Unless sense prevails, by 2015 the Ontario power grid is going have around 8,000 nameplate MW of wind, solar and bioenergy, mostly wind, and 10,700 MW by 2018. Even today with just over 1,700 MW of wind the grid is unmanageable during periods of surplus baseload generation (SBG) without exporting large amounts of electricity...
Electricity
High quality job creation in Ontario: here’s how they’re solving the problem in the U.S.
Yesterday the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced it will approve a construction and operating license for two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at The Southern Company’s Vogtle generating plant. This will be the first new U.S. nuclear project in more than three decades. It will create around 25,000 direct and indirect jobs. A couple years ago,...
Keystone K Street calculation: Obama tears page from McGuinty’s playbook
For political reasons, the U.S. president has put the kibosh on TransCanada’s plan to extend the Keystone pipeline from Cushing Oklahoma to Houston. That project would have immediately created 6,500 high-paid, high-skilled construction jobs, along with thousands more spinofff jobs. The employment situation in the U.S. has been persistently bad through Obama’s presidency, and...
Nuclear progress in Canada: like the western pipelines, it’s all about real property rights
If your energy strategy involves somebody else’s real property, don’t be surprised if that somebody’s legal property rights trump your energy strategy. CBC Radio’s The Current recently published a very interesting interview with the Canadian federal natural resources minister, who during the interview gives a pretty well-explained account of the government’s support of the...
The new industrial economy takes shape at NGNP
It’s exciting and fascinating to watch the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP) take shape. The NGNP is a graphite moderated, gas-cooled nuclear reactor that draws on nearly half a century of R&D and operational experience with these kinds of reactors in the civilian nuclear sector. This will be a high-temperature machine—above 700 °C at the...
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