Energi Talks

Markham interviews Jennifer Saldana, director of ESG performance and reporting for ENMAX, and Professor David Sauchyn, director of the Prairie Adaptation and Research Collaborative and professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina.

What is Energi Talks?

Journalist Markham Hislop interviews leading energy experts from around the world about the energy transition and climate change.

Markham:

Welcome to episode 294 of the Energy Talks podcast. I'm energy and climate journalist, Markham Hislop. ENMAX , the city of Calgary owned electric utility, has entered into an interesting partnership with the University of Regina to create a climate model that will help en masse navigate rapidly changing weather. Extreme weather, including drought, floods, hail, hurricanes, and other events of biblical proportions, have emerged as a major risk factor for utilities around the world. I'll be talking to Jennifer Saldana, who's the director of ESG Performance and Reporting or NMACS, and professor David Sotjian, who is the director of the Prairie Adaptation and Research Collaborative, and a professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of Regina about the project.

Markham:

So, Jennifer and David, welcome to the interview.

Jennifer:

Thanks for having me.

Markham:

Jennifer, I'm going to direct the first question to you. Why did Enmax feel that it needed to undertake this project, and in particular, why now?

Jennifer:

So we've been undertaking climate related physical risk assessments for a number of years now. We understand the need to be proactive in how we're managing the grid today in order to be resilient as severe weather events increase in frequency and severity. So we've done these assessments for a number of years. We, learned a lot through these assessments, but the data that we were using was very coarse data. So we were using, some publicly available reports that had really great information but didn't give us the granularity that we need to really understand and manage the system within the city of Calgary and Southern Alberta.

Jennifer:

So we saw the need to add in some more refined data. We don't have any climate modelers on staff, so we reached out to Doctor. Sachin at the University of Regina to see what he could do to support us.

Markham:

Dave, is this common within your profession, or is it just common more common now that utilities and other industries and sectors that would be affected by extreme weather are reaching into the academic community and saying, hey, can you help us with this data? Can you can you put together a model that will help us cope with this?

Dave:

It's more common now, like you said. Our research center is almost 25 years old now, it was established in 2000, and for the 1st 10 or 15 years most of our work was for government. But within last, say, 5 years, we're doing work for public utilities, Crown Corporations, banks, insurance companies, and the private sector.

Markham:

Dave, you know what? I I I take, I participate in these sometimes raucous public conversations on social media and sometimes off social media about climate change. And I hate to say it in this, you know, 2024, there are still a small but significant proportion of Canadians who either think that climate change doesn't exist or if it does, it's it's due to natural causes. And you're a climate scientist. What is it about the prairies, particularly because we're talking about Calgary here, the southern part of the prairies?

Markham:

What data, what evidence can you point to and say, science says this is caused by climate change?

Dave:

Well, there's a very large there's a vast amount of evidence, scientific evidence, and I'm not sure it's that productive to give that kind of information to the people that deny climate change because I'm not sure it would change their minds. So, I mean, I I I teach an entire one semester course on the evidence for climate change. I can't possibly reduce that to just a few sound bites, but believe me, there's an overwhelming amount of evidence.

Markham:

You're you're an expert, so we're gonna take your word for it. If you say there's a an overwhelming amount of evidence, we we believe you. Could you give us 1 or 2 examples of climate change in action in southern Alberta?

Dave:

Well, I can tell you how the climate is changing in Southern Alberta. The action that's being taken, for example, the city of Calgary has taken a lot of action in terms of climate change. They're one of the more progressive cities and the city of Edmonton as well. But in terms of the indication of climate change, most of it is occurring in winter, and our winters are much less cold than they used to be, and that's fairly easy to document. It's not as obvious in Calgary because Calgary already has a much warmer winter than the rest rest of the prairies, so you're starting at a much higher baseline.

Dave:

But if you go beyond Calgary, there's been quite a bit of warming in winter and if you have a warmer winter it means the rest of the year is the growing season's getting longer, the frosting season getting longer, and there's all kinds of implications for agriculture and energy sector, and in this case, the production electricity and and the demand for electricity. Yes.

Markham:

And, of course, there's a lot of attention being paid right now to the, likelihood the very high likelihood of a drought in Southern Alberta. I know I have some professional colleagues who are working on that file and are very, very concerned that this could be extremely dry summer. So, Jen, let's say the let's take the issue of drought, and let's assume for a moment that my, my associates' fears are are well founded, and in fact, it does turn out to be a very dry summer for, for Southern Alberta and Calgary. What does that mean for N MAX?

