Imagine being the federal minister in charge of the energy file and skipping a major world conference on a lower carbon that was happening in your own backyard.
This isn’t an imaginary scenario, the minister who did this is Jonathan Wilkinson, Justin Trudeau’s minister of natural resources.
The age of energy ideology is over in Ontario, replaced by power pragmatism. The Ontario government’s new and ambitious plan to meet the province’s power needs until 2050 draws on pretty much every known technology to meet a demand for power that could double by that year.
One doesn’t have to look too far back to remember the era of overhyped and overpriced wind and solar projects that former premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government was so eager to foist off on Ontarians. Across the province, the countryside is scarred with wind farms and solar installations. It was the sort of approach that a government could toy with, knowing that the province had surplus power so it didn’t need to rely on wind and solar.
Ontario Energy Minister Todd Smith announced Friday that the province is formally seeking approvals for three more small modular nuclear reactors at its Darlington power plant, where it had already put plans in place for one unit of the novel technology.
Provincially-owned Ontario Power Generation had always contemplated building a total of four of the new units, and had begun clearing enough land for the enlarged project east of the existing Darlington nuclear plant, in Clarington, Ont., east of Toronto. But until Friday, it had been formally proceeding with just one of the new units, the country’s first.
I think SMNR’s are a great idea, better than Wind and Solar by far.
But will the regulatory burden of environmental assessments & endless consultations take a decade to complete before a shovel is even picked up as with the earlier full sized reactor announced this week?
The Opec powers are forming new alliances
Oil might be a source of power, but trying to control its price is a politically hazardous business. Led by the odd pairing of the Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), and Vladimir Putin, the Opec Plus oil producers’ cartel exists to maintain a price floor for its fractious members in an energy environment where oil prices have crashed three times over the past two decades. But its importance in a geopolitical world defined by Sino-American competition is beginning to extend well beyond the gyrations of oil markets. Opec Plus has remained resilient even as the Beijing-Moscow-Tehran axis has hardened since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the recent Chinese-brokered rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran. This raises questions about whether Saudi Arabia is now defecting into the anti-Washington camp.
Ontario could be getting its first new, full-scale nuclear plant in three decades, the province’s Energy Minister said Wednesday, unveiling plans to work with privately-owned Bruce Power to conduct an environmental study of a potential additional facility at the company’s massive existing site on the shores of Lake Huron.
… Any new nuclear facility in Ontario would require at least a decade for an extensive federal impact assessment and public consultations – including with local Indigenous groups – as well as final approvals by the federal Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. It would also cost many billions of dollars. When the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty scrapped plans for a new full-scale facility near Ontario Power Generation’s Darlington site in Clarington, east of Toronto, more than a decade ago, the projected price tag was expected to be more than $25-billion. The government provided no cost estimate on Wednesday.
That’s a sick joke and I suspect much of the process is just a scam for well connected hacks to line their pockets.
“Let’s not politicize oil!” How many times have you heard that admonition?
It was first coined in the late 19th century, when oil was beginning to emerge as the key lubricant of a modern industrial society. Having started as a new venture by private entrepreneurs, what took shape as the oil industry soon attracted the attention of all major industrial nations. By the early 20th century most of them had set up their national, that is to say state-owned, oil companies, thus making oil political while insisting that it shouldn’t be politicized. (The US alone didn’t and still doesn’t have a state-owned oil company.) From the start, the biography of oil has included another theme: fear of the world running out of oil. In the 1930s a report prepared for the British admiralty warned that oil may become “a scarce resource” within a couple of decades.
European countries are still feeling the pinch of being cut off from Russian gas as the German Federal Network Agency, the Bundesnetzagentur, has revealed that the country will be dependent on purchasing electricity this winter from neighbouring France, relying on French nuclear power.
The current German leftist coalition of the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD), the Greens, and the pro-free market Free Democrats (FDP) have confirmed the findings of the “needs analysis” conducted by the agency, which regulates electricity, gas, and other utilities, according to a report from the German tabloid Bild.
Britain has started burning coal to generate electricity for the first time in a month and a half, after the heatwave made solar panels too hot to work efficiently.
