Energy can be polarizing. But for Innisfail, the Roadshow brought people together to discuss the challenges they are facing and their hopes for the future. In coming together, people were able to create solutions for the community’s future.
Budget 2023 offered a much-needed response to legislation in both the US and Europe. In this blog we breakdown the what it means for Alberta and opportunities at hand.
The Grid Sandbox seeks to identify new ways for utilities and consumers to gather better data in a way that supports a clean, affordable and distributed electric energy system.
Canada can capture significant value along the entire electric vehicle supply chain. The Energy Futures Lab’s contribution to an emerging battery metals sector speaks to the power of collaboration and social innovation.
Youth perspectives in the energy transition are much needed, and can reinvigorate energy leaders. Hear about the 2022 Youth Innovation Jam event from a participant perspective and why it was so meaningful.
In August of 2018 I had the good fortune to spend two weeks at the Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity for a Summer Writers Retreat. My project for that time was to write about the Energy Futures Lab. It was an intimidating program in the sense that I was there with people who were actual writers. I was one of only two non-fiction writers amidst a group of almost 20 very talented storytellers.
“We can’t forecast our way to the future that we want, we really need to begin with the end in mind.”
There’s never a bad time for the Energy Futures Lab to meet, but the gathering in February in Cochrane was particularly timely. In the wake of Teck Resources’s decision not to proceed with its Frontier Oil Sands project, and in the shadow of both a national conversation over Coastal GasLink and Indigenous rights and a growing provincial one about the merits of separation from Canada, the time was right to ask some tough questions.
Since its inception, the EFL has had the intention to both include Indigenous people, partners, and perspectives as well as acknowledge and address, in its work, issues related to Indigenous people’s relationships to the energy system. As we step along our Truth and Reconciliation journey, we are embracing a knowing that this aspect of our work needs to be improved and deepened if we truly intend for the Lab to represent what is possible for today’s energy system in Alberta, and beyond.
For as long as the EFL has existed, its work has been creating productive and solutions-oriented conversations about energy and climate as well as expanding the dimensions of what we like to call the “radical middle.” But with political polarization on the rise, and the dialogue around the energy transition becoming more binary by the day, we thought it was time to expand our reach — and our ambitions.
We are an Alberta-based coalition of diverse innovators and leading organizations working together to accelerate the transition to the energy system the future requires of us.
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