Jennifer:

So we work really closely with the city of Calgary on their drought resilience plan for water use, but the focus of our climate related physical risk work, we see a secondary impact from drought in terms of weaker trees. So one of the things that impacts us, on our distribution system is trees coming down on lines. So So that can take a number of homes offline. That's a really important risk for us to mitigate. And if we're seeing an increase in that risk during drought times, there's a lot we can do in proactive vegetation management to reduce that risk.

Jennifer:

We're also seeing, over the last couple of years, if you've been in Calgary, we've seen all of our conifers dropping a lot of cones, and that's caused the squirrel population to, explode a little bit. And we've actually seen more line impacts from squirrels over the last couple of years. So, that's something that we can now predict when we see these drier times and we see the impacts on our trees to mitigate out outages.

Markham:

Isn't that interesting? I I wouldn't I mean, those are two examples of the effect of climate change on the distribution system, that I would not have expected. I I it I have to honestly say that that, squirrels chewing on transmission lines or distribution lines has never come up in conversation or in an interview, but that would be one of those practical kinds of problems that increases your cost, increases the risk of maybe downtime and outage in a particular neighborhood, all of those things that that you can mitigate if you anticipate as opposed to react. Am I correct?

Jennifer:

Absolutely. It actually saves us money to have all of this information in our hands in advance.

Markham:

Now, Dave, I wanna ask you about your your model. Are how sophisticated is a model like this? Is it, the kind of model that's done with a with an Excel spreadsheet, or is it something much more sophisticated?

Dave:

Yeah. I wouldn't attempt it with an Excel spreadsheet. It would blow up the software. In fact, we have to run this model on a supercomputer. We have access to a computer at Simon Fraser University.

Dave:

It's one of the most powerful computers in Canada and our climate modeler, Doctor Basu, at our research center fired up the model several months ago. So as soon as Jen and enmax approached us about this kind of research, we fired up the model because it'll take many months to complete the model run, but it's generating huge amounts of information. We have a we have a storage device in our lab that stores 96 terabytes of data.

Markham:

Oh, goodness.

Jennifer:

And if

Dave:

you're not familiar with with that kind of measurement, it's a it's a very vast amount of information because our climate model is producing information on temperature and precipitation, humidity and soil and so on, every 6 hours, from 9 from the year 1950 to the year 21100, and on a grid where the spacing is 3 kilometers. So if you do the math, it it generates huge amounts of information, and so, doctor Basu has to write computer programs just to read and manipulate the data.

Markham:

Who collects this data? Is this, collected by provincial agencies, by businesses, by federal agencies, and and is it clean data? Is is it data that you can trust?

Dave:

Well, the model actually produces the data, and the model was built by US scientists, and and it's one of the more reputable models, and most commonly used models in the world, but we also need measurements because the climate that this model is producing is just artificial. We have to determine whether it's realistic for Southern Alberta. So that's when we look at the measured climate by environment and climate change Canada, by Alberta environment, there are these, real nice databases available that have recorded the climate, and we can compare the recorded climate to the kind of climate that's being produced by the model to make sure we're getting reliable results.

Markham:

Jen, how will en max I mean, you've given us a couple of examples of the of, what n max can anticipate in terms of, like, this increase in the squirrel population, problem that problems that causes for your distribution lines. But how will you use the data at the the bigger level, so the the more the global level within your management team to plan out, you know, because I know utilities have these, you know, short term plans, medium term plans, long term plans. How how might the the, analysis that you get from Dave's model help your team, with that planning?

Jennifer:

So I can think of a number of examples off the top of my head, but one that organizations don't necessarily think of is procurement. So we've got a number of assets that, will age out within the next 10, 20, 30 years. And we need to have the best information in order to spec the right equipment for the future when all of those assets age out. So we can look at the output from Dave's model and understand some of the temperature thresholds that we should be procuring equipment to. So maybe we don't have the best equipment today for the 2050 or 2080 horizon, and we can change that as we move forward.

Jennifer:

And the cost of doing that is really limited because it's going to age out anyways. So we can make better decisions when it comes to that. We can also, do better work on our emergency planning and really understand what the risks are, where the risks are. It it just allows everyone to be a part of this proactive management of a changing climate.

Markham:

Jen, does NMACS have other models? And I don't know what those other models would be. I'm I'm just because of guessing that you might have some, but models that that, simulate other variables that an electric utility, would need as part of its well, maybe it's load, maybe it's generation under specific weather conditions, so that sort of thing. So are there other models that would you would have your that MX would have that would work in conjunction with this climate model?

Jennifer:

Yeah. Absolutely. We do, climate related transition scenarios every year, and we do a number of, different forecasts on electricity demand to understand what, what the system needs to look like and where we need to make some investments. So this model will actually allow us to, add a layer onto our electricity demand forecast at a really granular level. So we'll be able to look neighborhood scale.

