Alberta's tar sands are even dirtier than coal - because large amounts of natural gas are required to convert the tar sands into syncrude, which is like a crude oil that requires more refining to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from it. The residue from tar sands refining is petcoke, which gets burned in regional power plants and exported overseas:
Since the coke is being exported to India and China for consumption in power plants there, there's zero change in the amount of fossil CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, so any effort to promote this as 'cleaning up the tar sands' is just fossil industry greenwashing.
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction accounts for 8.21% of Canada's GDP. So, not so much, but let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.
> let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.
12% in both USA (2023) and Mexico (2015). Other countries that use a similar classification seem to also be in the same range. Japan, for example, also sits at 12% (2022).
Is a single percentage point really that horrific?
This is the most interesting bit of information in this entire comments section:
Japan, which has a completely different view, model, and concept of real estate that does NOT treat it as an investment, ends up with the same portion of GDP locked/used/coming from real estate.
I feel like there's important information in that tidbit, but I am not equipped to grasp it.
Real estate is 3-5% of GDP for construction of new homes. And 12-13% for housing. That includes rent, but also the owner's imputed rent that they would pay. I think sales are counted as capital gains and I think not included in GDP.
I'm not too surprised that countries have similar housing, there is percent of rent that can afforded. I'm surprised that higher home prices aren't reflected, but that may show up as higher overall GDP.
It is when real estate prices are massively inflated. If houses cost 50% more than they're worth, it would mean that 4% of the Canadian economy is completely imaginary and based solely on speculation.
And worth saying that not all of the petroleum industry in Canada is oil sands, wikipedia (I'm lazy) gave a figure of 64% for the oil sands, so 36% is still the conventional pumpjack crude that's not as polluting (albeit still polluting) as oil sands, and not as dependent on gas prices being high to be viable.
given the housing shortage in both US and Canada, I think we would want the portion of GDP coming from real-estate new home construction to be even higher.
A healthy chunk of that real estate and construction GDP is the result of oil and gas extraction. Most of Canada's largest exporting companies are oil, mining, or derivatives related.
It's a high share on Alberta, but definitively not close to "the entire economy"
According to the most recent Statistics Canada's National Economic Accounts, the Mining and Oil and Gas Extraction industry accounted for approximately 26% of Alberta's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020, an increase from 23.3% in 2010.
However that 23.3% undersells its importance. Primary industries like mining, oil and gas extraction have large knock on effects on the rest of the economy. Many of the retail and service companies would go out of business if the fossil fuel industry were to disappear overnight.
Right. I wish we had a better metric than GDP for capturing the downstream impacts of an industry.
Say a town grows up around a single manufacturing plant. That plant might only account for 30% of the town's GPD because people use their wages to buy food, housing, etc. But when that plant closes up and 90% of the towns income disappears, it's hard to argue that the plant only contributed 30% of the economy in that case.
GPD != economy. GPD describes how money is spent, not necessarily in what order it is generated.
Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town? I've never seen it applied to any unit except nations as a whole (or the EU).
I suspect you need to collect reliable information on imports and exports and capital flows to calculate GDP, and a town can't collect it because it doesn't have, e.g., a customs bureacracy.
More than half of Canada's coal production is metallurgical coal, suited for steel production. Most of that is mined in BC and exported. The grandparent comment and the above response are both true.
Washington state refuses to allow for coal export terminals, while California’s two coal export ports are too small, so a lot of western American coal is exported via BC also.
Once upon a time, whale oil from whaling was a major factor in the Canadian economy. Then whale oil was replaced by kerosene and then the electric lightbulb. Tar sands will go the same way, and Canada's booming wind turbine economy will replace it to some extent (wind power can be exported in several different forms).
Ah yes, you've been fooled by the oil and gas propaganda. The entire oil and gas industry is only 3.2% of Canada's GDP. However, you'll never hear that from the army of O&G lobbyists who permanently reside in Alberta 24/7.
It is frustrating as someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money to remove coal that India and China have said FU to the world and increased their coal usage.
I guess given that those two countries are keeping Russia afloat by buying their oil it shouldn't be a surprise, but its still disappointing to see those countries choosing the path they did.
As an Indian immigrant to Canada, it is frustrating to see people believe it's a choice. I also hear a lot of hate for the carbon tax and rebate program in Canada. I support the program, even though it costs me money.
> someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money
Which means Canada has money. India is much poorer on a per-capita basis. They can become wealthy by developing their economy. India can't spend as much per-capita on clean energy as Canada or any other wealthy nation.
India has much more to lose from climate change compared to Canada. The heatwaves are already horrific, and many cities have water supply problems so drought due to climate change could spell disaster.
The air quality in most Indian cities is terrible. No one is burning coal for fun.
Gasoline is CA$1.81/l in Mumbai, in a country with a fraction of the per-capita income of Canada. Cars are much smaller on average and most people take public transport.
The electricity grid isn't as reliable as Canada and of course most people don't live in houses. It's mostly apartments, often with no assigned parking. Despite that I saw many electric cars and scooters on my last trip, even in small towns. I don't know how they charge. But I began to question why the US or Canada can't build enough charging for apartment-dwellers.
The "choice" India and China are making is no choice at all. They can either develop their economies or languish in poverty. Poverty means less food, less medical care, less education. It means lower life expectancy, higher infant and maternal mortality, an overall lower quality of life. Staying poor means when climate change gets worse, they'll have less money to mitigate it.
