Efficiency not only saves energy and fights climate change, but brings real cost savings by reducing energy bills for families and business.
There’s a decent chance you are—more than one-third of New Brunswickers live in energy poverty, meaning they have to spend an unsustainable proportion of their monthly income on energy costs.
In Feb 2023, the Conservation Council convened nine New Brunswickers for a Citizens’ Assembly on Energy Poverty and Affordability.
Participants laid out the challenges people are facing amid the surging cost of living and energy expenses and offered solutions for building a fair, affordable, and sustainable electricity system in New Brunswick.
In Feb 2023, the Conservation Council convened nine New Brunswickers for a Citizens’ Assembly on Energy Poverty and Affordability.
Participants laid out the challenges people are facing amid the surging cost of living and energy expenses, and offered solutions for building a fair, affordable, and sustainable electricity system in New Brunswick.
Today, we can enjoy affordable electricity that we can rely on and that generates little to no pollution. New wind and solar projects are the cheapest forms of electricity on Earth. Five times cheaper than coal, five times cheaper than nuclear energy, and three times cheaper than natural gas*.
These technologies have advanced significantly in the last 10 years and are more reliable than ever, especially when paired with new transmission networks connecting existing regional hydroelectric power with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and short and long-term energy storage technologies.
Conservation Council of New Brunswick (CCNB) and the Ecology Action Centre (EAC) research shows that electricity plans that favour cleaner electricity are cost competitive. In fact, of the 24 electricity plans reviewed, 80 per cent of the scenarios favouring efficiency and renewable energy were cheaper or within just a few per cent of the scenarios favouring conventional, polluting technologies.
Solving climate change requires deep social change, including an expanded reliance on non-polluting electricity to power our lives. The key to this transition is ensuring that our modernized and sustainable electricity system is affordable and reliable.
Cleaner electricity can help make us safer, more secure and healthier. We can use it to help make electricity affordable for everyone, reliable for when we need it, and cleaner for our health and for our planet.
The Electricity Vision is focused on the phase out coal-fired electricity and ensures our regional electricity system is 90 per cent emissions free before 2030 as required by federal regulation and climate change policy. These first steps will be accelerated by a federal Clean Electricity Regulation due in 2023 requiring a zero-emitting electricity system by 2035.
Our definition of cleaner electricity has two components. First, cleaner electricity relies primarily on non-polluting sources like wind, solar and hydro technologies and it is used efficiently. These renewable technologies have lower environmental impact than electricity generated from coal, oil and natural gas that generate greenhouse gases when burned causing the global heating that is supercharging our weather. Second, our sustainable electricity portfolio needs to be affordable and reliable.
We know that cleaner electricity is affordable, reliable and sustainable – and it’s ready to be deployed right now. The major barriers keeping us from achieving the clean electricity system we deserve are the outdated laws, rules and targets in our region. We need to come together to update the laws that control how we plan for future electricity systems, in order to ensure a safer, more secure and healthier future with clean electricity.
We need to build electricity connections to allow renewable energy like wind and solar to be reliable at all times of year, by backing it up with existing hydroelectric capacity, storage technologies, and collaboration with our neighbours.
We need to avoid the risks, mistakes and delays that come with continued coal burning, more nuclear energy, and dependence on fossil fuels.
Download the letter from CCNB:
Learn more about how our electricity and energy use changes the climate and what New Brunswickers are doing about it:
© Conservation Council of New Brunswick 2024