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Alberta’s oil-based economy needs to prepare itself for a looming consumer shift to electric vehicles, a Calgary crowd heard Tuesday.

Disruptive change in the automotive sector is already here and is likely to reach a crucial tipping point within the next five or six years, said Michael Liebreich, founder and guest contributor of Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

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“It will happen at different speeds in different places . . . but there are going to be millions of Canadians and hundreds of thousands of Albertans and Calgarians who are going to be buying these things,” Liebreich said in an interview. “The inevitability is that we will end up with very high penetrations of electric vehicles in the mix, because they’re better vehicles.”

Liebreich, who is also CEO of Liebreich Associates where he provides advisory services on topics such as clean energy and transportation and sustainable development, was one of the speakers at the second annual Energy Disruptors conference taking place at Stampede Park.