If you want developing countries to decrease their carbon emissions, invest in cheaper clean energy. Support programs and policies that give developing countries subsidies on clean energy technologies.
When the sun shines, no question about it solar is the cheapest. But is it still the cheapest when you account for battery storage?
Remember, poor countries can't just print dollars to buy batteries from China. If they don't have domestic manufacturing capacity, they have to spend foreign exchange reserves to pay for the imports. That gets expensive real quick.
Developing countries also often lack the technical talent available in wealthier ones. Quickly spinning up battery manufacturing can be difficult to do.
All I'm saying is: don't assume these countries haven't done the math for themselves. Saying "just use solar" might be sound advice. But it might also be a rich person telling a poor person to buy a Costco membership because it saves money. It's objectively correct but it may not be feasible for the poor person.
If anything developing countries are more open to the cheapest solution. They can't afford to get into ideological debates about whether climate change is real or worry about saving coal jobs by promoting "clean coal".
> But is it still the cheapest when you account for battery storage?
In India where the biggest load will be air conditioning and thus correspond with sunshine? Definitely.
But the answer was different two years ago. Electricity projects are often decades in scale and takes time to propogate.
But you're right about costs. Solar and batteries are all the cost up front. Poor people and poor countries are often forced to buy more expensive things just because they can be purchased on an installment plant. A fossil fuel plant is cheaper up front but you have to continuously buy fuel. It only becomes more expensive after ten years or so.
India's population density (people/land) is about the same as the Netherlands. The birth rate is nearly at replacement and continues to drop, and it's still a poor country! That's nearly unprecedented.
>India and China have said FU to the world and increased their coal usage.
China is building an unbelievable amount of renewables and nuclear, more than the rest of the world combined. Like every other part of the world, they're backstopping these variable power sources with fossil generation -- mainly by building modern coal power plants that can be spun down when renewable generation is high. They've also developed a framework to pay coal plants not to generate. And of course they're leading the world on the deployment and pricing of battery storage, pumped hydro and HVDC grid upgrades.
I'm posting this because your conclusion ("China has said FU" to the world) is almost the polar opposite of what's actually happening. If we survive the climate crisis, it's going to be because of what China is doing with renewable buildouts and manufacturing.
They've massively increased their capacity to build coal by a massive amount. They've also massively decreased the capacity factor of their coal plants. It used to be that their coal plants mostly ran 24/7, now their coal plants mostly just run at night while the sun isn't shining.
Canada emits more Co2 per capita than China today, by 1.5x.
But Co2 doesn't only count in 'last years'. It counts as a cumulative effect. The Co2 damage of Canada per capita is way beyond that of China, cumulatively.
In cumulative terms, China has emitted 'only' 7.5 times as much Canada despite having 35x the population. In other words, Canada's per capita cumulative emissions are about 4.5x those of China.
And that's a lot. It means Canada has damaged way more, and should have a bigger burden to reduce future damage, or undo damage already done.
Generally yes it's always frustrating to see any country keep emitting Co2. But Canada is a worse offender, both in the past, as well as now, and that's a pretty sad record for one of the richest countries in the world which also happens to be the country with probably the biggest per-capita natural renewable resources of all time. (land for wind and solar, as well as insane hydro).
Please cite the raw numbers you used to make your claims, and their sources.
I don't doubt that on a per capita basis Canadians emit more than Chinese do; furthermore, China is the source of many of the goods that western nations consume, and so they're producing emissions "for" the western nations in a sort of de facto shell game.
However, China has no interest in giving its manufacturing base "back" to the west, and does not take emissions reduction seriously. It is a deceptive claim that Canada is "worse than China"; China is out-emitting Canada, doesn't take emissions reduction seriously, and plans to continue to out-emit Canada into the future.
I mean, it depends on what problem you're trying to solve. If you want to dramatically skyrocket the prices of consumer goods, reduce every American's individual buying power, tank the stock market, crater everyone's retirement accounts, and destabilize the current world economic order, then that would be a terrible move.
I kind of want all that to happen, though, so I think it's a good move. I don't like living in a nation that is able to consume at a functionally unlimited level for very little national sacrifice or engagement in manufacturing and production. If manufacturing is inherently pollution-heavy, then it would be healthy for Americans, Canadians, etc. to actually bear the consequences of pollution in their own countries and then decide as nations whether or not to sustain the current levels of production, or curtail their consumption habits properly.
It’s impossible for Canadians to “emit” more on a per capita basis than China does, in fact Canada is a net sink of carbon emissions in the world. The “emissions” from Canada are a net negative because of its immense forests!
What does China to do their forests? They chop them down
All your claims in your last sentence I'd like to see sources for as well, because it appears to be the opposite. They're at the forefront of renewable energy production, has ambitious goals for reduction, despite already producing less per capita emissions than much richer countries with cumulatively larger emissions.
I’m not sure you can say China’s total is 7.5x Canada’s total and say Canada has caused more damage. It might well be true that per capita is higher however you seem to be comparing apples to oranges here.
And as others have mentioned sources for numbers greatly help the collective conversation.
Ratios matter little to the climate. Total volumes do. When you build your infrastructure from scratch, it makes sense not to go for XIX century technologies.
