This is part 2 of a 3-part series on Prince Edward Island’s 1970s turn to energy self-sufficiency, which peaked in 1976. Part 1 is here. Part 3 will be published Friday, 18 September, 2026.
On the heels of the OPEC energy crisis, the province of Prince Edward Island launched a grand experiment in self-sufficiency and sustainability. The coming-out party occurred in spring 1976, when PEI held “Energy Days”: four days of public hearings and expert testimony in the Island legislature that focused on addressing the province’s high energy costs. Energy Days was broadcast across the Island and a resulting 342-page transcript was produced, all to appeal to the largest possible audience.
A 28-year-old energy scientist named Amory Lovins gave one of the event’s closing presentations. It would be a warm-up for what would become his groundbreaking article in the world’s leading international relations journal, Foreign Affairs, that fall. Lovins would go on to be a co-founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute and a leading advocate for renewables and energy efficiency for the next half century. We have embedded and annotated Lovins’ 1976 talk, and attached the entire Energy Days transcript, below. And we had the pleasure to speak with Lovins this spring about 1976 and the ways in which his talk’s predictions for 50 years later did and did not pan out. This conversation is also embedded below.
Prince Edward Island’s environmental turn was an important moment for the province – and for Canada. “These were heady days,” says Lynne Douglas today. She was working at the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs in Ottawa when she met Andy Wells, the environmentally minded senior advisor to the PEI Premier. Douglas and Wells subsequently married, and built a home designed for energy self-sufficiency in Hazel Grove, PEI. A National Film Board documentary about the Island’s energy experiments opened with views of their home in mid-winter. “Andy’s research begins in his own home,” the narrator claimed, as Wells carried firewood through the snow to the splitting block. “The house is well insulated and is designed to get the maximum benefit from the sun’s heat. Wood is the main source of fuel, and in most respects the family’s daily life is remarkably self sufficient.”1
Wells had just been named executive director of the province’s new Institute of Man and Resources (IMR), an agency which was to help lead and implement the Island’s transition to energy self-sufficiency. For its debut, the IMR would organize and host Energy Days. The event was ostensibly neutral in its presentation of energy choices, but its structure made perfectly clear where Wells, the IMR, and Alex Campbell’s government as a whole believed the Island’s future lay. The program began with existing utility issues, moved toward alternatives such as solar, wind, and wood energy, and ended with more wide-ranging philosophical discussion of the future of energy. (An electrical generation expert grumbled that he had been slotted into the second day; was electricity not to be part of the Island’s future?)
Energy Days’ final speakers were all leading international environmental experts: John Todd, director of the Massachusetts-based New Alchemy Institute; George McRobie, of E.F. Schumacher’s Intermediate Technology Group in London; and scientist Amory Lovins. The three offered similar visions for the Island: using holistic science and intentional design principles, the province’s houses and farms – and so the Island itself – could be transformed from consuming to producing energy, from an energy sink to an energy source.2
Todd, McRobie, and Lovins stated how impressed they were with what PEI was attempting, and simultaneously worked to impress upon legislators just how important their little island could be in global terms: a perfect petri dish for the application of a small-is-beautiful philosophy. “You really are in the lead within Canada and I think compared with nearly all countries,” Lovins claimed. Even Premier Campbell pushed back against the speakers’ idealism: “certainly Prince Edward Island is not going to change the world or cause the governing authorities of the United States to change their ways.”
Lovins’ reply: “Why not?”3
Skip to PDF contentEnergy Days helped give energy and direction to the Island’s plan for an energy transition. The spirit of ‘76 as a result got noticeably cockier. In one speech that summer, Andy Wells stated that “the oil cartels have done us a service” by helping us recognize our reliance on oil. Similarly, Premier Campbell said he was fine that Prime Minister Trudeau had rejected the idea of energy subsidies for consumers; they would just be “a waste of public funds.”4 The Island was going to stake its future on renewables, not handouts.
Today, Energy Days still feels pertinent – perhaps because it deals with what seemed to be an imminent energy revolution that is, instead, still only partially underway. But it certainly feels dated in one way: all of its 26 speakers were male. Although women – including Lynne Douglas – compiled, edited, transcribed, and illustrated the Energy Days publication, the event overall gives a decidedly male energy.5
Energy Days: Proceedings of an Open Seminar of the Legislative Assembly of Prince Edward Island, compiled and edited by Lynne Douglas and Martha Pratt; transcribed by Dorothy Stallnecht; and illustrations by Elizabeth Hamon (1976) is available in full here as a PDF.
[1] D.T. Henaut, Sun, Wind and Wood (National Film Board, 1978) https://www.nfb.ca/film/sun_wind_and_wood/.
[2] Among the dozens of energy-themed articles that appeared in Island newspapers that spring, many argued that the energy experiment would benefit agriculture. “Farming Needs New Techniques,” Charlottetown Guardian (31 March 1976), 5.
[3] PEI Institute of Man & Resources, Energy Days (1976), 323.
[4] Charlottetown Guardian, 17 August and 29 September 1976.
[5] For more on this theme, see Emma Schroeder, “Thrifty Housewives and Wicked Wastrels: The Gendered Dimensions of Conservation,” NiCHE website, 13 April 2021.
Alan MacEachern and Joshua MacFadyen
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