Atlantic Canada Lags On Clean Tech Adoption, But Some Businesses Buck The Trend
HALIFAX — With increased emphasis on reducing environmental impacts and mitigating the effects of climate change, The Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC) says many Atlantic Canadian firms are increasingly recognizing the benefits of clean technology adoption. But the Atlantic region is still lagging.
APEC’s latest report, around the acceleration of clean technology adoption in Atlantic Canada, shares some insight on the benefits of “clean tech,” along with some of the barriers to adoption and how they can be overcome.
Clean tech is adopting any process, or purchasing a product or service, that reduces or eliminates negative environmental impacts or improves energy efficiency.
That can mean buying goods that are less energy- or resource-intensive, finding better ways to manage natural resources, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or finding other ways to reduce a business’s environmental footprint.
According to APEC, in 2019, Atlantic Canada’s clean technology output was valued at $1.7-billion. The region’s clean technology sector also accounts for 1.6 percent of Atlantic GDP, while environmental and clean technology together represent roughly 3.1 percent of Atlantic GDP.
That’s the fourth largest in Canada, in relative terms.
While APEC notes the clean technology industry is growing faster than the overall economy, it still faces challenges. Access to labour and capital, supply chain markets, and commercial scale-up are just some of the ongoing issues.
According to Statistics Canada’s 2018 annual Environmental Protection Expenditures Survey, firms were more reluctant to invest in clean technology because of “insufficient return on investment.” Others were a lack of education on clean tech and difficulty with financing.
In Atlantic Canada, the top concerns were high costs and insufficient return on investment, access to capital, and a lack of skilled staff.
Large-scale clean tech investments paying off for JDI
One of the broader examples of clean tech adoption so far in the region is by JD Irving Limited.
Dion Hanrahan, vice president of industrial business development at J.D. Irving Limited, spoke this week as a part of an APEC panel about how the company’s forestry products division, specifically its pulp and paper operations, have benefitted.
Hanrahan shared how two significant clean technology investments to JDI’s Lake Utopia Paper operation in St. George have helped the company reduce emissions over the past several years.
Its Lake Utopia corrugated mill produces roughly 185,000 tons of corrugated product per year. Hanrahan said the steam required for the operation had traditionally been generated in three boilers, all of which were fired by fossil fuels.
He said the installation of its biomass boiler in 2011 was undertaken for two reasons: one for environmental performance and reduction of emissions at the site, the other to help the company better navigate volatile fossil fuel pricing, with biomass providing a more stable price.
“Installation of the biomass boiler had an immediate impact on JDI’s operations,” said Hanrahan. “It satisfied typically about 65-to-70 percent of our steam demand and it allowed us to retire two out of the three fossil fuel boilers right away.”
Hanrahan said the later installation of the effluent treatment plant at Lake Utopia in 2018 provided an opportunity to both treat and capture some additional biogas from the operation.
The largest component of the upgrade, a 39-million-gallon, low-rate anaerobic digester covered by a geomembrane liner, allowed JDI to capture virtually 100 percent of any of the off gas coming from digester. That resulted in a 23 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
Hanrahan says since both investments came online, it reduced emissions at the lake by approximately 70 percent, calling it “a significant improvement.”
Smaller businesses trying Clean Technology
Another business making clean tech investments is PEI’s Atlantic Grown Organics. Its President, Marc Schurman, and his wife Krista started their greenhouse business in 2001 as a way to diversify their farm operation.
Following a three-year stint working in Mexico and managing a 25-acre greenhouse, the pair moved back to the Maritimes in 2011 to Marc’s family farm in Kensington. They started Atlantic Grown Organics as their own brand, which has now become the largest organic greenhouse operation in Atlantic Canada.
Schurman says the operation today grows fresh organic produce year-round but notes that also comes at the cost of increased energy demands on his business.
“Most people don’t understand what a greenhouse operation does, but of course it is a fairly intensive energy user,” said Schurman.
Schurman discussed how, in order to grow things in Canada throughout the Winter, there needs to be an investment in “supplemental lighting.” He said simply having the correct lighting in the winter can double harvest speeds and allow an operation like his to continue growing year-round.
Atlantic Grown Organics began growing indoors with high-pressure sodium lights in 2014, though Schurman says a switch to higher efficiency LED lights has allowed him to run indoor lighting at half the energy consumption per unit area.
The farm also uses biomass energy through a 2.5-megawatt system installed in 2019 in what Schurman calls “the first of its kind I guess in Canada,” saying the system does offset about one-million litres of fossil fuels every year.
“So mostly what we’re burning would be waste wood chips, whole trees that are harvested and would normally just be laid to waste in the field. But we also do burn some crop biomass from a local pressing plant — so waste seeds basically that would otherwise possibly go to the compost or the waste stream,” said Schurman.
A wake-up call for the region
APEC CEO David Chaundy calls awareness for firms around clean tech part of APEC’s mission to help ensure the region moves to a sustainable economy, adding it’s not just from an environmental point of view, but a fiscal and business competitiveness one as well.
“We’ve done work on this in the past,” remarked Chaundy, “but now that the environment is shifting, it’s not just about a policy agenda to get to net-zero or to introduce carbon pricing. This is becoming a business imperative,” he said.
Chaundy says investors are making decisions in favour of certain types of firms who are moving to clean technology and says even potential employees are selecting companies they would work for based in part on how much those companies are taking their own sustainability agenda seriously.
“So, from whatever the driver is really, it’s important Atlantic businesses understand what’s happening.”
Tyler Mclean is a Huddle reporter based in Fredericton. Send him your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].