I agree. It would be much better if wealthy nations subsidized clean energy technology for developing countries so that they can leapfrog the fossil fuel stage.
On the other side of the argument, borders also don't matter to the climate, so everyone should be doing everything they can instead of finger-pointing, no?
Ratios matter a lot. If everyone behaved like Canadians we'd be fucked. If Canadians behaved like Chinese, we'd be less fucked. I was replying to someone who felt upset with China as a Canadian, and I explained his own country and its population behaves worse.
If these were metrics for your startup I’d call them vanity metrics. You just used data to explain that the US captures higher margins on their products and China does a lot of low margin or commodity production.
The data doesn’t help us inform an opinion of whose carbon use is better than others.
This is very naive thinking. Let's begin with the fact that imports aren't GDP. GDP is the value of goods and services produced inside the country. Imports, by definition, are produced outside the country.
Imports power GDP growth. Let me illustrate.
60% of Wal-Mart's imports in 2023 came from China.[1] Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the world.[2] Wal-Mart generates billions of dollars of revenue and profit - GDP in other words - by selling imports from China.
Imagine the economic hardship if even just Wal-Mart was cut off from Chinese imports. They'd lose at least half their sales overnight. Up to half their stores might close, or half the workforce might lose their jobs. That's almost 800k people. The unemployment rate goes up 60 basis points overnight. That's just one company.
That only tells us China produces lower-margin goods. It isn't surprising that a developed country has higher labor productivity than a developing or middle-income one. Using that to decide whose carbon emissions are "fairer" is a fools errand.
Yes, but I think gross output as % of global share still illustrative proxy of how much resource intensive physical goods are produced relative to emissions. That's closer to maximizing "production" than using GDP/value added as % of global share which is proxy for maximizing "value".
Medium term - China is going to lead the world in emissions reductions. They have the most to reduce and the most to lose if they don't move to renewables rapidly.
Short term - nothing much is happening. Rome wasn't built in a day.
The US can idly sit around and burn it's own natural gas and oil. The US at least has the option to maintain the status quo for a long time (it won't). But China doesn't even have this option.
Additionally, auto manufacturing (ICE cars) accounts for ~5% of US employment. For China ICE auto manufacturing is ~0, and they have the opportunity to produce a huge chunk of the worlds EVs. They're not only incentivized massively to get off oil - they're incentivized to get EVERYONE ELSE off of oil, too.
China needs to IMPORT natural gas and oil. They'd much rather lead the world in renewables EXPORT EVs and renewable generation than be reliant on Russia & KSA for energy (the basis of their current economy)...
China will likely cut their emissions faster than the US has - which if you're realistic - the US has done an impressive job.
China will (supposedly) reach as well as potentially exceed their 2030 renewables target by the end of this year [1], and the solar manufacturing and deployment flywheel is still coming up to speed (global solar deployment is anticipated to reach ~660GW/pa by end of year, should achieve 1TW/pa within the next 18 months assuming current trajectories [2]). China and India being close geographically while also having enormous fossil generation to push out of the generation mix is convenient; not far from factory to solar farm.
For those unaware, China and India do NOT like getting their power from coal. They've both had decades now of abysmal smog and pollution that literally (like, statistically trackable) kills people every year, including people otherwise productive in society. China is absolutely dumping the price of solar panels. A fully renewable energy China is one that is harder for Western countries to sanction, has more prestige with bright blue skies, and exports cheap solar panels to everyone else. India will trend the same way.
Every geopolitically relevant country will feel more secure with renewable, and therefore utterly independent, energy generation.
A reminder that Texas, a uniparty state literally run by Oil Barron families for decades, still gets at least a third of it's power from renewable sources, because it's so goddamned cheap. It doesn't matter how profitable oil is, or how much you pump, it will always be cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to replace it with power that just manifests itself out of the sky or wind for merely the cost of maintenance.
Each oil well requires tens of highly skilled, rather well paid tradespeople to manage, drill, run, explode, etc. An entire field of wind turbines requires one or two small teams of somewhat well paid maintenance engineers.
As far as I am aware, Texas offsets the volatility of renewable with carbon based energy. Those renewable are not viable in a world with no carbon based energy.
Texas would be a lot less vulnerable to such volatility if they got out of their own way and connected their grid properly to either (or both) of America's east and west grids.
Of the five links between this comment and the other, I can only access one of them. Interchange domain is blocked, khou is access denied, dallasnews is a paywall.
What I do hear about is this (possibly outdated, I'm increasingly noticing the references there are not kept up to date) claim on Wikipedia:
> On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links, although the Texas Interconnection does not intend to connect for regulatory reasons. The Eastern Interconnection withdrew from the project in 2015, rendering the project moot. Construction was never started.
Like what? Energy storage would push the combined price of renewable way beyond nuclear. You would need an alternative source of energy that is 1) on demand, and 2) which does not cost much when it is not activated. Not sure what that would be.
That's storage for a few hours to smooth the volatility intraday. Nothing like the sort of storage capacity you would need if you don't have an alternative source of energy when there is no wind for a week.
vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
As far as I am aware, these are short term batteries to deal with intra day volatility (intra hour to switch between different sources in fact I believe). It's not capacity to deal with a week without wind. You would need to quote the capacity not in GW but in GWh for that (or GW-days).
Batteries are short duration storage (4-12 hours); overbuilding renewables, generation diversity, and transmission solves for your problem statement around longer duration lulls in certain generation types.
