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That’s the thinking behind the CanInfra Challenge Ideas Contest from the Boston Consulting Group, which announced a winner at its inaugural event earlier this week.
Infrastructure is about more than pipelines and highways. It’s about how we move everything, from resources to people and ideas, and building the foundations to help Canada meet the big challenges of the coming decades.
The winner out of more than 70 submissions from across the country was a proposal seeking to build a renewable energy micro-grid in Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut.
Canada can be a world leader. If we can do it in the hardest possible places, it’s going to be a lot easier to do it in the easier places.
By using wind turbines and Tesla battery packs to build a so-called “IceGrid,” the project, called Polar Power, would replace diesel generators and power plants that rely on expensive, and dirty, fossil fuels with clean and reliable energy.
Memorial University professor Brett Favaro, who led the pitch, said IceGrid provides a model for the rest of Canada in realizing a lower-carbon future to producing energy without greenhouse gases.
“The entire planet needs to have access to cheap, reliable, carbon-neutral energy,” he said. “Canada can be a world leader. If we can do it in the hardest possible places, it’s going to be a lot easier to do it in the easier places.”
One of two runners-up was a proposal for a smart road that would charge electric vehicles as they drive. Canada faces unique barriers to electronic vehicle adoption. Building a network that addresses “range anxiety” for battery-powered automobiles would help address the challenge.
The second was a wastewater treatment retrofit that would allow such plants to dramatically cut methane emissions and produce a renewable energy fuel from food waste.
All three proposals show how infrastructure will be a key part of the solution for Canada’s 21st century problems. Canada’s carbon commitments—cutting emissions by 40% by 2030 from the 2005 level—provide the biggest opportunity for transformational ideas.
According to the Canadian Infrastructure Report Card, one-third of our municipal infrastructure is in fair or poor condition and needs rehabilitation or replacement.
The IceGrid proposal suggests savings of more than $300 million over 20 years from switching away from diesel, and its emission reductions could be the equivalent of taking 8,300 cars off the road—and that’s from the Iqaluit project alone.
The wastewater treatment project is even more ambitious, suggesting bio-gas from properly processed food waste, of which we currently use only 20%, could replace 10% of Canada’s natural gas consumption. And providing the infrastructure to support electric vehicle use would go a long way to addressing Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions—one-fifth of which come from cars and trucks on the road.
Vinay Shandal, a partner and managing director at BCG, said the contest was originally designed to help address a key missing element in the Canadian conversation around the future of infrastructure: big ideas.
“I think that the ideas from infra projects haven’t been coming from the right places,” Shandal said. “Having specific ideas that could be put in front of the right leaders to spark debate and give them a national spotlight was what was missing.”
The need for new infrastructure spending is significant. According to the Canadian Infrastructure Report Card, which comes from a group including the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, one-third of our municipal infrastructure is in fair or poor condition and needs rehabilitation or replacement.
“Everyone talks about incremental projects, like adding another terminal to an airport,” Shandal said. “Infrastructure is for the long term.”
The contest was open to anyone across Canada, and participants included students and academics, as well as employees from think tanks and private companies, competing for $100,000 in prizes and the chance to help chart Canada’s future.
Other finalists included an inter-city cargo transportation system for remote communities using blimps and airships, a blockchain-based identification system that would allow Canadians to use government services online, and a nationwide network of 30,000 water-monitoring sensors and a centralized analytical office to predict localized flooding and droughts.
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