Alberta Premier Danielle Smith knows she increasingly needs to step up where Ottawa steps down.
“Canada is becoming irrelevant,” the premier reports, matter-of-factly. “We have the ability to supply the world with everything they need, and we really could be a leader. But we have a federal government that chooses not to, that chooses to work against the national interest rather than advance it.”
Energy critics within the NDP’s provincial affiliates in Alberta and Saskatchewan are pushing back against MP Charlie Angus’s private member’s bill targeting fossil fuel advertising.
The dispute between provincial and federal New Democrats comes days after two candidates to lead the Alberta NDP expressed openness to loosening the formal ties that bind the party branches.
However, federal party leader Jagmeet Singh said while there may be disagreements on some particular matters, “we’re a large party and that’s a normal thing that happens.”
It wasn’t so long ago that Orsted was being held up as an example of how oil and gas companies should handle the transition to clean energy. In 2009 the then-DONG (Danish Oil and Natural Gas) announced that it was going to turn around it business so that instead of earning 85 per cent of its money from oil and gas it was going to earn 85 per cent of it from renewables. It was an early mover in offshore wind – and, at least for some years, shareholders were richly rewarded. The share price marched upwards from around £19 in 2014 to a peak at £100 in early 2021. Increasing your money fivefold and saving the planet at the same time – you can hardly argue with that.
Last week, the Ontario government announced plans to spend many years and billions of dollars refurbishing an old nuclear plant in Pickering, just east of Toronto. Pure folly, said its critics. In fact, the decision makes good, solid sense, both for Ontario and the planet.
Winning the battle to control global warming depends in large part on powering more things with electricity – specifically electricity that isn’t produced by burning fossil fuels. Making that energy shift is a huge task, but Ontario has two big advantages.
A cryptocurrency mining company has lost a bid to force BC Hydro to provide the vast amounts of power needed for its operations, upholding the provincial government’s right to pause power connections for new crypto miners.
Conifex Timber Inc., a forestry company that branched out into cryptocurrency mining, had gone to the B.C. Supreme Court to have the policy declared invalid.
So this could apply to EV owners.
Taxpayers and utility customers naturally expect to pay heavily for wind and solar power. After all, if such projects made economic sense, there would be no need for governments to subsidize and mandate them. But even beyond the costs of inefficient power production, there’s a question of whether alternative-energy cheerleaders yet have a handle on the environmental impact of their projects. It seems that there is still no free lunch and that every method of producing electricity carries costs and benefits.
Joe Biden’s war on American energy started on day one.
Biden’s first act of president was to kill the Keystone XL pipeline. Biden’s action on January 20, 2021, was part of a series of executive orders on his first day in office that revoked “permits signed over the past 4 years that do not serve the U.S. national interest, including revoking the Presidential permit granted to the Keystone XL pipeline.”
With the federal government planning to phase out sales of new gas-powered vehicles during the next decade, many drivers question how they will fare on cold Prairie days like this week’s.
But two electric car enthusiasts who chatted with host Leisha Grebinski on CBC’s Blue Sky this week say they love driving their vehicles in the winter.
Hmmm…
Fast chargers stop working in Yellowknife due to cold weather
Northland Utilities’ FLO fast chargers stopped working due to the extremely cold weather. The company is working with FLO to find a solution.
No Go Flo!
Real life is hard …
Took my wife into work today for safety sakes. It’s -45 this morning.
Saw a fellow sitting in his EV at a charging station. The businesses were still closed for him to stay warm and dawdle while his car charged.
I briefly spoke with him as he went into the store. He said… pic.twitter.com/INfnWU7eu1
— Mark Bohaichuk (@m_bohaichuk) January 13, 2024
h/t Mauser
The Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) issued a grid alert for power consumption on Friday.
The alert was issued at 4:16 p.m.
“The AESO issues a grid alert when the power system is under stress and we’re preparing to use emergency reserves to meet demand and maintain system reliability,” AESO wrote in an online statement.
Apparently AESO reported last evening that every wind turbine in Alberta shut itself down due to extreme cold – this is the alternative energy source we are supposed to count on? Wind and solar farms are a pathetic joke.
— Rick Parker 🦅 Alberta Freedom (@HappyintheWest) January 13, 2024
Dustin Duncan has retained a personal lawyer for the first time in his nearly 18-year political career. The Saskatchewan cabinet minister in charge of Crown corporations said he’s prepared to go to prison, or what he had called “carbon jail” – the most unlikely and extreme outcome in his government’s fight against Ottawa and the current unfairness of its carbon pricing policy for home heating.
Mr. Duncan said he would still rather it didn’t come to all that. He and his boss, Premier Scott Moe, aren’t energy outlaws, as of now.
“Nobody is breaking the law yet,” Mr. Duncan said in an interview with The Globe this week.
A study is revealing some of the challenges that electric vehicles will pose to northern power grids — and it’ll likely be revised now that Canada has a plan for phasing out the sale of gas-powered cars and trucks.
“At no point in our studies did we consider 100 per cent electric vehicle adoption,” said Michael Ross, a researcher at Yukon University who is leading the study.
Ross, an industrial chair in northern energy innovation, said his research is looking at slow to high adoption rates of electric vehicles in Dawson City and parts of Whitehorse and Yellowknife. So far, it’s showing some of the ways residential power grids will be strained if people in those neighbourhoods add Level 2 electric vehicle charging stations to their homes, he said.
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith made it crystal clear that she intends to fight with “everything” at her disposal what she called an “unconstitutional” new federal government mandate that all new cars and trucks by 2035 be electric, which would in effect ban the sale of new gasoline- or diesel- only powered vehicles after that year.
To meet Canada’s commitment to its Paris Agreement climate goals, the federal government has announced increasingly heavy-handed emissions reduction policies this year. It culminated Monday in the publication of regulated targets for electric-vehicle sales: an EV mandate.
History has shown us time and again that government quotas are no match for the market. The Liberals want to show us one more time why this is the case.
DOCUMENTS: @EnvironmentCa data show @S_Guilbeault claim that gasoline car ban "will help Canadians with the cost of living" is 100% untrue. Net costs to drivers run to billions. https://t.co/m8lt39fwdQ #cdnpoli @BCheadle #disinformation #FactCheck pic.twitter.com/OukJaLDhVb
— Blacklock's Reporter (@mindingottawa) December 21, 2023
It’s now official. We have, as a nation, joined those other countries banning the sale of internal-combustion-engine-powered light-duty vehicles past the year 2035. Now, never mind that, like last year — when the feds dropped the original draft of these new standards — it appears the Liberals are once again hoping that dropping this rather Draconian new regulation right before Christmas will give them two weeks or so for skeptics’ distemper to dissipate. Or that, as I and many insiders believe, this is most definitely a Quebec-centric dictum — a province where both Liberals and EVs are hugely popular — writ large across the entirety of our fair land.
Charging an EV …
@liberal_party @JustinTrudeau @FP_Champagne @JonathanWNV pic.twitter.com/1HvEvjvU7j
— Kim Allen (@KimKimmer4761) December 19, 2023
h/t Mauser
As Ottawa mandates selling electric vehicles (EVs) and with an increasing number of offerings for consumers, the potentially major issue of battery replacement remains uncertain.
It’s been said that an EV is its battery and then everything else.
In a video uploaded Dec. 12, automotive journalists Andrea and Zack Spencer of the Motormouth Youtube channel, told the story of Kyle Hsu, a 2022 Hyundai Ioniq 5 owner who faced a $60,000 bill to replace its battery. That was more than the $55,000 cost of the car brand new.