I can understand the frustration from a climate change perspective, but you still get the benefits of cleaner air locally, increasing energy independence and freedom from commodity cost fluctuations.
Oof. Before we start pointing fingers, over 50% of China's energy consumption is manufacturing, and a significant chunk of that manufacturing is western countries outsourcing their manufacturing needs, i.e. claiming to be coal-free while really just burning the coal elsewhere and then blaming the landowner.
If you want to truly be coal-free, don't just pay for it to be built in Canada for your wooden house that consumes a few kilowatts. Pay for it to be built in China for all your manufacturing outposts that make your computer, TV, phone, kitchen gadgets, kitchen ware, disposable items, containers for food delivery, and everything else, that take an enormous amount of power to create. They are equally a part of your energy footprint.
Do you have iPhones in Alberta? It takes about 1 GJ or 278 kWh to make a single phone [1], which is about enough to heat an entire house for a month. For a computer you're looking at about 1 MWh, about a large house's heating usage in an entire year.
I mean, you basically ignored the point about them buying Russian oil/gas, thus enabling the Russian war. But yes, I agree that China makes things. India doesn't really have that excuse for using coal.
India's government is dirt poor in comparison to China's government. Clean energy is expensive.
Both governments are actually very pro-clean-energy and more willing to deploy it, given the money, than a certain two ~80-year-old farts that take turns every 4 years playing stupid politics games and picking fights.
Eh, nuclear sure but in general no. That's the whole reason solar is becoming so popular is that it's cheaper [2].
If you have to pair solar with storage then it becomes more expensive [1] (general X+Y is more expensive than just X or Y). But uh, people tend to work when the sun shines so you can add a ton of solar to offset the increased energy usage during the day.
New builds in developed countries can be 100% renewable because there's enough installed non-renewable capacity available as fallback. Developing countries don't have that.
Err...no. Developing countries tend to not have a large amount of anything. Definitionally they're poor and under-resourced.
If their economies are growing, the grids are constantly playing catch-up with demand. Otherwise they're in a state of managed decline, or are an actual dumpster fire.
Whatever the case may be, the one thing they don't have is reliable base generation capability. A safety net for when renewables can't produce enough.
This is complete nonsense. India is among the world’s five largest economies and is continuing to grow. Part of a growing economy is falling poverty and growing electrical demand.
how exactly do you propose India meet the growing electric demands of her residents?
The Russian gas and oil story is more pragmatism than evil intent.
One part of your comment is accurate - India’s exports are tiny relative to its population and economic size.
Indeed, one of the more nonsensical threads i've seen. Alberta farts rainbows because it doesn't make anything and nobody lives there. USA imports oil from KSA enabling KSA to do whatever the hell KSA feels like doing, all the while periodically starting wars and bombing the more stubborn oil suppliers like Libya and Iraq into submission. India and China similarly use whatever energy they can get their hands on, especially China so it can produce half-a-trillion dollars worth of cheap consumer goods every year to supply the said Americans (and even Albertans too). The ignorance is amazing.
lol they did just that. China is not "growing so many people" anymore, and neither is India, really. I suppose they could cull some of the previously grown people to get under 5 million like Alberta and to make your advice actually useful. But maybe your obvious solutions just haven't occurred to them yet.
Canada (and US) has no leg to stand on because domestic emissions reduction is offset by simply choosing to be increasingly large net crude exporters after domestic use. At the end of the day, Canada is trending to enable more net fossil fuel use, whereas PRC is trending to reduce net fossil fuel (coal used for peaking not baseload) and via renewable exports that reduce demand for fossil.
As Canadian, the only disapointment is influence ops against Canadian fossil industry has stalled development so much for so long that we're not a larger fossil exporter and reaping in benefits of current geopolitical turmoil. EU could have been buying overpriced Canadian oil + lng.
You do realise that vast majority of India's new electricity generation is renewable right? And Canada just replaced coal with petroleum not green sources.
Its amazing how most western countries bash coal so much and then proceed to generate electricity using natural gas.
To me it's Canada that is saying FU to the world and then preaching about it.
I suppose there could be worse problems though. According to Bloomberg, as of a few years ago there were more people in India who didn't have access to electricity at all than live in all of Canada, and not insignificant portion of our population is of recent Indian descent. This source reports ~10% of their population https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/access...
As a Canadian (but not Albertan) I've never had direct access to the residual economic effects of oil resources, or the slight tax offset that comes with having no Provincial Sales Tax, aside from general gov redistribution. I've never not had electricity, and I've never not had renewable electricity, which is quite remarkable.
If “all this undeveloped land is a huge carbon sink we want to take credit for,” then we’re going to have to take responsibility for the terrible amount of carbon release as peatlands continue thawing.
This is frankly a dumb article. It’s an unhelpful reframing of the issue at hand by trying to take credit for what’s happening across large swaths of undeveloped land that happen to be within our border. It will quickly
be abandoned the moment the natural carbon release of former permafrost regions cause us to be a colossal emitter instead.
Consider how unhelpful it would be if countries began trying to solve their emissions issues by laying claim to vast swaths of ocean, to take credit for algal carbon sinks.
BC electricity is completely hydroelectric. And they encourage homes to go all electric with no gas.
