The Canadian Renewable Vitality Affiliation (CanREA) has accomplished its evaluation of knowledge for the top of 2022, discovering that Canada’s wind and photo voltaic power sector grew by 10.5% final 12 months.
“Canada now has an put in capability of greater than 19 GW of utility-scale wind and photo voltaic power, including greater than 1.8 GW of recent technology capability by 2022,” mentioned Phil McKay, CanREA’s senior director, technical and utility affairs.
Greater than 1 / 4 of all put in capability in Canada will likely be added in 2022 alone.
Western Canada accounted for 98% of whole Canadian development in 2022, with Alberta including 1,391 MW and Saskatchewan including 387 MW of put in capability. Quebec contributes 24 MW to the entire development for 2022, Ontario 10 MW and Nova Scotia 2 MW.
Because it grows, the renewables sector emerges as an essential drive for job creation, first within the building of recent services, but in addition within the ongoing operation and upkeep of those websites. Canada’s wind and photo voltaic trade will account for roughly 4,462 person-years of employment in 2022, rising by a powerful 86%.
“Progress within the renewables sector means job development for Canadians,” mentioned McKay, “and we anticipate these employment alternatives to proceed to broaden much more strongly because the trade which has modified continues to develop.”
Whereas final 12 months’s development of 1.8 GW was considerably larger than in 2021 (<1 GW), it didn't meet the expansion price known as for in CanREA's 2050 Imaginative and prescient, Powering Canada's Journey to Internet-Zero , which says Canada must deploy greater than 5 GW of recent wind and photo voltaic power annually to fulfill its dedication to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050.
“Canada is simply starting to reap the benefits of the potential of wind and photo voltaic power,” mentioned Vittoria Bellissimo, president and CEO of CanREA. “The nation should do extra to unlock the advantages of the numerous alternatives provided by renewable power. We have now huge, untapped wind and photo voltaic sources, the bottom price sources of recent decarbonized electrical energy technology out there at present.”
Important additional development within the deployment of wind and photo voltaic power may be anticipated within the close to future. CanREA’s knowledge group tracks greater than 2 GW of initiatives presently below building throughout Canada, plus one other 6 GW of initiatives in superior levels of improvement, for a complete forecast of greater than 5 GW in wind, 2 GW of main photo voltaic and 1 GW of power storage are anticipated within the subsequent few years.
On the similar time, CanREA is working with federal and provincial governments to unlock many gigawatts of extra alternatives of their jurisdictions.
“CanREA is working arduous to dramatically speed up and broaden the deployment of wind, photo voltaic and power storage applied sciences – there are a lot of coverage, regulatory and infrastructure limitations that we predict have to be addressed,” Bellissimo mentioned. .
Within the photo voltaic sector particularly:
- Photo voltaic power grew by 25.9% (810 MW) in 2022, to a brand new whole put in capability of just about 4 GW;
- Greater than 1 / 4 of Canada’s present photo voltaic capability will likely be put in by 2022;
- Alberta accounted for nearly all of this development, with 759 MW of 771 MW. Saskatchewan put in 10 MW, Nova Scotia 2 MW, and Yukon 0.1 MW this 12 months;
- As of December 31, 2022, Ontario may have greater than 1.9 GW of put in photo voltaic PV capability, powering almost 517,000 properties.
Photograph by Jason Hafso on Unsplash