One unit at Uniper’s Ratcliffe-on-Soar coal power plant in Nottinghamshire started producing electricity for the first time in weeks on Monday morning, while another coal-powered plant was warmed up in case it was needed by the early afternoon.
If Ontario wants to keep its lights on and its economy stable, it needs to abandon the fantasy that wind and solar power can make a meaningful contribution to its energy needs. In the absence of untapped hydroelectric sites, the provincial government’s determination to outlaw fossil fuels in pursuit of an all-electric society means Ontario has no choice but to go nuclear.
Germany’s mainstream parties are stuck in an old ideology
During a press conference in March, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised that the green transition will lead to growth rates last seen during the economic miracle of the 1950s. During that decade, the West German economy grew by 8% per annum, outperforming all of Europe and most of the world. As we now know, at the time of Scholz’s speech the economy was already in recession, and based on current forecasts Germany could well be the only G7 nation with a contracting economy this year.
A growing number of Canadians are finding it increasingly challenging to maintain their standard of living, with more and more people struggling just to afford basic necessities.
Even though a range of contributing factors — such as rising commodity prices, or supply disruptions due to the war in Ukraine — are beyond our government’s control, Canadians nonetheless hold the belief and expectation that any actions or interventions taken by the government will lessen the burdens we face. Unfortunately, too often government policies often have the opposite effect and financially burden Canadians further.
It’s a war designed to impoverish us.
Ontario is singled out in an electricity regulator’s report warning two-thirds of North America is “at risk of energy shortfalls this summer” should temperatures spike.
With the province in the grip of an early June heat wave in the last few days, the Atlanta-based North American Electric Reliability Corporation says extended refurbishments at nuclear power plants could result in a power pinch if the coming months prove hotter than usual, causing “extreme demand.”
More Nukes Now.
While they are being promoted around the world as a crucial weapon in reducing carbon emissions, solar panels only have a lifespan of up to 25 years.
Experts say billions of panels will eventually all need to be disposed of and replaced.
“The world has installed more than one terawatt of solar capacity. Ordinary solar panels have a capacity of about 400W, so if you count both rooftops and solar farms, there could be as many as 2.5 billion solar panels.,” says Dr Rong Deng, an expert in solar panel recycling at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
Not again. All the electric vehicle charging stations were taken, and I knew I was in for at least a 30- to 40-minute wait. And yet, the app on my phone showed two chargers had been available five minutes ago. I had driven in this pouring rain for nothing, but what choice did I have? My EV needed charging for the next day’s commute, and this was the closest station to my home.
When my old Hyundai Elantra received a death sentence at the repair shop in 2019, I decided that my new vehicle was going to be electric. Up until then, I had cared for the Earth by doing small things, such as using reusable grocery bags and recycling plastic and paper products. I wanted to do more. The demise of my gas-powered vehicle presented a perfect opportunity. I looked forward to driving a car that did not emit pollution or run on fossil fuel.
A callous prig in the making: Pay for my luxury poor people, I’m saving the world! She is unaware of what she has revealed about herself in this very CBC screed. The comments indicate people are waking up to THE BIG EV LIE.
Lo and Behold …
I received a survey from the Condo board today. They wanted to know our thoughts on installing EV Charging stations.
Unfortunately our building cannot accomodate a charger for every parking spot.
Their proposed solution is to convert some visitor parking to Pay as you go EV charging spots.
Oh fab, I get to pay so someone else has a charger handy.
An ROI wasn’t even mentioned. I doubt this limited conversion would boost resale value by an amount that could justify the investment.
South Africa Beats Climate Goal as Blackouts Slash Emissions. It’s one of those headlines you read and assume the Babylon Bee is to blame. In this case, it came from a Bloomberg article, gushing about South Africa’s falling emissions putting it on track to meet its 2025 climate goals. They were even bold enough to note: ‘Power plant breakdowns are reducing industrial activity.’
Sure, collapsing into the Stone Age is probably going to lower your CO2 emissions – for a while – but pretty soon everyone is going to be chopping down the nearest forest like it’s 5000 BC.
