Amy Taylor, Director of Alberta Energy Solutions at the Pembina Institute, made the following statement in response to the announcement that the Governments of Alberta and Canada will provide a $779 million subsidy to TransAlta's Pioneer Carbon Capture and Storage project:
"Given the urgency of tackling climate change, Canada should not build new coal plants without carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology to sequester all or most of its emissions. Today's announcement means that the only new coal-fired power plant under construction in North America will use CCS to partially capture its emissions — and that's an important step in cleaning up the dirtiest source of electricity.
"CCS technology has the potential to reduce emissions from existing sources of pollution. While it is a step in the right direction, it is worth noting that today's announcement will only reduce the emissions from this project by less than one third.
"To truly cut Alberta's emissions, companies must retrofit existing coal-fired electricity plants, which comprise over 70% of Alberta's electricity supply, or replace them with clean energy alternatives.
"Today's announcement of a significant subsidy for CCS comes at a time when the federal government has not announced even the outline of a national cap-and-trade system. Canada urgently needs regulations that put a price on pollution high enough to compel polluters to invest their own money in the deployment of technologies like CCS.
"In parallel to their support for CCS, governments need to support a massive scale-up in renewable energy and energy efficiency, the most sustainable solutions to provide electricity and address climate change. The Pembina Institute's recent "Greening the Grid" analysis found that Alberta could meet its electricity demand over the next 20 years without building any new coal plants if it aggressively targets renewable energy and efficiency.
"Unfortunately, the federal government has ceased support for renewable energy development in Canada, failing to renew the ecoENERGY for Renewable Power program in the last budget, while the Government of Alberta has never offered targeted incentives for the production of renewable electricity. In sharp contrast, President Obama's recovery and reinvestment package included $27 billion of support for renewable energy, almost 14 times more per person than Canada's economic stimulus package."
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The Pembina Institute is a non-partisan sustainable energy think tank. The Pembina Institute's perspective on carbon capture and storage is available at www.pembina.org/pub/1787
For more information, contact:
Amy Taylor, Director of
Alberta Energy Solutions
The Pembina Institute
Cell: 403-996-0510
Email: amyt@pembina.org