If BC's population went up by a factor of 1.1B/40M = 27.5x, most likely the hydroelectric resources in the province would become insufficient and BC would have to switch to alternate forms of electric power. Maybe that is solar+wind+nuclear, but maybe it's just gas and coal.
Please note that in Canada, electricity, heat, and transport emissions dwarf those from all other sectors [1].
IIRC most people's carbon emissions come from transportation, electricity, heat. My guess is the efficiency of scale at ~40M is within spitting distance of what it would be at 1B. So it ought to scale linearly, for the most part?
I really think you should be taking responsibility over your own current and historical consumption and production patterns instead of pointing fingers at countries who have much larger populations and are much more poorer per capita. Lead the world with better technology, show everybody how it can be done. Everybody does their bit and we will all benefit.
Total fossil gas generation capacity is ~12.7GW. Seems straightforward to replace with solar, wind, batteries, and interconnects with neighboring grids.
If you're curious, you can actually see the real-time stats for what's going on in Alberta: http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle.... There's lots of solar and wind installed but wind right now isn't producing much at all. Solar's doing decent though!
Thanks for sharing that resource! ElectricityMaps parses it [1] for showing real time data as well as creating a data source for carbon intensity estimation models. Alberta has the most favorable wind and solar resources in Canada (citation in my root comment), so solving for the remaining fossil gas generation should occur in due time simply out of economics [2].
Honest question: Is it clear that wind really could not produce more electricity right now? Depending on the way producers are chosen and the net is "congested" the wind farms might just not be allowed to contribute.
The area west of Edmonton and Red Deer where it’s more like 5-6kt (still not particularly windy) is in the Rocky Mountains and would be pretty challenging to build wind turbines in.
>> the wind farms might just not be allowed to contribute.
Alberta uses a bid system where everyone who bids under the price that (based on demand) ends up getting set, gets to participate and get paid. Because renewable is tough to store, they almost always bid zero to make sure it gets included. The same thing happens for the renewable portion of integrated providers; they bid low on the renewable to make sure they're included, and high on the variable fossil fuels (i.e. gas can be turned off or brought on line) to drive up the price. It's a complicated system with lots of opportunities for manipulation, but renewable tends to be prioritized for participation because it's hard to store for later.
In the EU the merit order principle is used ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order ). So, sometimes that might mean a large energy company finds that their wind farm suddenly needs a break for maintenance work, so a much more expensive source can raise the price for everyone. ;)
Alberta is about twice the size of Germany, 50% larger than California and has a meager population of 4.3 million spread out across that area.With a latitude that ranges from 48' to 60' and a wide variety of geography there's a range of availability in solar and wind.
Alberta politics is also a factor.
Alberta is a complete aberration in North American democracy in that more or less one party have been in power there for over 50 years. While the party has always been blatantly pro O&G industry at the expense of everything else when they issued an unexpected moratorium on a solar and wind projects last year.
This has thrown the renewable industry in Alberta into chaos and has likely damaged investor confidence in Alberta for decades[0]
They just mean if you have geographical diversity, it helps with the availability of renewables.
For example, if wind is in 5 different locations across Alberta (for sake of example), you're less likely to run into issues with losing it all at once like you would if all your wind came from a single area and the wind stopped blowing there or dropped to a very low value.
Yeah, and notably it's exponential in distance, not linear.
There's also a diversification benefit for solar due to two reasons, one reason is rainfall is less likely to impact a large land mass at the same time, second is the sunset occurs at different times so you can have a one hour window to offset the evening peak of the other side of the country and vice versa in the morning. Although I don't believe these benefits are exponential as they are for wind.
Yeah but the downside to that in a place the size of Alberta is that you need to run electrical infrastructure that can handle the load of 4.3 million people across a 1000km distance.
Or easier. With germany you can't just put solar panels around a big city because either the city is too big or the land is occopied by something else.
There's plenty of land in cities. Rooftops and solar canopies (parking lots with solar panels over them) for example. Solar canopies can even go above outdoor public transit lines.
They're all over the place in my area. I've seen them in church parking lots, supermarkets, you name it. Added benefit: you and your car are shaded from sun, snow, rain..
Germany is a relativly small country even compared to Alberta. therefor the population is pretty centralized with makes it far easier to supply with energy.
Alberta has 2 larger cities but the population is spread far a nd wide which makes distribution and supplying power that much harder.
I think you're overstating the difficulty given that population distribution.
And those two large splotches on the map representing Calgary and Edmonton and with most of the population pretty close by, they're only 282.6 km apart.
A 10cm^2 cross section of aluminium between them would have a resistance of 7.3 Ω, and even when bought from the first random supplier I found on Amazon that would only cost about €14m:
Appreciate the response but I'll be honest I don't understand what point you are making.
My only point is that Alberta being larger than Germany means its more expensive to deliver power to all its various small towns distributed around the province.
That seems pretty tautologically correct to me given that power lines have a cost and must be constantly maintained and built to support new power demands.
I'm unsure about what the cross section of aluminum has to do with the size of a province, but i'm willing to learn:)
Run a simple thought experiment. Would it be easier to deliver power 100 meters or 100 km's? That's what we are debating here.
I already have a grid which handles this situation. I'm lost on what your issue is with the grid?
The biggest issue in germany regarding grid and renewable is a distance of 800km between north germany which has a lot of wind and south germany which has a lot of solar.