Jennifer:

Where do we need to upgrade infrastructure faster, based on the temperature that we see? And we can use it for a number of different applications.

Markham:

Yeah. I can you know, looking from my own personal experience, I mean, we we adopted a a we installed a heat pump, 2 years ago, so there are and we had to have the, supply into our house upgraded, and our and the, panel in our garage upgraded to handle that extra draw. And it occurred to me that, you know, if everybody in our neighborhood did that, that that might put a strain on the, the neighborhood, infrastructure, the transmission the transformers and and what have you. And And I suppose if you then extrapolate that over much bigger neighborhoods or even over the whole city, that's something that you want to the kind of data and information you'd wanna plug into your model so that you can invest in upgrading your transformers or whatever whatever kinds of work that that, you think needs to be done to adapt to the changing environment.

Jennifer:

Yeah. Absolutely. We I mean, this is an an additional piece of data that we can layer on to what we're already doing. We can we can look at a number of different things. So if you look at the northeast of Calgary, we don't have as many trees up there.

Jennifer:

But maybe that's a great place for solar potential. That'll be hotter and drier is what we're seeing in a lot of cases. So that might be a a place where we wanna go in and upgrade sooner than later. So we're trying to, use all of the information that we have and all of the forecasts that we have, as well as this climate model, to do our best infrastructure planning.

Markham:

Dave, I don't know how to not sure how, to structure this question, so I'll do it this way.

Dave:

Okay.

Markham:

Is there any are there any advantages or are there any is there anything positive that comes out of climate change, you know, like, for for going to a drier climate? Is there anything from your point of view that's actually not horrible, that actually might be an improvement or something better?

Dave:

Oh, certainly. And you know, our research center was, established to support adaptation to climate change. Adaptation is both changing policies and practices to prevent the adverse effects, but adaptation is also taking advantage of a warmer climate. And after all, we have a cold climate and it's getting warmer, so there are advantages certainly in winter in terms of the lower demand for heating costs. And, in agriculture, there's gonna be an opportunity to produce more crops and higher crop productivity just from there's more carbon dioxide, there's more heat, there's a longer growing season, although those advantages can only be realized if you can withstand drought and in some years too much water.

Dave:

So it's a combination of taking advantage of a warmer climate, while at the same time dealing with some of these acute climate hazards.

Markham:

Sure. I remember, when I was doing my graduate work at the University of Saskatchewan just up the road from you, in Saskatoon. And the the, plant breeding that went on a 100 years ago more than a 100 years ago to produce dwarf varieties of wheat, for example, that were more drought resistant, or could, you know, use less water. That that was a big part of research at that time, and you could almost see that that might have to be, ramped up again if the climate changes significantly. Jen, we're we're drawing to a close in the interview, and I I wanna ask you a question which is kind of sort of climate related, and that is the role that you expect solar, power to play in the coming years in the enmax system.

Jennifer:

So we see, distributed generation, which is what we would consider residential solar, to be as part of the solution. I mean, we we see the need for all kinds of sources of energy, and distributed energy is part of that. And we wanna make sure that we're there for our customers when they do that. We just, came out with a solar offering this past summer, which had some really great uptake, and we just want to encourage more of that. So, when we start looking at the climate adaptation, solar and being able to use, your own energy sources will actually help us with that load management as we move forward.

Markham:

Yeah. I've interviewed a number of, of experts on power grids and where the new technology not just policy, but new technology is is taking modern grids, and distributed energy resources plays a big part in that in making it more resilient and more flexible, I'm being told. You know, for instance, you might have, batteries, in the garage, you might have, your EVs might be integrated into the grid, and I assume that Enmax is looking ahead to that and and planning for those changes, that are coming in terms of both load and other technologies it can draw on, like an EV to stabilize and help it run its grid.

Jennifer:

Yeah. A 100%. And, I mean, we're here for our customers. So if that's what our customers are looking for, we just need to be able to support them in these energy solutions as we move forward. We see, you know, increased electrification in the energy transition, has not just one solution.

Jennifer:

It has a whole handful of solutions, and we just wanna be a part of all of them as we move forward.

Markham:

Well, thank you very much to to the both of you for this. I this is quite fascinating because, really, you're on the utility and, and Dave, with your your team in, in Regina, you're kind of on the pointy end of climate change. You're trying to figure out adaptations, getting data, figuring out what the data means, what does that mean for the utility for planning, and I think this is a little peek into, what's coming for us in the in the future, and so thank you very much for this.

Dave:

Thank you, Martin.