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:…
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…
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…
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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