The grid which already exists because it was built before solar was interesting.
The grid which connects the Suncor Fort Hills mine in Alberta to Tijuana in Mexico.
Even if you want to expand that grid to the level of everyone getting their winter midnight electricity from the midsummer sun on the opposite side of the planet, the material element of the "electric highway" isn't what stops it, it has a low cost compared to the last-mile stuff that already exists.
> Run a simple thought experiment. Would it be easier to deliver power 100 meters or 100 km's? That's what we are debating here.
What you're debating is the cost of using a grid that already exists and is already in use.
> I'm unsure about what the cross section of aluminum has to do with the size of a province,
The answer is right there in the same post. Multiply them together to find out how much material you need (and by extension cost); likewise resistive losses.
The material costs for making an extremely efficient grid are trivial compared to everything else involved in the supply of energy that already exists and has already connected all those "various small towns distributed around the province".
--
Also, I demonstrated with my maps that if you put a copy of the German borders around the Calgary-Edmonton conurbation, you'd get almost the entire population of Alberta, so your stat is misleading.
the nice thing about solar is that it's naturally diffuse, it's actually more effort to push it into a dense urban area than to have it spread over a rural place
The bigger problem with the comment is that said party threw in the towel in 2020. How they managed to enact something last year from the dead is a head scratcher.
Hey folks, I live in Alberta. This isn't as big of a win as you all think it is. We replaced coal burning with natural gas and gasoline burning power generation.
For those who will say, "but Alberta has wind and solar!" please know that our current premiere (similar to a governor) is actively attacking all of our renewable energy investments. Her name is Danielle Smith and she's quite literally a former oil and gas lobbyist.
The only reason this is being touted is because big oil in Alberta is happy we've switched over to burning their carbon emitter of choice.
Take that into account when you read this feel good piece about Alberta being "coal free".
At present, solar is about 6% of Alberta's electric generation capacity.
The provincial government suspended planning permission for all renewable energy projects across the province for six months, then outright banned the installation of grid-scale solar in much of the province. This resulted in the cancellation of tens of billions of dollars worth of private investment in renewable energy in Alberta.
Solar is also not as cheap as elsewhere in the world, as Canada has import duties on the cheap Chinese solar panels are driving the change elsewhere. The duties roughly triple the price, with a tax of ~160% on the purchase price and per-watt charges on the panel's rated output.
I'm sure that in five years things will start to shift. Heck, there's workers installing solar panels on my neighbour's roof right now — but it's not going to change much while Danielle Smith is in charge.
It's not as much cleaner as we often think. Only a small % of leakage means that overall the warming potential (from leaks and burnt gas) can be more than coal.
Actual gasoline? Unless you're talking about super-isolated northern communities on generators [which should still be using diesel rather than gasoline], that seems... insane.
They fire up gasoline generators when the load is high as a back-up to natural gas generation.
There have been periods of rolling brown outs due to high industrial demand where I live. I know people in the industry and also watch the local news where they report that the gasoline backups have been activated and the brown outs should stop. Can confirm, they sometimes burn gasoline for power generation.
Unfortunately they did it by switching to natural gas instead of the massive sustainable buildout they needed. Good job on reducing thorium and uranium emissions, at least.
Other hand when talking about functional operation. Solar, Wind plus Nat Gas works well together. Where Solar, Wind plus Coal doesn't.
It's technically easy to shutdown, restart, and take Nat Gas plants in and out of standby to make up for shortfalls in solar and wind production. Where you can't do that with coal and nuclear for both technical and economic reasons.
Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of number of solar jobs.
Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.
I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.
Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%.
It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage.
Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.
> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.
Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.
It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible.
Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).
For seasonal storage, it would be either an e-fuel (like hydrogen) or bulk storage of thermal energy (basically, artificial geothermal). The latter could produce very hot rock at rather shallow depth, yet still have thermal time constants of many years.
Hydrogen on this scale would be stored underground, preferably in solution mined salt caverns. This is a well established technology, although it's more used for storing natural gas. These caverns are very inexpensive to build, which is why they are used.
Alberta, as it turns out, is underlaid by kilometers of sedimentary rock that includes salt formations.
If one compares the heat of combustion of hydrogen stored at 100 bar and 20 C, to the energy of water elevated by 100 meters, the former exceeds the latter (per unit volume) by a factor of 1000. So that "holding pond" is going to be much, MUCH larger than the solution-mined cavern for storage systems of equal capacity (and remember one needs two reservoirs.)
> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.
This still doesn't work - storage is mandatory. Winter peak loads, which are often the most power that the grid will require all year, are before and after the sun.
That's why I didn't specify it needed to be seasonal, but it does need to be stored, as a lot of that load isn't shifting. At 7pm on a -35 day there is zero solar generation, but every furnace in the province is on and people are doing their evening cooking and cleaning.
You're right, you said "as much storage as production". That's actually a very tiny amount of storage. Generally a "24hr" solar plant for California usage patterns has about 4-6Wh of storage and about 1W of discharge per watt of solar plant. Alberta will likely need ~2X that for daily load shifting during the winter. Seasonal storage would require a couple of orders of magnitude more.
I'd note that actual -35 days are pretty rare. Per Environment Canada Climate Normal Data from 1991 to 2020, Edmonton averages only 2.5 days per year with a minimum temperature below -30.
