ATHABASCA - What happens when you bring together energy experts, leaders of industry, and regular citizens, just looking for the best way to navigate the need for energy in the future and how it's going to be produced in north-central Alberta?
Since October, the Energy Futures Roadshow (EFR) has hosted four virtual sessions with those very people in the Athabasca area to discuss what is being done and what could be done to transition to more renewable energy sources and other alternatives — like passive solar greenhouses — for the region.
“It was good to have that much support from the community from really a varied group of people within the community,” said participant Marie Golonka. "The municipality and Mike (Gismondi), but then also people in industry; it was really neat to see all these people support the idea and the project.”
It was in February that Golonka organized as a project coordinator with Rural Roots to Climate Solutions, a presentation at Athabasca University about passive solar greenhouses.
“There were several ideas too, it wasn't just the passive solar greenhouse that we talked about,” said Golonka. “There's some other really exciting initiatives that came out of it as well that people are networking around, and creating a small group of interested people to continue the conversation and continue the project.”
One of the ideas was accessing waste energy; another was capturing energy from the Athabasca River; and a third included leveraging abandoned wells to capture heat for greenhouses.
“It was really neat because we were able, with this big group of people to find these small working groups, people that had the right skills for the right projects and knew the right people for the right things that were needed,” she said. “And so, it's not just one project coming out of this. It's a lot of projects and a lot of different collaborations happening.”
There are still some loose ends to tie up, like the vision statement, but Golonka was happy that it captured an essence of every group that took part.
“That document I'm really excited about because everybody collaborated on that. So, it's Indigenous voices, and people from oil and gas, and people from Al-Pac (Alberta Pacific Forest Industries Inc.) and people from both the town and the county," said Golonka. So, it's not a document that just suits one type of person in the community, it's trying to be representative of everybody.”
She also pointed out it was helpful to see representatives from both the Town of Athabasca and Athabasca County attend every session.
For someone like Noel Major who has deep ties to the oil and gas industry, he appreciated the acknowledgement oil and gas is still going to be needed for the long time to come.
“I think one of the best things that happened with it is, it's a pretty diverse group, but they acknowledge that we live in the time we live in, and we still need the energy that's being produced now,” said Major. “But we need to look to transitioning into the future, and how can we do that and still maintain our livelihood?”
Major did say that some of the ideas described, like encouraging oil and gas companies to transition to renewable energy, will take some doing.
“But if somebody can actually show a product out there that we can do in northern Alberta; where you can actually have your own greenhouse that can produce commercial grade products that we can actually have locally, then you'll get somebody paying attention,” he said.
Mike Gismondi has always been a local and vocal advocate of renewable energy and knew what to expect from having attended a session before, but noted that the online format gave participants access to the EFR fellows that would not have been able to hear from in a pre-pandemic session.
“The strength was that we were able to hear from all of the energy fellows, and at a workshop we would only get one or two of them,” Gismondi said. “That was a big plus because they could just phone in.”
One of the initiatives mentioned that Gismondi felt was an achievable goal was the PACE program — a financing tool for building owners and developers to use to upgrade their building’s energy performance and install renewable energy systems with no money down and the financing is repaid through their property tax bill.
Property assessed clean energy (PACE) was started in 2008 in the United States and to date has financed over 237,000 homes and commercial retrofits and created over 63,000 jobs.
Gismondi added that discussions also took place about helping people transition from oil and gas jobs, to applications of hydrogen, geothermal and more.
“One of the things we talked about was bitumen beyond (combustion),” said Gismondi. “That was interesting, because they were saying, is there a future for all the by-products that come out of heavy oils and oil sands, but that we don't burn and create carbon from? So, are there ways to use it for some of the by-products that we need to make plastics or to make other materials and other chemicals that we need in society?"
