Alberta Ecotrust sees role for AI to advance climate solutions

Though the use of artificial intelligence has come under fire for its impact on the environment, the technology has a role to play in addressing environmental challenges, says the vice-president of the Alberta Ecotrust Foundation.

"I do think that utilizing AI to achieve environmental outcomes is going to lead to optimized benefits," Mike Mellross told Taproot. "It's not the use of the AI to achieve those optimized benefits that is the demon that we need to demonize — it's the responsible development of AI that we need to optimize."

The organization's AI policy framework, which it released in September, says that it actively encourages using AI with a critical eye. "The technology is moving too quickly and is becoming too embedded in how knowledge work happens for a foundation like ours to stand back from it," the framework reads.

The foundation, with a mandate to unite the corporate and environmental sectors to advance environmental and climate solutions, overlaps with the typical tech and startup world because it acts as a venture capitalist looking to solve difficult, time-consuming, and expensive problems in the building sector. Six or seven years ago, the organization started seeing software as a service (SaaS) companies looking for investment, Mellross said.

"They were using the language that, at the time, was pretty unfamiliar to me," he said. "They were using words like machine learning, artificial intelligence, and we needed to pretty quickly learn about all of that if we were to make these investments."

For the foundation's first AI project in 2024, it partnered with a startup called Lightspark to use AI, machine learning, and publicly available data to predict the energy use of all single-family homes in Edmonton and Calgary, providing a market-accessible digital energy label for display on a map. Mellross said doing that work without AI would have taken $300 million and about 25 years, and Lightspark did it in a few weeks.

More than 80,000 households accessed the tool, and the City of Calgary now uses a similar process to label homes, Mellross said. Some of the recommendations that came out of the pilot project have been included in Natural Resources Canada's new guidelines for virtual home labelling. "That was how we started our journey into artificial intelligence," Mellross said. "The knowledge sector, where we really reside — we're in the charitable sector, but all of our work is knowledge work — is getting done in a very different way, and artificial intelligence it has to be a part of it."

Another project is the foundation's virtual retrofit explorer, an AI agent trained to walk people through getting an energy retrofit. "It really operates like one of our coaches asking you the questions: 'Why are you doing this? What kind of money do you have access to right now? What kind of capital would you need in order to achieve these things? What kind of decision-making barriers do you have?'" Mellross said.

The foundation has also invested in technology startups, including Variablegrid. The company allows a homeowner to install an electric vehicle charger without having to upgrade their electrical servicing, by using an AI model that analyzes when and how a household uses energy. The foundation invested in QEA Tech, a company using drone and AI technology to identify energy inefficiencies in buildings. The organization also partners with EcoPilot, which uses AI to analyze a building's occupant behaviour, indoor environment, and outdoor weather forecast to reduce energy use by up to 30%.

But Mellross is aware there is a trade-off here. While AI can help individuals make better choices about their personal energy use, the technology has been shown to have significant environmental impacts, primarily driven by the energy, water, and land demands of data centres.

For Mellross, it's about tapping the benefits that AI can bring while calling for responsible development.

"When it comes to artificial intelligence, there's just no opting out as an individual or an organization right now. The train has left the station on that," Mellross said. "If you want to be relevant and you want to actually do good work, you've got to do it … So, absolutely, advocate for responsible development of AI data centres and a responsible level of investment and sustainability at that systems level."

One example is advocating for Alberta's "bring your own energy" policy to be amended to mandate renewable energy, he said. The province has a strong preference for natural gas, which will fuel, for example, the 932-MW Greenlight Electricity Centre that will power Meta's data centre in Sturgeon County.

Ecotrust is hosting a luncheon and panel on Oct. 28 celebrating the third anniversary of the launch of the Emissions-Neutral Buildings Information Exchange or ENBIX, which connects members of Alberta's construction industry with information on greener building. Jen Hancock of Chandos Construction, Don Iveson of Civic Good, and Reza Nasseri of Landmark Homes will speak on a panel moderated by Taproot's Karen Unland.

For more on Alberta Ecotrust and what it hopes to see from Edmonton city council during budget deliberations, listen to Episode 371 of Speaking Municipally.