Canada's oil capital may be damned as an eco-villain. But don't let that fool you: This boomtown isn't just tilting at windmills - it's harnessing wind power and making radical cuts in emissions to become 'the greenest city in the world'

By Chris Turner

Maybe it's because Calgary's population ticked past one million with a bullet last year, or because the average price of a house in the city overtook the comparable Toronto figure not long after that, but Calgarians have finally taken up the unofficial national urban sport of fretting over whether their city is "world-class."

The Calgary Downtown Association likes to point out all the city's "world-class" arts facilities, while the chairman of the Stampede insists the casino-resort complex it is building will be a "world-class, year-round gathering place." And seemingly everyone agrees that EnCana's new headquarters - the tallest skyscraper west of Bay Street, designed by bona-fide "starchitect" Norman Foster - will surely be world-class once it's completed in 2011.

In the meantime, though, there are less visible features whose claims to world-class status are pretty much unimpeachable. This one in particular: Calgary has the largest per-capita ecological footprint of any municipality in Canada.

It takes 9.86 global hectares (gha) of land and water to provision your average Calgarian - well above the national average of 7.25 gha (which itself places Canada near the top of most worldwide rankings).

This distinction probably comes as no surprise. Calgary, after all, is synonymous with oil wealth, expansive suburbs and half-ton trucks, a city whose National Hockey League team celebrates big goals by firing off natural-gas torches inside the arena.

There is one left turn in the city that obliges drivers to make a three-kilometre circumnavigation of a broad meadow of big-box retail sprawl. Such outsized living naturally needs a ranch-sized patch of the planet to sustain it.

All of which just makes the latest development at City Hall the more unexpected: As of next month, the government of this wasteful boomtown will officially become the Canadian champion of greenhouse-gas-emissions reduction.

On a flat stretch of farmland near the town of Taber, about 275 kilometres southeast of Calgary, Enmax, the city's wholly owned subsidiary power company, has built an 80-megawatt, state-of-the-art wind farm for the express purpose of supplying Calgary's municipal buildings and other civic operations with fully 75 per cent of their electricity needs.

Once the entire wind farm comes online in October, it will join a host of other green-minded initiatives to reduce the city's emissions by a projected 40 per cent from their 1990 levels - in easy reach of the 50-per-cent target it has set for 2012.

The municipal government of Calgary, corporate capital of the oil boom, has become a world-class climate change crusader - "the greenest in the world," Mayor Dave Bronconnier asserts.

It is, to be sure, a world-class dichotomy: One of the planet's most ravenous resource hogs administered by one of its most climate-friendly regimes. The situation reached a sort of absurd pinnacle on a single day this March, as Mr. Bronconnier unveiled plans for a district energy system - a single gas-fired heating plant to be built on Calgary's derelict east side to serve a wide swath of the downtown core and potentially subtract 235,000 tonnes from the city's greenhouse-gas emissions. "It's a great green-letter day for Calgary," the mayor announced at a press conference.

Meanwhile, City Council was voting at almost the same moment to reject a curbside-recycling program because its price tag was deemed too high. (A rejigged plan was later approved and it should be up and running by 2009. After two pilot projects and discussions dating back to the early 1990s, Calgary is finally set to join the blue-box brigade.)

"The City of Calgary is a good corporate citizen," says Noel Keough of the public interest group Sustainable Calgary. "But it's not always such a good government."

BOOMTOWN TO GREENTOWN

The twisting path by which Calgary has arrived at this contradictory state begins with the fractious and quixotic birth of what remains its most striking feature: its wind-powered light-rail transit network. Since 2001, Calgary's LRT - the CTrain - has drawn every single kilowatt-hour of its electricity from a grid powered by a dozen 660-kilowatt wind turbines that stand in the Castle River Wind Farm near Pincher Creek, about 200 kilometres south of Calgary.

Those 12 turbines were added to the wind farm under the "Ride the Wind" program, a joint project of Vision Quest Windelectric, Enmax and the municipal government, under which the city agreed to purchase all of the CTrain's electricity for the next 10 years at a fixed rate sufficient to cover the capital cost of building the turbines.

Ride the Wind traces its origins to an agreement between Enmax and Ottawa to begin providing green power to Alberta's federal buildings in the late 1990s. That project led Enmax to become a key early customer of Vision Quest, Alberta's first industrial-scale wind-farm developer.

Keen to expand the fledgling business, Enmax and Vision Quest dreamed up the Ride the Wind idea and took it to Calgary Alderman Bob Hawkesworth, who also sat on Enmax's board of directors. Calgary's City Council had been working since 1997 on developing an emissions-reduction policy, but at the time Mr. Hawkesworth was pretty much the only member of City Council with a reputation for climate-change activism.

Mr. Hawkesworth had had what he now refers to as his "inconvenient truth" moment during a climate change lecture at a Federation of Canadian Municipalities conference a few years earlier, and a wind-powered LRT struck him immediately as just the right way to cut through his colleagues' lingering skepticism about the issue. "It just was this wonderful marketing phrase that immediately captured imaginations," he says. "Calgary Transit could see very good public-relations and marketing benefits with this project."

Not that it was an easy sell - press accounts of the initial proposal noted outright laughter from at least one alderman, and an early estimate of the extra cost of the green power at $2.5-million over the lifetime of the 10-year contract was widely and ominously cited. But that estimate - extrapolated from ridership statistics and Calgary Transit's assertion that the program would cost an extra half a cent per passenger - assumed that the cost of conventional electricity would remain low. Instead, it has skyrocketed - Enmax's default electricity rate has more than doubled in the last year alone. "Today," Mayor Bronconnier asserts, "there is actually a savings."

