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:…
Of all the countries on earth, France is the only one with the foresight, confidence, and discipline to have recognized and then immediately implemented the right energy strategy during the existential economic upset that resulted from the 1973 oil crisis. Like every other modern country, France realized instantly, when Saudi Arabia began dramatically raising the…
Infra-red water faucets are now a fixture (pun intended) in many public washrooms. Everybody appears to have bought in to the conservation mantra: use as little as possible. Chief among the purveyors of the conservation ideology are the mainstream environmental organizations. These groups also push for renewable energy in the form of wind turbines and…
A soirée is an evening event, meaning that most soirées held in non-polar latitudes take place at a time when solar photovoltaic devices are not experiencing very many photon interactions and hence are generating very little if any electricity. So if you are throwing a soirée and need electricity, it’s wise to make sure the…
Tables 1 and 2 in the left-hand sidebar of this blog give hourly and so-far-daily snapshots of the energy sources that power Ontario’s electricity grid. As you can see, there are five fuel types: coal, gas, hydro, nuclear, “other,” and wind. The “other” category consists of eight generating units, four of which are at OPG’s…
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