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.
Great headline but doesn’t indicate what replaced it.
Carbon dioxide still getting produced in massive quantities.
Coal and other hydrocarbons still being produced for export. But, hey, if it gets burned in another jurisdiction that isn’t our problem, right? We will put up those glass barriers all the way to space so our atmospheres don’t mix.
Southern Alberta is probably the best place in Canada for massive scale solar installations. Get on it.
Southern Alberta is probably the best place in Canada for massive scale solar installations. Get on it.
Alberta declared solar panels “ugly” so they wont be installing them anymore.
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.
https://renewablesassociation.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/EN-2023-Map.png
Alberta produces 2-3X more energy per capita from wind and solar than any other province, and has almost as much renewable energy storage than the rest of Canada put together.
Thats awesome, but leaves out the fact that BC and Ontario do it by Hydro Electric dams, so solar and wind is less attractive
Quebec does hydro. Ontario just calls it that, but majority comes from nuclear.
It probably wasn’t that good for propaganda to call it “Nuclear One” when they’ve privatized the crown corporation.
Good stuff. Danielle Smith is failing her fossil fuel mafia owners.
Sounds good when you phrase it like the headline. But all they’ve done is trade coal for natural gas. So it’s still a carbon heavy power grid, just slightly better than coal.
NG may actually be just as bad or worse. Methane amplifies the greenhouse effect (IIRC) 4x as much as CO2 per unit volume emitted, and it’s much harder to track the emissions of the NG industry because most of it comes from methane leaks. The FF industry loves NG for that exact reason. If you are leaking an odourless gas, you don’t need to report what you can’t possibly track. So the self-reported emissions numbers look way better than they probably actually are.
For the climate, probably, but for acute health effects and smog, coal is so much worse.
The word for natural gas leaks is so good, fugitive emissions. I think the government is doing a reasonable job at tracking them though and they make up a significant amount of the carbon budget.
The whole Danielle Smith thing has the feel of a disorganised last stand against the inevitable.
This is completely different to my view of Alberta, plus the idea they were governed by the ndp.
Meanwhile in Nova Scotia…
NS’s power generation is a. Bunch of micro-plants, which lend themselves more easily to upgrade and transformation.
Just gotta get on it.
The fact that their entire infrastructure - roads, water, power, some sewer, data - is all long thin media and throughways twisting along through granite and trees, makes ‘status quo’ maintenance hard, harder still depending on the leadership, and makes upgrades a hard sell.
I assume Albertans are somehow mad about this.
