How Implementing Community Energy Planning Creates Jobs

The Energy Economy is transitioning and growing fast and the communities and their local governments that are ready will be the beneficiaries.

In an April blog post, QUEST made the case for accelerating the transition to Smart Energy Communities as a response to the massive economic impact that has resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. Community energy planning is a critical tool to enable Smart Energy Communities and now is more important than ever to understand its economic impact.

What is Community Energy Planning?

Community energy plans (CEPs) are a tool that helps define community priorities around energy with a view to improving efficiency, cutting emissions, and driving economic development. According to QUEST’s 2015 Rapport national sur la mise en œuvre du plan énergétique communautaire, positive economic development tops the list of the many environmental, economic, and social reasons why municipalities and their communities embark on the development and implementation of a CEP.

The 2016 QUEST Rapport d'impact reported that 384 communities across Canada have completed, or are in the process of completing a CEP. This progress has continued and Canadian communities are driving change at the local level.

What are the Barriers to Understanding the Economic Potential?

Although there is a great deal of anecdotal information available as to the economic potential of implementing CEPs, there remains a significant challenge for municipalities and community stakeholders in actually measuring that potential. They require more information and support to understand and accurately estimate the economic potential, measured in job creation through CEP implementation.

CEPs, while often developed under the leadership of municipalities, establish community-wide goals that require significant commitment and buy-in from a wide range of stakeholders. Maintaining leadership and driving implementation is a challenge as they do not always have full information on:

• The changes in energy markets and technologies that bring local benefits
• How this fits with their traditional economic development role in attracting investment and job creation

The Transitioning Energy Economy

With this challenge in mind, a 2019 New Brunswick research project set out to examine the local economic benefits of implementing CEPs in New Brunswick.

This research started with the principle that any discussion on the economic job creation benefits of implementing CEPs needs to start at an understanding of how the energy economy is “transitioning.”

The Transitioning Energy Economy is largely defined as the change, over time, from centralized forms of generating and distributing energy in all its forms. This transition has three key attributes that link to a potentially positive impact on local and regional economies:

1. The increase in readily available technologies and services that can serve the local goals of Community Energy Plans
2. The vast majority of those technologies are located or implemented locally
3. Community Energy Plans create channels to local markets for product and service providers that have a measurable positive economic impact by:
   1. Attracting local investment for local energy infrastructure
   2. Creating more energy-efficient economies

To understand how the energy economy is transitioning is to understand how any other sector of the economy transitions. We have seen this in communications – with the invention of the telephone, to the internet, to the smartphone. In transportation, we have witnessed the invention of the automobile, to the proliferation of air travel, to electric vehicles and public transportation. These examples demonstrate a radical change in technology matched by massive shifts in consumer and societal demands. It is no different for energy!

Our earliest settlers relied on local sources of energy to do their work. Horses provided agricultural and transportation energy. Wood was used to stay warm and cook food. As technologies advanced, energy systems began to centralize. Small regional electrical grids supplied were by water power and coal gas plants for industrial steam generation. This centralization scaled up at a very rapid rate at the turn of the last century and had a powerful effect on our local economies and culture.

The last half of the 21st century saw massive centralization of energy supply and distribution systems. All of which did a great job of supporting unprecedented growth in the world economy. However, the current economic reality of centralized energy systems has two distinct impacts on local economies:

1. The inefficiencies of large scale centralized generation, from primary fuel inputs to long-distance transmission infrastructure, are substantial. The consumer pays for this through its regulated rates.
2. The maintenance deficit on energy generation and distribution systems is growing further putting pressure on local ratepayers.

Communities of any size can spend up in the order of $50M a year per 10,000 citizens on transportation fuel, heating fuel, industrial energy and electricity to support their local economies. The vast majority of these dollars leave the community to support centralized, non-local energy generation, fuel supply and distribution.

Implementing community energy plans and transitioning to Smart Energy Communities provide an opportunity to keep these dollars local and to attract investment from the transitioning energy economy. This will have a significant positive impact on local economies through job creation.

Three Ways CEPs Create Jobs

Smart Energy Communities who implement their CEPs have the potential to create jobs in three ways:

How Can Municipalities Better Understand the Economic Potential?

Communities, and their municipal governments across Canada, will struggle to renew their post-pandemic economies in the years to come. Transitioning to Smart Energy Communities through the implementation of CEPs is a vital part of community recovery. 

Communities that fail to accommodate the job creation and investment opportunities afforded through the implementation of CEPs may find themselves unable to compete in their efforts to maintain vibrant and resilient local economies.

How do I Learn More?

Learn more below about QUEST resources that have been designed to support municipalities and their communities on their Smart Energy Community journey.