It’s April Fools’ Day! But I promise you the content in today’s post is no joke—we had one of those last Thursday. This week, we are looking at some exciting news here at home regarding a new facility in the Clean Energy Frontier region as well as local leadership on net zero.
We’re also turning our attention south of the border and taking a look at President Joe Biden’s recently released infrastructure plan—which has some points that we should be taking note of.
Here we go…
1. Kinectrics celebrates the grand opening of Teeswater laundry facility
Last week, we provided you with links and a heads up for a great event that took place on Friday, March 26. The virtual event was held to celebrate the grand opening of Kinectrics new fully operational laundry facility in Teeswater!
This new facility is already creating and sustaining jobs in the community of South Bruce. The 40,000 square-foot building launders personal protective equipment (PPE) from Bruce Power and was designed with sufficient capacity to service the CANDU fleet across Ontario.
Furthermore, the facility is highly automated and uses environmentally sensitive equipment. In fact, the laundry water recycling systems on site are engineered to recycle up to 80-90% of all the laundry water used!
We are very excited to have this facility up and running in Teeswater! If you missed the event, which includes a virtual tour of the facility, but want to check it out, take a look:
2. President Biden lays out infrastructure plan
This week, President of the United States of America Joe Biden revealed his plan for American infrastructure moving forward. The $2-trillion proposal contained a lot of new initiatives and is dialed in on creating clean, green infrastructure and energy in the US. From mandating cleaner energy uses by utilities to tax breaks and spending that promote climate-friendly technologies, there are some interesting points here for us in the Clean Energy Frontier.
First, it demonstrates how critical a clean grid is and highlights the role we play in creating Ontario's own clean energy grid. There is a significant focus on phasing out the use of carbon-emitting sources of electricity throughout the US.
We are fortunate in Ontario, thanks largely to nuclear and hydro-power, that more than 90% of our grid comes from non-emitting sources. This gives us a head start, we’ve made the critical investments in clean energy infrastructure (ex. extending the life of Bruce Power to 2064 with the Major Component Replacement project) and are fostering innovation on new clean sources like Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), hydrogen, and more.
The plan also lays out an aggressive spending requests with respect to electric vehicle production and adoption. The president is looking for Congress to approve $174 billion to increase America’s market share of EVs and their supply chains. And the president will be looking to establish 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations by 2030 as well as beginning the process of electrifying the fleet of school buses across the country.
The Clean Energy Frontier has been engaging with several local stakeholders on electric vehicles and charging infrastructure. We are looking forward to advancing this important work and demonstrating the role that we can plan in building local infrastructure in a strategic and measured manner. An EV future is upon us, so we need to be ready.
3. Bruce Power commits to net zero by 2027
A couple of weeks ago we talked about net zero—what it is, why it is important, and why everyone is talking about it.
This week, Bruce Power is demonstrating leadership in this space by announcing that it will be the first nuclear operator in North America to commit to achieving net zero on site by 2027.
Bruce Power produces large volumes of emissions-free electricity. With this commitment though, they will be taking the next step to minimize and offset emissions from activities like vehicles on site, machinery, buildings, and other equipment.
This is an outstanding demonstration of leadership from Bruce Power and further solidifies the Clean Energy Frontier’s role as an integral part of our provincial and national goals to become net-zero.
More about this announcement is available here.
--Chad Richards is the Director of the Clean Energy Frontier.