St. Albert will get more trees next year in time for Canada’s 150th birthday with the help of some railway cash.
CN Rail announced Oct. 28 that St. Albert was one of the 50 communities picked to get a $25,000 EcoConnexions grant. The grant, done in partnership with Tree Canada and Communities in Bloom, is meant to fund tree-planting projects in celebration of Canada’s sesquicentennial next year.
“We are a country of nature,” said Communities in Bloom spokesperson Raymond Carriere, and trees are a significant part of that nature. Planting trees is a way to acknowledge Canada’s past and leave a legacy for its future.
This grant will help the city buy up to 150 trees to plant as part of the 150 block parties St. Albert hopes to hold next year, said Anna Royer, the city’s division business manager. The parties are part of a series of events the city has planned for Canada’s 150th anniversary.
“We want to make sure there are many more 150ths that can be celebrated,” she said, and these trees would help ensure that happens.
The trees will be planted between next May and September in various city parks, Royer said. A bigger tree with a plaque commemorating the grant will be planted at a major downtown block party the city has planned as part of its Canada 150th celebrations.
The EcoConnections grants have funded the planting of some 60,000 shrubs and trees across Canada since they started in 2012, CN reports.
Alberta will hold its first auction for renewable power next year as it seeks to get a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, a move one local renewable advocate says is the right call when it comes to climate change.
The province tabled legislation Thursday that commits Alberta to getting 30 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030.
Solar and wind advocates have long talked about how the cost of their power has fallen precipitously in recent years, Environment Minister Shannon Phillips said earlier that day at a press conference at a wind energy conference in Calgary.
“We want to see what the market can deliver in Alberta.”
The province will have investors bid in an auction next year to add 400 megawatts of renewable power to the electricity grid, Phillips said. This was the first step towards adding some 5,000 MW of renewables to the grid by 2030, a move she said would draw some $10.5 billion in private investment and create 7,200 jobs.
Open competitions are now the dominant approach for getting renewables on the grid and have been successfully used in the U.S., Germany and Mexico, said Dan Woynillowicz, policy director for Clean Energy Canada (a climate and energy think-tank at B.C.’s Simon Fraser University).
“It’s leaving it very much to the market and to competition to deliver the best program at the best price.”
It’s tough to predict how expensive this transition will be as every electricity market is different, Woynillowicz said. The government has said that this new power will likely be more expensive than conventional natural gas, but has also said it will offset the added cost using carbon tax money paid by large industrial emitters.
A carbon tax means that the price of natural gas will also rise as that of renewable power falls, he continued. Wind and solar prices have fallen 61 and 82 per cent, respectively, since 2009.
The province’s job predictions are in line with what’s been seen in other markets, Woynillowicz said.
“It’s a high likelihood that it will actually be Albertans that will be building these projects,” he noted, as Alberta has a big supply of construction and wind workers.
This announcement won’t benefit rooftop solar and wind companies, but small-scale installs won’t get the province to where it needs to go, said Leigh Bond of St. Albert’s Threshold Energies Corp.
“We have the goal of getting rid of greenhouse gases or lowering greenhouse gases, and the only way to do that is to stop burning things,” he said, coal and natural gas included.
“You have to encourage the whole electrical power and the renewable segment of the market to move forward.”
