John Spears of the Toronto Star published an interesting piece the other day about the performance of Ontario Power Generation’s Pickering nuclear plant. Its headline reads “Pickering nuclear units among the most expensive, least reliable in the world,” but readers should keep a couple of facts in mind. First, as Scott Luft points out, price...
Ontario Power Generation
Earth Day 2012: time for greens to walk the walk when it comes to clean energy
Clean energy is energy that comes with no air emissions, and that comes with low or no lifecycle environmental impacts. By that measure, what’s clean? This: That public service announcement is from Energy Northwest, a public power utility in Washington state. I was in Gatineau Park last Sunday. The day started sunny but by...
Energy in the modern age: what’s the real low-hanging fruit?
The modern energy economy developed in two stages. The first stage, Rapid Urban Electrification, which began in the late 1800s, essentially defined the modern urban metropolis. Electricity is what made cities so dramatically preferable to rural areas as places to live. The vast migration from the country to the city began at precisely the...
Three years of cheap gas spells NO RELIEF for Ontario electricity consumers
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...
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,...
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