The Canadian Renewable Vitality Affiliation (CanREA) has accomplished its evaluation of information for the tip of 2022, discovering that Canada’s wind and photo voltaic power sector grew by 10.5% final yr.
“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 latest era capability by 2022,” stated Phil McKay, CanREA’s senior director, technical and utility affairs.
Greater than 1 / 4 of all put in capability in Canada might 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 full development for 2022, Ontario 10 MW and Nova Scotia 2 MW.
Because it grows, the renewables sector emerges as an necessary pressure for job creation, first within the development of latest services, but additionally 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%.
“Development within the renewables sector means job development for Canadians,” stated 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 yr’s development of 1.8 GW was considerably larger than in 2021 (<1 GW), it didn't meet the expansion fee referred to as for in CanREA's 2050 Imaginative and prescient, Powering Canada's Journey to Web-Zero , which says Canada must deploy greater than 5 GW of latest wind and photo voltaic power every year to fulfill its dedication to net-zero GHG emissions by 2050.
“Canada is simply starting to benefit from the potential of wind and photo voltaic power,” stated Vittoria Bellissimo, president and CEO of CanREA. “The nation should do extra to unlock the advantages of the numerous alternatives supplied by renewable power. We’ve huge, untapped wind and photo voltaic assets, the bottom value sources of latest decarbonized electrical energy era 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 information crew tracks greater than 2 GW of initiatives at present beneath development throughout Canada, plus one other 6 GW of initiatives in superior phases 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 identical time, CanREA is working with federal and provincial governments to unlock many gigawatts of extra alternatives of their jurisdictions.
“CanREA is working laborious 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 boundaries that we predict have to be addressed,” Bellissimo stated. .
Within the photo voltaic sector specifically:
- Photo voltaic power grew by 25.9% (810 MW) in 2022, to a brand new whole put in capability of virtually 4 GW;
- Greater than 1 / 4 of Canada’s present photo voltaic capability might 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 yr;
- As of December 31, 2022, Ontario may have greater than 1.9 GW of put in photo voltaic PV capability, powering almost 517,000 houses.
Picture by Jason Hafso on Unsplash
