Imagine driving from Ottawa to Toronto in a car that runs purely on electricity. Your drive takes the usual four and a half hours. But instead of burning 40 to 50 litres of gasoline—and dumping 92 to 115 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air—you use 85 kilowatt-hours of clean Ontario-made electric power and…
The electricity grid is a techno-sociological phenomenon that exists for two reasons, one of them physical and the other human. The physical reason directly relates to the force of gravity, and the effect of gravity on water. Gravity is what makes life on earth such a work-intensive enterprise. All physical work, including the simple act…
Ontario’s electricity is much cleaner than Germany’s. Here is a comparison of the carbon content per unit of electricity, from 2011: It is important to note that Germany’s 2011 CIPK of roughly 540 grams is based on CO2 emissions of roughly 325 million tons from combustible fuel sources. These sources produced roughly 405.9 billion kilowatt-hours…
Ontario’s carbon reductions from electric power generation have since 2003 been simply remarkable. From a peak of over 40 million metric tons of CO2 in the year 2000, these fell to just over 16 million tons in 2012. That represents a 24 million ton annual reduction. This is by any standard a stunning achievement, worthy…
Toronto’s subway trains carry thousands of passengers every hour through underground tunnels. This would be extremely difficult to accomplish if the traction power hurling the trains across the east-west line and up and down the north-south lines under the city were not supplied by electricity, which at its point of use is smoke-free. And from…
The other day I put up a table showing the carbon implications of the brave new world Ontario is heading into when perhaps 10 nuclear reactors come out of service (six of them permanently). It’s not pretty: in a single typical July weekday, Ontario electricity generators could, in the course of delivering the same amount…
In the economic boom of the 1950s, Canada made a strategic gamble on its industrial future: it invested in developing the CANDU nuclear reactor. The CANDU was invented as a conscious decision to differentiate a product from its competition. Why was this a gamble? Because the CANDU’s competition was a reactor technology invented and marketed…
How much carbon pollution will Ontario’s electricity generating sector dump into the air after 2020, when the Pickering B nuclear station comes out of service and there are multi-year refurbishment outages at the Bruce and Darlington nuclear plants? Remember that by 2020 the Pickering station, which today represents 3,090 megawatts of zero-carbon generating capacity (6…
The Ontario Liberals in the 2011 general election lost their majority position in the provincial legislature. This was because they lost a number of key rural districts into which their green energy policies had forced enormous and enormously inefficient wind turbines. The rural residents in those districts deeply and rightly resented this imposition, by force,…
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