After eight extensive posts about the Ontario electricity sector, I am expanding my geographic coverage to look at the electricity sectors in selected OECD countries. My focus will be on the historical and relative performance of each country’s sector with respect to decarbonization and prices. As in the case of
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Writings of J. Todd Ring: Peak Oil, Climate Change, and Human Fallibility
I’m just going to share verbatim a letter that I just sent to a few friends. I think it is worth giving it some thought. The letter expresses my comments on an excellent set of films by James Corbett. (Link is below. Part one is better, and extremely important.) Hi
Continue readingIn-Sights: Privatizing public dollars
The high-priced help at BC Hydro and the provincial government decided benefits of low-costs should never be wasted on consumers. To ensure it was not, the utility signed decades-long deals with private power companies to buy electricity generated by wind turbines. The contracts contained inflation escalators and were designed to
Continue readingThings Are Good: Quebec Cancels Planned LNG Operation to Protect the Environment
The waters of the Saguenay and the St. Lawerence have avoided great harm thanks to the cancellation of a massive natural gas facility in the area. People had been protesting the development for years and the government finally listened. The project would have taken bitumen from the tar sands in
Continue readingThings Are Good: Reducing CO2 Emissions by Targeting the 5% of Power Plants
Electric energy production using non-renewable processes produces an immense amount of carbon, and as a civilization we can’t afford to put more carbon in the atmosphere. Researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder set out to figure out how much pollution do power plants actually produce and what can we
Continue readingThings Are Good: A Cheap Material for Producing Power from Waste Heat
Machines produce a lot of waste heat, and if we can capture that heat we can convert it into electric energy. Capturing thermal energy is currently inefficient because of thermal dynamics and the lack of super capacitors. Not to be deterred by these obstacles, researchers have found ways to efficiently
Continue readingIn-Sights: Resolving EV inhibitions
For personal use in urban areas, electric vehicles are clearly in our immediate future. But not everyone lives in a place where battery charging is a simple affair. Fast charging stations are costly to build, damaging to batteries, and may be expensive to use, drawing power at times of peak
Continue readingThings Are Good: Home Water Heaters can Reduce Electricity Production
Across North America homes have massive tanks of hot water regardless of the outside temperature or other concerns. The energy cost to heat all this water is immense and not only can we reduce this cost we can use the water itself to power homes. The basic idea is to
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Ontario Electricity VIII: Now also going backwards on climate
There have been a number of important developments in the Ontario electricity sector since my last update when I summarized my arguments in front of the Ontario Legislature against the proposed Provincial Conservative legislation, now enacted, that eliminated the Provincial Liberal rate-based borrowing scheme to subsidize electricity prices and replace
Continue readingIn-Sights: Taxpayers pay for Earth’s destruction
When an industry is on a path to extinction, private investors exit and governments often step in, spending huge dollars that merely delay the inevitable. We should not allow that to continue happening in Canada.
Continue readingThings Are Good: Manage the Summer Heat in Your Home Without AC
Global warming is making our cities hotter than ever before, which has led many to turn on the air conditioning. The irony is that to keep us cool we turn on machines which consume a lot of energy, and if that energy comes from a non-renewable state then the local
Continue readingThings Are Good: Keystone XL is Dead, For Reals This Time
Protesting works! The absolutely foolish plan to make a massive pipeline to transport a heavily subsidized non-renewable energy source is dead. It is really dead. We’ve heard before that the project is over, only for it to come back to life. Obama and Trudeau both worked hard to ensure that
Continue reading52 Ideas: Alberta’s Dilemma: When do we recognize that the world is changing?
Back in 2015, I started asking a simple question: is Alberta ready? Whenever I talked to politicians or entrepreneurs or thought leaders, I asked that same simple question. I asked that question for one reason: History told me that Alberta’s politicians didn’t understand that the rest of the world was
Continue readingIn-Sights: Deception and duplicity
While John Horgan’s government was almost doubling the Site C budget to C$16 billion, the Biden administration was getting ready to approve a C$3.4 billion wind project off the coast of Massachusetts. The per megawatt cost of the wind project is less than 30% of Site C’s capital cost per
Continue readingIn-Sights: Fuel on a fire
I understand why people gaining direct financial rewards support the Peace River megaproject. But it is harder to explain why rational and, we hope, honest cabinet ministers stay attached to a hazardous hydropower project when less expensive, less damaging options are available. Perhaps the refusal to admit error is explained
Continue readingIn-Sights: Volte-face
Years from now, after physical frailty or political transience has ensured John Horgan’s removal from the cabinet meeting room, a political opponent or a savvy journalist will definitively explain Premier Horgan’s about-face on energy matters.
Continue readingThings Are Good: I See Your Red Roof and I Want to Paint it White
On solution to avoid catastrophic climate change is as easy as painting buildings. It’s known that white pain has benefits for cooling cities and on individual buildings it can reduce the use of air conditioning. This has led to a wider adoption of white paint on buildings, and more research
Continue readingIn-Sights: BC Hydro quandary
Unrestrained capital spending and needed write-offs of valueless items will result in major rate increases. But that presents a critical problem. Alternatives for consumers are steadily getting easier and less costly.
Continue readingIn-Sights: Wind turbine for when the winds don’t blow
Years ago, the head of BC Hydro said the least-cost solutions to energy needs were conservation and efficiency. While that remains true, recovery of energy now wasted would be advantageous. Alpha 311 now offers a vertical axis wind turbine that can produce electricity by harvesting energy produced by moving vehicles.
Continue readingIn-Sights: BC: a follower, not a leader
The BC Government could have learned from hydropower disasters in Newfoundland and Labrador and Manitoba as those were unfolding. Spending went out of control on Muskrat Falls and Keeyask. Because NL has only about 10% of BC’s population, the federal government had to step in to avoid ruinous electricity rate
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