My coffeemaker, a 1995-vintage Hamilton-Beach automatic drip filter machine, takes roughly eight minutes to make four cups of coffee. The appliance is rated at 1000 watts (one kilowatt), which means that in those eight minutes it uses roughly 0.133 kilowatt-hours. Of course, I don’t turn off the power as soon as the coffee is ready:…
All Bruce Power nuclear reactors are running, as of just this afternoon. This is the first time since 1996 that the plant’s 8 units have all been running, and the first time in Bruce Power’s history. As I mentioned in early April, Bruce Power is a hugely successful public-private partnership that began in 2001 in…
Alberta is panicking right now, fearing the worst when the U.S. makes its next decision on the Keystone Pipeline. If the new American secretary of state’s recent legislative past is an indicator, Keystone, which will carry Alberta bitumen to the U.S. gulf coast, will receive extra attention on the question of whether the proposed pipeline…
At its height, the nuclear refurbishment at the Bruce power plant on the east shore of Lake Huron was the biggest capital infrastructure project in Canada. It generated 3,000 jobs, mostly in the building and construction trades, at a time when jobs were scarce and urgently needed in Ontario. At the time the refurbishment project…
What is the most important number in clean electricity? It is the carbon intensity per kilowatt-hour (CIPK): the total amount of carbon dioxide, or CO2, in metric tons, emitted by the emitting generators feeding the grid, divided by the total amount of electricity generated, in kilowatt-hours. As you can see in Table 1 on the…
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