Thank you very much for this opportunity to present, as well as to Mr. Bateman for presenting a lot of the facts that I was going to present. Mine will be a little shorter, allowing more times for questions.
As a bit of background, I'm an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria's institute for integrated energy systems. I'm here wearing two hats today: one with regard to the 2060 project, which is funded by the Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, looking at deep decarbonization pathways for Canada's energy system, as well as on behalf of Marine Renewables Canada and the marine renewables industry.
The 2060 project looks at the intersection of technology, policy, economics, environment, and society in developing decarbonization pathways for Canada's electrical sector. At this stage, we focus primarily on British Columbia and Alberta, and I'll give some reasoning as to why that is.
I think it is important to state up front that that project is technology neutral. We don't pick winners or losers, we simply place all the technologies available to us on the table. We allow the system to optimize the least-cost, least-risk solution for Canada in meeting our greenhouse gas reduction targets.
On the marine renewables side, I also run a project looking at wave energy for British Columbia, looking at developing and understanding the opportunities, hurdles, and value proposition for developing marine renewables for British Columbia. By connection to Marine Renewables Canada, we look at tidal on the east coast.
I'm going to try to answer the questions from those two perspectives. If people get confused, I'll try to elucidate which perspective I'm talking from.
Looking at the intertie, as Mr. Bateman pointed out well, Canada's mid-century, long-term, low-greenhouse gas development strategy states that Canada needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050. This is transformational change. This isn't something that is incremental. There is a significant change that needs to happen.
The Canadian system is well positioned to be a global leader in this space. Currently, 80% of our generation comes from non-emitting resources. Provinces like British Columbia, Manitoba, and Quebec are well positioned to be able to do this already. The other provinces are just not naturally endowed with this competitive advantage.
Times are changing, though. If we look at what is happening in Alberta and around the world, it's being driven by both policy and economic drivers. We are seeing Alberta put into account their 30% renewables by 2030 and push coal out of the system. As well, I don't think anyone would have suggested or predicted the cost changes that we're seeing in wind and solar these days.
Connectivity is key to this reliability question, being able to take complete advantage of our natural resources that we have in the country. There is a huge distribution of our rural renewable energy resources across the country. We have hydro in British Columbia, wave in British Columbia, solar and wind in Alberta, and tidal on the east coast. Interties allow us to start to connect these. It allows us to start to look at peak demand diversity and how to mitigate those and reduce costs to the general consumer.
I think it's important to note, before I get into an example on how we're showing the value of interties, that there are a lot of zero-carbon energy resources that are economical right now. It's important for us to think beyond that and look at zero-carbon flexible capacity. What is going to be there to manage the variability in the energy resources that we have? We have limited economically viable options right now in that regard.
The 2060 project will look at deep decarbonization for British Columbia and Alberta. We don't look at it from a provincial perspective, we look at it from a regional perspective. If the two provinces were able to create a market that worked for both and come to political agreement on a whole slew of different things, what would the benefit be?
Under a climate change-inclusive vision for the future, we can see that seasonally there are huge advantages. As Alberta builds out its wind resources, they're going to have overgeneration in the winter. They are going to generate too much renewable power in the winter, which they are either going to have to curtail or they're going to have to export somewhere else.
Concurrently, British Columbia's hydro resources will no longer be generating at the same level. They will be slowed up, so we will be able to absorb that. In the summertime, British Columbia is going to continue to be affected by the freshet and have low cost of power. We'll be able to export that into Alberta where their wind resources aren't working. There is huge complementarity in the seasonal and temporal aspects of these resources, and intertie unlocks that potential.
What does this do for our greenhouse gas emissions? If we stayed with the situation as normal, we suspect British Columbia would stay at about 95% renewable. Alberta will reach its 30% goal. However, if we intertie them, we probably can get to about 92% or 93% renewable. There is significant investment. The intertie needs to grow eight to 10 times its current capacity, but I think just showing that there is a value proposition there is important.
On the marine energy side, to provide that, one of the greatest competitive advantages of marine energy is its location. Our current electrical system is generally fairly centralized to where our resources are, and a lot of our coastal communities don't have a lot of generation. They're connected by somewhat unreliable transmission lines to the coast. No disrespect to the utility. They work hard and they do a fantastic job, but there is this complementarity among our variable renewable resources, and there's a huge advantage in our starting to unlock all of those tools, all those resources that are in our tool box as a country.
We need spatial and temporal diversity in our resources, so we're looking at wind and solar. I don't think there's much debate that wind and solar will dominate in the future, but in the long-term predictions, once we start to see incremental value to incremental gains and capacity, we start to see value build out in diversifying beyond those two.