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…
I often attend gatherings and events that have an environmental theme: it is not only part of my personal evangelism as an environmentalist and nuclear advocate, it is also simply enjoyable to discuss things with smart people who share some of my interests and concerns. Yesterday I attended a presentation that was somewhat different, in…
In 1997, Japan hosted a conference at Kyoto, in which most of the world’s industrialized countries agreed in principle to reduce their man-made greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to roughly five percent below 1990 levels. Nearly 14 years later, Japan abruptly abandoned that goal after a tsunami of unprecedented power destroyed hundreds of communities along its…
Nine years ago today, the eastern North American electricity grid crashed when trees fell on a transmission line in Ohio. Most of the northeastern U.S. and southern Ontario suddenly were without electricity. The blackout occurred in the middle of a hot sunny Thursday afternoon. I was walking back to my downtown Ottawa office when everything…
The price of North American natural gas has been ridiculously low since before the recession of 2008. In that time, the fossil component of the Ontario electricity supply essentially shifted from coal-fired power generation to gas-fired. The provincial grid still supplied mostly with nuclear, but the fossil supply is now mostly gas. As I write…
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