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To your geography point: If the numbers I've found can be believed, Canada as a whole has 81GW of hydro generation capacity. This would beat out the US, despite Canada having ~12% the population. Now, some people associate hydro with mountains. BC, admittedly, has something like 15-20% of the hydro capacity of all of Canada. Washington is similar. Still, he biggest generator isn't actually BC, it's Quebec. Quebec has the largest hydro dam in Canada. It also has a greater total hydro capacity, and percentage of power from hydro, than BC. This despite Quebec not being particularly known for its mountains. Why? Well, geography.[0] The Canadian Shield is pretty good for hydro. The mountains are more of hills, these days, but they were mountains once, and the corresponding rivers and height changes still exist. Also, you know that wonderfully cold Hudson Bay, especially the attached southern bit, James Bay? Yeah. It's cold. No one wants to live there. But water? Water wants to get there, so Quebec built dams, and now generates a bunch of power there. Ontario, on the other hand, went mostly for nuclear. I'm not sure whether that's due to some inherent unsuitability of the land or rivers on the Ontario side of the Bay, or something else, but Ontario has several nuclear power plants, and relatively few hydro facilities. [0] Okay, so I dramatized this paragraph a fair bit, but the message stands. Quebec has a very large amount of hydro generating capacity. |