Abstract
Governments today are increasingly looking to non-state and bottom up community actors to help achieve climate change mitigation targets. Canada is a resource rich state with one of the highest per capita greenhouse gas footprints in the world. It is also a state where issues of political will, geographic scale and incumbent industries contribute to a challenging context for broad community participation. Despite this, a long history of co-operative and municipal activity exists in the energy sector, exhibited in diverse ways across its provinces and territories. Provincial variation in energy sources and actors illustrates a far more nuanced picture than exists at the national level, providing a case rich with both promising and cautionary tales for the community energy sector. This article examines the emergence of community energy in the context of broader energy sector moves towards increasingly powerful trade agreements, privatization, and conflicts over Indigenous rights in Canada. It argues that significant potential exists to strengthen the role of local actors in Canadian energy governance, but that macro-level political and economic developments have also created significant challenges for widespread community energy transitions.
Highlights
The year 2016 was a significant year for the planet
A further step in the research involved identifying recent challenges to renewable energy policies in Canada in order to determine the implications they have for community renewables in particular. This included a scan of academic and grey literature on international trade and renewable energy policy as well as keyword searches for Canada or Canadian jurisdictions in trade challenges within North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and WTO contexts
Canada argued that the actions of the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) were outside NAFTA jurisdiction because it was a state-owned enterprise and not a government, an argument the arbitration panel did not accept [47,48]
Summary
The year 2016 was a significant year for the planet. It was another “hottest year on record”, more than 1.3 ◦C warmer than the 18th century when modern temperature records began. Much of the warming in recent years has been stored in oceans, which has led to record lows in the Arctic sea ice this November This past year heralded significant political shifts, in the form of a rise in anti-establishment and populist political movements, in established Western democracies with the heaviest climate debts. It has never been more important to examine the potential of non-state institutional alternatives in the energy sector This is because once institutionally established, community energy actors are passive recipients of electricity policies but, importantly, can be involved in co-constructing public policy alongside more traditional private sector actors [2]. Canada sits in a unique position to understand the varied development of community energy initiatives around the globe It is a wealthy, arctic nation with significant fossil fuel extraction, processing and consumption activities and greenhouse gas emissions significantly higher (20%) than 1990. Canada is a case rich with both promising and cautionary tales for the community energy sector
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