As for Mr. Hawkesworth, he was given the honour of driving a CTrain the length of the platform at the Ride the Wind launch in acknowledgment of his efforts and he now has a much more receptive audience for his ideas. "The policy environment has come light-years from where it was then," he notes.

Calgary's first formal emissions-reduction commitment came fast on the heels of Ride the Wind in 2002. In the years since, the city's street lights have been retrofitted with low-watt bulbs and its traffic signals replaced with high-efficiency LED lights, precipitating an annual savings of about $2.7-million.

Calgary's government introduced the nation's first municipal sustainable-building policy in 2003 and all new civic buildings must now receive a minimum of silver certification under the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design standards. (Calgary's new Water Centre, an administrative office for 800 employees to be completed this fall, is a green showpiece sporting everything from a recycled-steel skeleton to waterless urinals; its energy demand is projected to be 58 per cent less than a conventional building its size.) The city also mines two local landfills for their waste methane, which is burned to generate electricity, greatly reducing its potency as a greenhouse gas in the process.

BEYOND KYOTO

By 2005, Calgary's municipal government had reduced its emissions to 4 per cent below their 1990 levels. The following year, a new Climate Change Action Plan committed it to a 50-per-cent reduction by 2012, the lion's share of which will be accomplished by the new Taber wind farm. The farm's 37 turbines generate more power than the 114 installed just four years ago at McBride Lake - formerly Alberta's largest wind-energy facility - and the wholesale cost is comparable to a new coal- or gas-fired power plant.

"The technology is improving by leaps and bounds," says Enmax spokesman Peter Hunt. "It has now reached the point of cost-effectiveness."

The increasing affordability of green power is just one of the many pleasant surprises that have coloured Calgary's ad-hoc approach to emissions reduction. Indeed, the city's initial target in the late 1990s was a per-capita reduction of 6 per cent by 2012 - a goal designed to appease the city's anxious senior managers, who initially doubted they could bring in absolute reductions amid breakneck boomtown growth.

The worries soon proved to be unfounded. "All we had to do was get on the road towards energy efficiency and greenhouse-gas reductions, and there was so much we could do," Alderman Hawkesworth says. "We far exceeded what our initial ideas of success would be."

Before long, the city committed itself to the more ambitious absolute target, which it did under the auspices of the Federation of Canadian Municipalities' Partners for Climate Protection program, even though the goal was identical to Canada's obligation under the Kyoto Protocol.

"What we said as a city is we know what the objective is," Mr. Bronconnier says, "and the objective is to protect the environment. And that's what we're going to move forward on - irrespective of the national debate that was taking place. And look at the benefits today."

Even as Calgary has achieved emissions reductions several orders of magnitude beyond Canada's Kyoto targets, the mayor notes in the city's Climate Change Action Plan that reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is necessary regardless of "what our individual perspectives are on the specific provisions of the Kyoto accord."

'LEADING BY EXAMPLE'

Admirable as the city's reduction target is, its achievements aren't quite monumental and its successes far from unqualified. In the shadow of those new windmills, there remains Calgary's mammoth ecological footprint, as well as the inconvenient fact that the municipal emissions amount to a mere 2.8 per cent of the total volume of greenhouse gas discharged by the entire city.

Calgary's civic officials like to claim that they're "leading by example," but there are strict limits imposed upon the efficacy of that strategy when the province of Alberta as a whole has seen its emissions explode by 40 per cent since 1990. "That to me is the next huge challenge - making the city as a whole embrace these principles and live them," Mr. Hawkesworth says.

That task certainly presents obstacles far more formidable than the construction of a wind farm or two, particularly in a city growing so fast that even such infrastructural basics as schools and hockey rinks are nowhere near sufficient in number. Still, there appears to be widespread enthusiasm for the task.

That evidence is contained in the final report of the Imagine Calgary project, an exhaustive 18-month survey conducted on behalf of dozens of civic organizations - including the municipal government itself - intended to formulate a "100-year vision" for the city. More than 18,000 Calgarians contributed to the project, and the resulting sustainability plan documented a passion for green living at least as zealous as the city's own. (Among other ambitious goals, the plan called for a 6-per-cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions citywide by 2012 en route to a 50-per-cent cut by 2036.)

Imagine Calgary was exactly the kind of blue-sky exercise that rarely gets much further than the daydream stage. But since the plan was published in June, 2006, the city has made surprisingly concrete efforts to put it into action. Patricia Gordon, who served as the project manager for Imagine Calgary, is now overseeing the formulation of a new long-term land-use and transportation plan based in part on its recommendations.

One of the unique opportunities presented by the boom, Ms. Gordon notes, is a forward momentum conducive to large-scale transformation. "I think we're on the cusp of change in Calgary."

Her enthusiasm is echoed by a number of the participants in the project - among them Brian Pincott, who has been one of the most vocal critics of the municipal government's uneven approach to climate-change remediation since he co-founded a local chapter of the Sierra Club of Canada in 2000.

Mr. Pincott is running for alderman in next month's municipal election with the Imagine Calgary plan as a key plank in his platform. "We're so close to that proverbial tipping point," he says. "And Imagine Calgary is part of that. Imagine Calgary envisions the kind of city we all want, envisions the kind of city that, in our own private ways, most of us are striving for."

It's a fairly accurate description, actually, of the municipal government's own approach to addressing climate change - private, internal, reluctant to push too hard outside its own doors. "Sometimes you've got to actually lead a community," Mayor Bronconnier says. "You can't just go and ram something down their throat until they're ready. And Calgary's now ready."

He was directly addressing the embarrassing tardiness of the city's curbside-recycling program. He'll have to address much else besides - all of Calgary will - before it can truly aspire to world-class status.