Our Energy Use Implications for the Yukon's Future, Community Sustainability and Energy Security

In my previous post, I illustrated the Yukon's Energy Budget. So, what does this mean for our future? What does this mean looking forward to maintain some semblance of life-as-we-know-it in the Yukon as we enter the post oil age? We know that fossil fuel costs are going to rise exponentially (and become increasingly volatile as we've recently experienced) over the next 10-20 years. Fuel prices have doubled in the last 8-10 years, and we should expect this cost doubling to occur again in an even shorter period of time.

Space Heating - Use of fossil fuels for space heating is not going to be affordable in the next 10 to 20 years. What do we do?

• Reduce space heating requirements - insulate, build more energy efficient buildings, etc. Although this can help, I doubt we can count on more than a 20% Yukon wide, net reduction in building heating requirements.
• Burn more biomass (wood, pellets) - this is going back to the old way we did things, however our population is WAY bigger now, so this will mean cutting a lot of trees. And even though our new wood stoves are "clean burning", there would be a lot of local air pollution if we all burned wood.
• Burn coal for heat - yuck, who wants to go there.

So what does this leave us? ELECTRICITY. Knowing that we won't be able to afford to heat our homes with fossil fuels in 10-20 years, then we need to start planning for the electrical production needed to replace that energy. In other words, we will have to DOUBLE our electrical production in the next 20 years to make up for the shortfall left by fossil fuels.

Some have argued that new hydroelectrical production is very expensive. Say $0.25 to $0.35/kWh. Well, right now oil space heating is in the range of $0.15/kWh equivalent. So, when our fossil fuel prices double and then quadruple to $0.30 and $0.60/kWh equivalent, then that "new" hydro is going to look pretty cheap. Let's start the planning now, especially while energy (and its proxy, "money") are still cheap.


Transportation - Energy for transportation is a hard nut to crack - fossil fuels really are not easily replaceable for transportation. Possible solutions:

• travel less: fewer trips, transit, walk & bike, live closer to your work, friends and family.
• produce more goods & foods locally so we are less dependent (vulnerable) to trucking goods here
• use electric vehicles for local travel
• use electric transit systems: either trolley buses, or electrify and extend our existing streetcar system (say to Whistle Bend?!). Grid connected vehicles are highly efficient - on the order of 98% - what other vehicle can claim that kind of efficiency?
• switch some vehicles to biogas- again, probably relegated to relatively local travel because there isn't likely to be much biogas production outside of Whitehorse.
• limited local natural gas production from Whitehorse Trough (perhaps coal bed methane) - a long shot, and would only be affordable if "nationalized".
  

Are these things going to be enough? Probably not, so let's prepare for transportation to become VERY expensive. Fossil fuels are probably going to be reserved for long-range transportation.