While you're correct, they do happen and need to be accounted for, and temperatures in the -30s in general aren't rare, but we're also experiencing more extreme weather as of late. Edmonton set a few records for cold the last few years, and those moments, when the grid is at the most strain, is also when the power is needed the most to keep people safe.
They do use them as storage, but more passively - When others sources of production are high BC slows their consumption, allowing them to build up greater reserves in their dams.
> The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production.
I guess Canadian politics are not unlike US politics in the area of energy production. You'd think that most of the jobs in non-renewable energy could just transition over to jobs in renewable energy and everyone's happy. But sadly, like everything, the energy source itself has been politicized. The left favors renewables regardless of the pros and cons and the right favors non-renewables regardless of the pros and cons, so it looks like yet another ideological battle rather than a battle over concrete things like jobs and the environment.
I think there's simply not enough jobs in renewables - once a solar farm is operational maintenance is a fraction of production, unlike the oil sands or rigs which require constant human intervention.
Winter is not an issue for solar because solar panel efficiency is better when the panel is cooler. A panel blazing away in Florida is actually losing quite a bit of efficiency because of how hot the panel is; much farther north even with less light, the panels can produce more.
Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.
Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.
Yep. The Alberta government has their head stuck in the sand (pun intended) around renewables as they existentially threaten their current economy. They have repeatedly shown that they’d rather double down than try and diversify.
To boost your point - that is literally what the Alberta government has been doing. They instituted a seven-month renewable's pause to "evaluate" them (evaluating renewables in 2023????), which introduced a lot of investor uncertainty[1]. When the pause was over they introduced rules around preventing wind turbines and solar from being developed in areas to prevent obstruction in "viewscapes"[2].
Methane burned for electricity is better than coal no doubt. But methane that escapes into the atmosphere is way worse than CO2 in the nearish term. And not every extraction company is super thrilled about proper containment.
Released methane is 27-30 times worse than released CO2 per unit mass measured over the next 100 years of warming [1]. Burning methane releases 1 CO2 molecule per CH4 molecule (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O), or 2.743 it's mass in CO2 [2].
To make up the difference in CO2 you'd have to be losing ~5% of the methane to the atmosphere along the way from extraction to burning.
Do you have reason to believe anywhere near that much is lost?
"Worse than coal" has set a very low bar for how not-bad methane needs to be.
That study puts it at 9.4% of gross production. Many other sources exist which put 5% at a very realistic number. Fossil gas is dirt cheap, invisible, and leaks are large self-reported, so the companies have 0 reasons to properly test for or stop leaks.
I am under the impression that methane levels in the atmosphere have spiked significantly in the last decade or two, and the origin is not really understood. Extraction could be one source, but if it's from another source, that could be more bad news as it would mean that some tipping point has possibly been triggered. I'm far from an expert on this though.
Most of the consciously vented is flared. However, the infrastructure leaks like mad and there have been no incentives incentive for the companies to fix it, it's a cheap invisible gas after all with almost all reporting being self reporting.
>No? Methane produces less than half the CO2 per kwh than coal.
The important metric is CO2e, not CO2. Critically, CO2e includes measurements of methane emissions.
The problem with methane is that the methane leaks are self-reported, by an industry who have every incentive to under-report and who have a history of massively underreporting. Methane isn't clearly better than coal, and might well be worse.
Note: even though this is published by a large and pretty well respected newspaper it's an op-ed piece from a left-leaning environmental organization (which should be obvious if you read it). Dropping coal is pretty different from dropping fossil fuels, especially right now when natural gas is dirt cheap. It's also debatable if Alberta currently needs any more solar or wind; what we definitely need is storage for these generative sources. The other components of industrial use and transportation are probably more effective targets for big wins than getting gas out of the electricity grid.
Due to its abundant wind & solar, Alberta could easily get to ~70% renewable generation without any storage. So until Alberta hits that 70% mark, investing in a dollar on wind or solar generation will provide far more fiscal and decarbonization return than investing that dollar in storage.
Similar, investing a dollar in wind & solar will pay itself back very quickly. Investing that dollar into transport or industrial decarbonization will have a much longer return.
Let's see how long it takes them to realize they should have gone with the latest nuclear power tech and will eventually be unable to meet demand with anything but coal or nuclear (unless something changes).
I'm wondering what scenario you're considering that natural gas won't suffice but coal will. Alberta is celebrating simply transitioning from one fossil fuel to another, slightly cleaner burning, one.
They are certainly still struggling with renewables when they are needed the most, such as -35 at 7PM, long after the sun has gone down and the wind turbine's hydraulics are too cold to function safely and all our furnaces are running and everyone is cooking and doing laundry. This is also when nuclear isn't a great solution, as it's a huge spike in demand.
> This is also when nuclear isn't a great solution, as it's a huge spike in demand.
Overproduce electricity, then burn off the excess to match load to demand.
It's counter-intuitive, but the cost structure of producing electricity via nuclear is different from fossil fuels. The unit costs per kW/h of nuclear is negligible compared to the capital costs of building a plant. Making it economically viable to "waste" electricity to match load to demand.
At some point down the road, people will do the cost benefit on capturing excess production in battery packs vs expanding the existing nuclear facilities to meet demand.
Sorry, I did some research, it's not just hydraulics, but at below -30 materials experience significant changes in strength and many become brittle and prone to breaking, demanding that they be shut down.
