[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, this is hiding a lot of geographic reality. You're using the word Canada pretty broadly here, when the reality is that the left-half of the country past Ontario (or arguably Quebec) is pretty shit in this regard.

Quebec has that hydroelectric power production. And their power grid is cheap and pretty clean. And their government and populace is highly pro-EV and yeah, it's great.

Ontario a bit second to that but reliant on nuclear, and those nuclear plants will be going offline for maintenance and its ... a whole thing.

Under Doug Ford we just keep increasing the amount of natural gas in the mix and the prices keep going up on electricity. (This being the guy who lied his way into power claiming that under the Ontario Liberals we had "the most expensive power in North America" [again a total lie])

The rest of the country? Oof. Have you looked at the prairie provinces power generation?

[emptybits]

Sure, but nearly half the population of Canada west of Ontario is in BC (5.0M out of 11.8M west of Ontario), and 92% of BC's electric generation comes from hydro (89%) and wind (3%). I like these numbers.

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...

The bulk of the rest of the west's population is Alberta and they generate most of their electricity from natural gas. That province is Canada's sore spot from an emissions and CO2 perspective.

[cmrdporcupine]

Right, I meant to call out BC as a relatively positive example but didn't. I agree they're doing the right moves for now.

(I'm from Alberta originally, and fled during the Klein years. I have many ... sensitive ... spots about that place)

That said... electricity generation aside... Massive LNG terminals on the BC coast aren't exactly a positive for the planet. In fact the approval of the first by the Trudeau gov't basically blew Canada's possibility of ever meeting its international climate commitments just on its own.

Natural gas sucks.

[emptybits]

Yeah, I agree. We have a large and persuasive LNG industry influencing government policy.

Not a lot of critical discussion is permitted because of the sheer money at stake. So many resource corporations, their employees, towns, and a heavily lobbied government don't want to sit and have a rational discussion about, oh, say, "How and when will we ween ourselves off LNG because we should?" :-|

[cmrdporcupine]

I get the impression that BC is in a tough spot in that between the forestry/natural gas and speculative real estate "bread", there's not a lot of other meat & cheese in the economic sandwich. Not to say there isn't anything, but manufacturing, tech, and agriculture are proportionally smaller than in Ontario and Quebec. (Though I see more interesting tech positions in Van these days than I do around here in the GTA)

Especially when it comes to economic development in Northern BC or even outside the lower mainland at all, it's difficult to walk away from extractive industries.

[8note]

the leaks can be improved, but I'd rather have europe and east asia burn Canadian fossil fuels than middle east and Russian ones

[yabones]

The situation out west is indeed rough. Saskatchewan still burning coal and Alberta... Being Alberta. It's not to say we can't fix it, those are both places where you can build plenty of solar and wind power for very cheap.

These problems are very political, but also very fixable. I think (well, hope) once it becomes clear that cheap Chinese EVs are here to stay the tide will begin to turn. In terms of total lifetime cost, you can either spend 200K CAD on a Silverado or 50K CAD on a Dolphin.

[cmrdporcupine]

If Smith fails in her attempts to gerrymander provincial ridings, there is a small chance (based on recent polls) that the growing split between far-far-right and far-right in Alberta yields another "accidental" NDP victory next election.

They're hardly anti-O&G but they do have a slightly more reasonable position around energy mix and renewables. Investing hardcore back into the green energy sectors that Smith tried to kneecap would really improve the situation there.

(If that happens, I'll probably move back to Edmonton after 25 years away. My daughter is doing her BFA at the UofA anyways, and my whole family is still there)

[8note]

alberta is alberta because provinces are pushed into competition on using their local resources.

you cant fix it without nationalizing control over BC and quebec hydro and alberta oil, and using them to canada's benefit rather than the individual provinces'

that constitutional reform isnt gonna happen

[cmrdporcupine]

I mean, I was born in the 70s in Alberta and hoooooy boy, I remember the reaction to the NEP even as a kid, which was a modest (and clumsy and malformed) attempt by Trudeau Sr to do some of what you describe.

If there was even a vague intimation of any of that happening now, the hair-brained small Alberta seppy minority would quadruple in size and funding.

[kimos]

Manitoba is almost 100% powered by hydro, and exports something like 7TWh of power a year. You’re drawing your line in the wrong spot.

[cmrdporcupine]

Fair point. I love Manitoba (though I haven't been there in 29 years) but I often forget about it.

[maximilianburke]

But if you keep looking past the prairies you’ll find another province, one that also has invested heavily in hydroelectric power.

[tonyarkles]

That's the thing about SK... we do actually have a pretty significant hydro investment. Problem is that the untapped hydro resources are quite remote. We can't really extract a whole lot more energy out of the South Saskatchewan River without causing upstream and downstream problems.

My own research and modelling basically showed... if we're going to remain energy independent (i.e. the ability for SaskPower to power the entire province without net imports), including riding out the worst scenario (cold, dark, and calm in the winter) for a week while moving towards minimum carbon, it's going to pretty much need to be a strong mix of nuclear, solar, wind, and natural gas peakers. We keep the existing hydro capacity because it's great, but there isn't much more to be had.

Where it gets really gnarly is looking at also eliminating SaskEnergy and transitioning residential and commercial heating and cooling to electric (e.g. heat pumps) is going to require at least 3x the nuclear buildout that we've got planned PLUS significant energy retrofits to every house. Trying to move to electric-only HVAC without energy retrotifts adds like another 33% nuclear capacity requirements (+ additional solar and wind of course) and it starts to get financially infeasible.

[cmrdporcupine]

It's strange to me that nuclear isn't a bigger mix in Sask with the Uranium industry so big there.

Related, it seems like the only pull that nuclear is getting in AB as an adjunct support for the fossil fuel industry, to help with oil sands extraction. Which just shows how distorted the political-economic system is at this point.

[tonyarkles]

> It's strange to me that nuclear isn't a bigger mix in Sask with the Uranium industry so big there.

There's two factors to this:

- Before SMRs, we wouldn't have been able to build conventional Big Reactors without violating grid redundancy requirements. Currently we have about 5,300 MW of installed capacity. With a conventional 1GW+ reactor, hitting the N-1 redundancy requirements would've been challenging. Losing ~20% of your capacity because one facility goes offline isn't acceptable unless you've got tons of extra generation capacity (either sitting idle or nominally running for export)

- The Sask NDP has traditionally been very staunchly opposed to nuclear. The SaskParty won their first election in 2007 and that was a pretty tenuous situation. They certainly didn't have much of an appetite to make any bold/potentially unpopular moves early on in their tenure. There's a large contingent of swing voters who in the early days likely would've rebelled against the SaskParty proposing nuclear. Even now it's moving very slowly; I appreciate that we're letting Darlington build the first BWRX-300 before we start building our own (Darlington is already sited for it and is honestly a better place for FOAK).

Edit: I missed this line from your comment:

> to help with oil sands extraction

That was a joke I used to tell in the early 2000s to upset my further-left anti-nuclear college friends: we should build nuclear reactors in the oil sands so that we can use the waste heat to process the bitumen. I'm honestly pretty amazed that no one had an aneurism.

[red-iron-pine]

big oil has been calling the shots in n america since oil was discovered. new boss is same as the old boss, etc.

[bryanlarsen]

Doug Ford has a plan to spend most of a trillion dollars on nuclear to ensure that our power becomes the most expensive.