In today’s news… hey, why’d it go dark?

Written by News Roundup on March 22, 2024. Posted in Current News

Canadians have apparently resigned themselves to the fact that the people who run our country could create a sand shortage in Saudi Arabia or an ice shortage in Greenland

No country on Earth has had better luck, from geography to resources to a peaceful history founded in constitutional liberty.

And, famously, ample rivers for hydroelectric dams, some of the world’s biggest oil and gas reserves and a well-established nuclear industry using homegrown CANDU reactors.

And now we face… self-inflicted electricity shortages. It can’t have been easy. But given enough politicians and zealots, anything can turn from a dream into a nightmare.

The specific trigger for this gloomy blast is a paper from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute by Andrew Evans (h/t Parker Gallant via email) entitled “Canada’s declining electricity abundance”.

And even a sour and persistent reader of the news might react initially with hey, I thought that was a long way in the future, not something they already had caused.

But in fact last December even our Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne, a man whose feet are as firmly planted in the air as anyone’s in cabinet, actually:

“brought the upcoming deficit of Canada’s clean power supply into critical focus, stating that companies were reticent to invest ‘because some jurisdictions are getting strained with respect to the capacity of energy generation.’”

Weird, huh? But there it is. Even so, we must note, to produce this electricity shortage right now is exceptionally daft since they are at the same time utterly determined to electrify everything from home heating to pickup trucks in the rugged Canadian northern winter.

As Evans says:

“To solve the constraints on energy generation as the minister outlined, and to meet net-zero 2050 targets, the federal government projects that grid demand will be twice that of today.

To meet that demand, the capacity of the grid, which we have accumulated since we have had electricity – roughly the past 140 years – will have to double in the next 21 years (Canada Energy Regulator 2023).”

There was a time when such a project, though daunting, would have been right up Canadians’ alley. From our fabled national railway project, a madcap ride through drunken politics, impossible geography and fiscal disaster to nation-building triumph, to our outsized contributions to two world wars, we were a can-do people.

Now, alas, we’ve gone from the “aerodrome of democracy” (FDR’s phrase) to outsourcing pilot training. And while provinces are scrambling to increase generating capacity, including Ontario’s commendable plunge into newer nuclear reactor designs in a province where nuclear already provides about 53 percent of electric power:

“Even Manitoba, a province with abundant and previously boundless supplies of cheap hydroelectricity, is now projecting a deficit by 2029 (Froese, Ian 2024) and is being forced to restrict access for potential new businesses due to supply shortages (Kives, Bartley 2023).”

That’s right. In a nation whose productivity growth has long been inexcusably weak given all our advantages, and has turned disastrous under the current administration, provinces are literally telling businesses to stay away, you can’t plug in your stuff here, this is Canada.

When you dial down into the piece, you discover some real problems with fixing the problem including limits on more hydro. Canada has picked the low-hanging water here, of which there was a lot given that we have half the entire world’s fresh-water lakes and so many rivers connecting them that it’s hard to think of names for them all.

(The relatively small Atlantic province of Nova Scotia alone, for instance, has four North Rivers, and four East Rivers plus a Little East River.)

But as Evans explains, new hydro projects look to flood thousands of hectares, with one in BC aiming to stretch for 83 kilometres, and even if you can find new sites for this kind of thing nowadays it runs into major obstacles from environmental harm to aboriginal land rights that were not on the radar a century ago or even 50 years.

Plus, in modern Canada, you confront the apparently now inevitable massive cost overruns and shrugging off of responsibility. On a mere app for arriving travellers during COVID we somehow spent nearly $60 million, much of it on a two-person firm whose credentials are hard to discern in retrospect.

And that 83-kilometre hydro project? Its current price tag is $16 billion, nearly $10 billion over budget, and rising.

An additional issue is that we are phasing out coal, which has earned a dirty reputation even though we’ve learned how to burn the stuff with only a fraction of the air pollution emissions compared to a few decades ago. But scrubbers don’t catch CO₂ and we’ve convinced ourselves that CO₂ is “pollution”.

We, by which we mean them, namely the zealots who determine public policy from the activist sidelines and the corridors of power, also somehow concluded that just because methane generates far more energy per tonne of carbon equivalent it isn’t better and we must not export it or develop it domestically.

As for oil, well, again, what a great gift. Let’s squander it by calling it “tar sands” and aiming for windmills from sea to sea to sea instead.

Speaking of windmills, Evans also notes that abundant energy has been fundamental to our economic success for more than a hundred years including major electricity exports to the United States that help cover the bills for various follies including otherwise hugely expensive “alternative” energy projects like, um, windmills.

In 2022, he points out, the Quebec government earned $1.29 billion from such exports, Ontario another $1.22, and British Columbia nearly a billion.

Obviously we’ll not be doing so in future if we insist on banning internal combustion energy cars so everyone has to plug in, vastly increasing the draw on a grid we also have somehow massively to expand in a land where 70 percent of respondents told a recent poll “everything is broken in the country right now”, and without having the power plants we’d need to charge the cars even if we could plug them in.

Canada is a very big country. Much of it is very sparsely inhabited and frankly there’s a reason. But if you think it’s hard to get gasoline to Baffin Island, try getting electric cables there.

The Canadian Pacific Railway will seem like a stroll around Mount Royal by comparison.

Canadian policymakers confront such situations with insouciant confidence in their capacity to summon wealth in vast amounts in any configuration they prefer that seems to others to be based on… absolutely nothing.

Quebec, for instance, shut down its nuclear plants in 2012 and, Evans says, “faces supply crunches by 2027” at which it is flinging money in the hopes that it can make up most of the gap from offshore wind and the rest from hydro that will mysteriously get built really fast.

As Evans notes drily:

“As of writing, there are no offshore wind farms operating or under construction in Canada, so the progress in Quebec is difficult to assess.”

Well, not really. Everything these people touch turns to lead.

This one will too. Expensive lead. Painted green.

Source: Climate Discussion Nexus

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