new energy economy.
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