California and Canada working toward joint climate change solutions

This article is part of a package of special coverage of climate change issues by CBC News leading up to the United Nations climate change conference (COP21) being held in Paris from Nov. 30 to Dec. 11.

"So what you're seeing there is technology that's basically a hundred years old‚" Glen Martin says, pointing out the tangle of poles and wires that make up the Los Angeles-area energy grid. 

 "We take what is effectively these 100-year-old poles and wires and we modernize them. We add intelligence to them. We add sensors, we add control systems."

Martin, originally from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., is an engineer who moved south 25 years ago to work on solar power projects for the International Space Station. 

Now he runs a California-based company that helps modernize energy grids‚ making them smarter and able to "heal" themselves while reducing energy consumption.

"So there's a 30 per cent reduction in actual voltage consumption across the board, efficiency gains for consumers, ways to save line losses and save on their bills on their end," Martin says.

He's one of close to a million Canadians living in and around California, and more and more of them, he finds, are working on ways to limit climate change in the U.S. and back home in Canada.

"I think Los Angeles is the third-largest Canadian city, and so we Canadian ex-pats living and working in California obviously are exposed to fairly advanced technologies and new ideas around how projects can be developed and financed," Martin says.  

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That's one reason why earlier this month Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne embarked on her first official mission to California. 

"Everyone's looking to create jobs and allow their economies to grow, but the short-sightedness of not collaborating on a task that is as important as pollution in Beijing, or drought in California, or flooding in Alberta … to not collaborate on those is absolutely going to sound the death knell for everyone," Wynne told a gathering of politicians and experts, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and the head of California's Air Resources Board.

Cap-and-trade allies

Soon, Ontario will join California and Quebec in a massive joint cap-and-trade program.

In these jurisdictions, companies that want to emit more than their quota of greenhouse gases can buy carbon credits from companies that burn less.

"Ontario is no small potatoes," says Tim O'Connor, a senior attorney and director of the U.S. Environmental Defence Fund. "It's a jurisdiction that has greenhouse gas emissions similar to that of California." 

O'Connor says this joint cap-and-trade program is one step closer to a North America-wide carbon market.

"And if we can show that California and Ontario can do it together, we can see it happening everywhere," he says.

Mary Nichols, the chair of California's Air Resources Board, says the state is working with several provinces on other shared programs to reduce greenhouse gases.

"Once we start our linkage through the cap-and-trade program, the next step would be to establish some common programs, policies, ideas around how to make the transportation system cleaner and more efficient as well," Nichols says.

Wynne was also on hand to witness the signing of an international collaboration between the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI) and Toronto's MaRS Discovery District, aimed at increasing the development and adoption of clean technologies.

"The kinds of collaborations that we're trying to foster will lead to people in Ontario and people in Quebec who are in this field having better information, being able to understand where the failures have been and then move quickly to solve problems," Wynne said.

Glen Martin's company, Energizing Co., is a product of the L.A. incubator and one firm that will be benefiting from the growing collaboration between MaRS and LACI. 

His company acts as a "broker" between those who develop the technologies, the financiers and the communities. His first project will be in his hometown of Sault Ste. Marie, and he hopes to work with communities in other provinces to build modern grid infrastructure improvements.

"Each area's going to be dealing with certain distinct elements of the climate change challenge," Martin says. "And only through collaboration will we be able to solve the problems."