Archive: [ https://archive.is/sEZIL ]
Coal accounted for 80 per cent of Alberta’s electricity grid in the early 2000s and it still amounted to 60 per cent just 10 years ago. When phasing out coal was just an idea being batted around, many said it couldn’t be done. This is not dissimilar to the rhetoric today around decarbonizing the grid. But Alberta’s experience phasing out coal shows environmental progress of this magnitude is possible.
Alberta said that putting it on prime agricultural land needed some restrictions, and rightly so. The amount of good farmland that’s under solar panels now in south and central is disconcerting. There’s no end of shit land in Alberta that’s better suited to solar panels anyway.