Energy Transition

Energy Transition is a general term for the effort to transition away from the usage of fossil fuels, toward the usage of renewable clean energy. This is necessary to limit global warming.

The emission of green house gasses (GHG emissions) is caused to a big percentage by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels like natural gas, propane, gasoline, diesel fuel, or coal. These greenhouse gasses (hence the name) trap the suns heat in the earths atmosphere. This leads to global warming, that has catastrophic effects like changing weather patterns and extreme weather conditions like droughts, severe storms and extreme rain fall. Arctic regions heat up much faster than the average global temperature, accelerating the melting of polar ice caps and increasing the sea level rise. This, in combination with more extreme weather, causes coastal erosion and flooding.

Read more about Climate Change on Wikipedia

Since climate change has self-reinforcing effects, humanity needs to bring GHG emissions to net-zero by 2050, to avoid a catastrophic outcome.

The federal government has committed to reach its emissions reduction target of 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero emissions by 2050.

The government of Québec plans to reduce Reduce GHG emissions by 37.5% below 1990 levels by 2030, and achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Energy consumption is often divided into 3 sectors:

• Electricity production
• Heat (for industry and homes)
• Transport

In the future, we will likely see more electricity being used for heating (heat pumps) and transport (electric vehicles). These links between the sectors are called sector coupling.

The key challenges in the sectors are:

Quebec has big capacities to produce clean electricity at the moment, but the increase in demand will require more generation capacity in the future, such as wind parks.

Replacing old electric heating systems in houses with much more efficient heat pumps could liberate a big amount of electric energy. Heat pumps are more expensive to install, and not easy to retrofit in existing buildings. Well insulated buildings will have to play a key role as well. The use of biomass will be limited by how much wood we can sustainably take from the forests.

Transport electrification can greatly reduce the GHG emissions of the transport sector, but the necessary battery production is bound to have another impact on the land that has to be considered.