From Cork to Toronto

During his recent trip to Canada, the Governator met with Stephen Harper (the Kyotoevader), Dalton McGuinty, who broke his pledge to close coal-fired power in Ontario, and Gordon Campbell, whose province is planning new coal plants despite objections from his neighbours in the state of Washington. Yet while in Toronto he did not meet with our Mayor , David Miller, the greenest broom wielder in Canada. I for one would love to know why. Could it be that word has got around about Hizzoner's deserted presentation in New York , in contrast to Ken Livingstone 's packed house? While Schwarzenegger promotes his Hydrogen Highway, Miller is promoting the idea of plug-in cars , which is a curious idea from a Mayor who believes we don't need new power plants or power lines. Even restricting use to off peak will require specialised infrastructure to ensure people don't plug in their cars in day time because they really really really need to make that trip to Walmart. Like the h...

This isn't a follow up to Thursday's post but rather to Far and Wide's entry about Stephane Dion's speech on energy in Alberta during the week. I was posting in response to another comment by someone called "Sceptical Environmental": Answer me this: if Dion were sincere in wanting us to use less gas, why did he vote against California-style mandatory emissions standards last year? Dion also said his solution to climate change in the oil sands is to have nukes power the whole thing. Who says this guy's an environmentalist?? Dion said the absolute opposite - that while energy generation is a provincial matter, he does not believe nuclear is a viable option . I disagree. Given the size of the comment my disagreement seemed to be generating, I opted to move it here. Please note at this point - I believe in aggressive conservation, supply management and innovations like Deep Lake Cooling but this is a province where peak demand has grown 20% or 1646MW in...

Next time you meet an environmentalist potsmoker ask them where the energy came from for their pot. It's becoming clear that eliminating grow-ops such as this one and the 1,000 watt incandescent lights used for growth would save more energy in Toronto than all those CFL bulbs (and dodgy LED christmas lights) Toronto Hydro are giving out. Apparently apartment blocks are popular with growers because power is part of the rent rather than being individually charged and thus disproportionately high bills being easy to spot. I don't actually have a problem with pot being legalised but growing pot in an old apartment block while rewriting in dodgy manner likely to cause fire, not to mention taxes having to be paid to relocate innocent co-residents - well, that's just uncool man...

Reviewing the statcounter log, I offer a welcome to those from Ontario Power Generation ( ty1.ontariopowergeneration.com ) and Constellation Energy ( person1.constellation.com ) who took an interest in this and those US visitors who found this via Google Finance . Since the first two were reading via IE 6.0, I presume they read it and didn't just Firefox Prefetch it .

The problem Peter Tabuns has is that he doesn't want a portlands power plant at all. However, since the NDP declined to evict Hizzoner ( as was Hargrove ), Miller still having his NDP party card makes it tricky for Tabuns to fully disown him since our Mayor has gone and backed the "Toronto Waterfront Clean Energy Centre" joint venture between city-owned Toronto Hydro and US firm Constellation Energy Group over the rival "Portlands Energy Centre". However, a few new snags have arisen - the lease on the Hearn (currently to a film studio) does not permit power generation . the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (which includes Toronto Hydro as a member, ironically) says the current Hearn plan, a simple cycle non-co-gen station is less efficient on a pollution per watt basis than the PEC combined cycle bid. It does mention that with steam for district heating (co-generation) the TWCEC would be more efficient than the PEC, but that implies the PEC would not be able to d...

Earlier this week I wrote about the impending (hell, current) power crunch in Ontario. Yesterday's Star has an editorial and today quotes Premier McGuinty on the issue of the city's power future. One of the statements it makes is quite stunning - that no power is generated in the City of Toronto. It's also not quite true - all over the city various facilities such as hospitals have generators which could be used to maintain city power at crisis points if the means to exchange power with the grid existed, and sufficient safeguards were built into the system to ensure the generator could isolate itself from the grid to protect the facility it is powering if the grid itself becomes unstable. Power grids generally are quite old-school in their lack of flexibility compared to telecoms which are accelerating towards fully distributed operation. The ideal is for power to be produced as near its users as possible, to enable communities to be more self-sufficient and the gri...

There's an ongoing kerfuffle about nuclear power plants here in Ontario, refitting old ones and building new ones. There is an unhappy history of capital cost overruns and dubious reliability of the ones that get built, not to mention that it is de facto corporate welfare for AECL - and last week's West Wing won't help either . Windfarms are starting to happen but not at the rate of the anti-nuke crowd's paragon, Germany. There is also conservation, where some folk say if only we used less power we'd be fine. The name of the last update to the building code which imposes optional standards for energy efficiency is R-2000 which gives you an idea of how old the standard one is. Premier McGuinty's promise of shutting all coal fired plants will place massive stress on a grid which doesn't have enough power as it is, and residents groups are successfully opposing new gas plants in Mississauga and t he portlands of Toronto. As supply is falling with the en...