Canada’s electrified future is a challenge, but one we can achieve

A recent survey found nearly 70 per cent of Canadians planning to purchase a new car in the next five years are likely to buy an electric vehicle, a result that raises the question about the electricity system’s ability to meet the increased demand. In addition to cars, the electricity sector is being looked at to displace emissions resulting from the combustion of fuels for home heating and an increasing number of industrial processes in a transition broadly called “electrification.” To meet increasing demands, electricity generation capacity will need to grow, but efficiency advantages inherent in electrification, combined with the untapped resources available mean this is not an impossible challenge—in fact, it is one that Canada has achieved before. The first advantage that electricity has is that combustion is a low-efficiency process. Much less input energy is wasted when moving vehicles or heating homes with electricity, meaning we need less of it to serve the same purpose compared to burning a fuel to achieve the same result. For example, in a vehicle, only about 20 to 25 per cent of the energy released by burning fuel in the internal combustion engine ultimately moves the vehicle, while the rest is unavoidably lost to heat. The low efficiency is not a failure of engine design—in fact, modern engines are incredibly well optimized—but simply an unavoidable reality of the limits imposed on thermal energy systems by the second law of thermodynamics. In contrast, electric motors can convert more than 77 per cent of their input electricity into moving the car, so they can go three times as far with the same amount of energy put into their “fuel tank.” This means that only about one-third of the raw energy contained in diesel or gasoline needs to be replaced with electricity when internal combustion transportation is electrified. While engines only convert a small fraction of their fuel’s energy into motion, combustion is much more efficient when the energy is being used directly for heating; furnace efficiencies can be as high as 98 per cent. However, even in this sector, thermodynamics affords electricity another advantage, as electric heat pumps can be used to move heat in much the same way your refrigerator does with an effective efficiency of 200 to 300 per cent. Electricity systems aren’t perfectly efficient either, but stationary combustion power plants operate at much higher efficiency than their mobile counterparts, while renewable energy sources are available for free and unused wind or sunlight creates no waste. Despite the efficiency improvements electric machines present over their thermal counterparts, electrification will require a larger grid. A recent Canadian Gas Association study found that very deep electrification across all sectors of the economy, with limited efficiency improvements, would lead to an increase in demand from 532 TWh in 2019-2020 to 1130 TWh in 2050, which translates to an annual growth rate of 2.5 per cent. Canada has the energy resources, engineering know-how, and historical precedent to meet this level of growth. While electricity generation has largely plateaued in Canada just as it has in the U.S. in recent years, historically, electricity production in Canada grew at an average rate of 4.8 per cent from 1960 to 1990—almost double the high estimate of the required rate of growth under an aggressive electrification scenario. Canada’s electricity system is well-positioned to build off its strengths for this transition. The significant existing hydro capacity that provides the majority of the country’s electricity today can also act as a battery to facilitate integration of low-cost, but variable, technologies like wind and solar, whose costs have fallen dramatically in the past decade. There is no shortage of renewable energy resources or interest in developing them; in fact, in Alberta alone, there are more than 8,000 MW of wind and solar already being investigated, more than enough to replace the annual energy currently being supplied from coal in the province. Meanwhile new renewable options are also emerging across the country from geothermal, to tidal, to huge offshore wind farms, while other, pre-commercial technologies such as small nuclear reactors and carbon capture and storage may one day be developed. Building out Canada’s electricity system to meet an electrified future is a challenge, one that will require investment, along with policy and regulatory changes, but the thermodynamic efficiencies mean it is less daunting than it first appears, and one that is well within our ability to deliver. Sara Hastings-Simon is a senior researcher at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines; the co-host of the Energy vs Climate podcast; and a research fellow at the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary. Tim Weis is industrial professor in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Alberta, and executive director of Electricity Research at the Centre for Applied Business Research in Energy and the Environment. The Hill Times