Ore and More

By 2012 the Canadian government does not want any new coal-fired power plants. Strong words; for some they would be fighting words. I can understand the rationale. I can even understand the political necessity. My question is, what do you replace it with?

People talk about renewable energy, and I am a firm believer in it, as long as, if it is hydro, it is run-of-river and does no harm. I love wind, but that will never be more then 20% of a grid. I think solar is great if we can get the capital required down. In theory we should be able to reduce our use of coal completely in the coming years, but the question just comes down to cost.

While we’re trying to reduce our use of coal, we are simultaneously wildly expanding oil sands projects. For these, we burn lots of natural gas to bake the oil out from the sands. To put that in perspective, we are burning one carbon fuel to release another one, so we can then burn the second carbon fuel in a car, because natural gas does not go into a car’s gas tank.

But do not worry, we have a solution to burning all these fossil fuels. We are going to plug in our cars and use even more power off our grid. We are going to get off that Saudi oil that is so expensive and replace it with domestic electricity.

The question just is where are we going to get the volts. Are we going to have acres of wind farms, or millions of acres of corn, are we going to be doing biomass plants where we burn slash from wood cuttings, or are we going to have other solutions?

If we want plug in green cars and get even more power off the grid, and at the same time we want to ban coal, the net result will drive the price of electricity to at least double the rate today.