My mechanic father has a saying - badly maintained stuff breaks down at -30 C, but everything can break at -40 C.
Well, then you'd better choose materials that are appropriate for the location. There are wind turbines in Antarctica. It's just a matter of engineering.
You... know how big Alberta is, right? It's twice the size of Germany/the same size as Texas, with a population of only a little over 4 million, with a pretty much linear trend in population for several decades now, so you're going to have to do a bit more work if you want to make the argument that they're going to run out of the power necessary to serve the province any time soon.
Alberta’s population growth trend in the last 5 years is anything but linear. It has accelerated significantly driven in large part by new to Canada immigrants and those escaping higher cost of living provinces like BC and ON.
That page shows population change measured in several tens of thousands, not several hundreds of thousands, so as a year over year increase that's basically still linear, just with a slightly higher coefficient, but nowhere near enough to scream population boom. Just an above average increase.
If we look at the population numbers for the last 24 years there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary going on [1].
Sure, the last two years could be the start of an explosive increase, but the drop in year-over-year increase as indicated by the charts from your own link suggests it's far more likely to return to the overall trend.
But of course: even if the population doubled over the next 5 years, Alberta is still the size of Texas, and has plenty of room to address those energy needs using renewables.
I'm not debating the merits of renewables, I'm just stating that the population growth in Alberta is not linear. And the population IS growing by hundreds of thousands annually. To quote directly from Alberta population statistics:
"Alberta’s population growth continues to accelerate. In the 12 months preceding April 1, 2024, the province’s population expanded by 204,677 people, or 4.41%." [1]
"This represents a significant increase from the previous year (3.67% between 2022-23) and the highest April 1 year-over-year growth rate since 1981. Alberta’s population expanded by 49,138 residents over the first quarter of 2024, or 1.02%." [1]
The vast majority (over 160,000) of those new residents of Alberta were immigrants to Canada, driven by the federal government's massive immigration ramp-up. The immigration levels plan targets a continued increase in immigration through 2026 [2] and with Alberta having a comparatively low cost of living and very high quality of life, it's hard to believe that trend in population growth will not continue.
https://archive.md/sEZIL
Alberta's tar sands are even dirtier than coal - because large amounts of natural gas are required to convert the tar sands into syncrude, which is like a crude oil that requires more refining to produce gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from it. The residue from tar sands refining is petcoke, which gets burned in regional power plants and exported overseas:
https://skepticalscience.com/legal-fight-leave-dirtiest-foss...
Since the coke is being exported to India and China for consumption in power plants there, there's zero change in the amount of fossil CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere, so any effort to promote this as 'cleaning up the tar sands' is just fossil industry greenwashing.
https://www.argusmedia.com/en/news-and-insights/latest-marke...
As far as I understand it, Canada's economy is wholly dependent on the tar sands.
Mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction accounts for 8.21% of Canada's GDP. So, not so much, but let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada
Edit: I realize that source is from 2020, which may be skewing those numbers, but it seems that statista still roughly agrees in 2024.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/594293/gross-domestic-pr...
> let's all take a moment to stare at the horror show that is the 13% that is real estate.
12% in both USA (2023) and Mexico (2015). Other countries that use a similar classification seem to also be in the same range. Japan, for example, also sits at 12% (2022).
Is a single percentage point really that horrific?
This is the most interesting bit of information in this entire comments section:
Japan, which has a completely different view, model, and concept of real estate that does NOT treat it as an investment, ends up with the same portion of GDP locked/used/coming from real estate.
I feel like there's important information in that tidbit, but I am not equipped to grasp it.
Real estate is 3-5% of GDP for construction of new homes. And 12-13% for housing. That includes rent, but also the owner's imputed rent that they would pay. I think sales are counted as capital gains and I think not included in GDP.
I'm not too surprised that countries have similar housing, there is percent of rent that can afforded. I'm surprised that higher home prices aren't reflected, but that may show up as higher overall GDP.
One possible takeaway is that just maybe real estate isnt a parasitic zero-sum activity that some make it out to be.
That developing, renovating, bankrolling, managing, and maintaining physical infrastructure is real work and creates real value.
It is when real estate prices are massively inflated. If houses cost 50% more than they're worth, it would mean that 4% of the Canadian economy is completely imaginary and based solely on speculation.
And worth saying that not all of the petroleum industry in Canada is oil sands, wikipedia (I'm lazy) gave a figure of 64% for the oil sands, so 36% is still the conventional pumpjack crude that's not as polluting (albeit still polluting) as oil sands, and not as dependent on gas prices being high to be viable.
given the housing shortage in both US and Canada, I think we would want the portion of GDP coming from real-estate new home construction to be even higher.
Modern numbers at a provincial level show that it's much higher than 13% in 2024. Canada is slowly becoming a massive housing/real-estate bubble.
A healthy chunk of that real estate and construction GDP is the result of oil and gas extraction. Most of Canada's largest exporting companies are oil, mining, or derivatives related.
> A healthy chunk of that real estate and construction GDP is the result of oil and gas extraction.
Is it? I'd be interested in numbers to qualify that claim.
It's 1.7% of Canada's GDP. Significant, but not wholly dependent.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1319179/canada-oil-sands...
But it's 1/3 of Alberta's GDP.
The GHG impact is pretty huge though (2.2x regular oil extraction per barrel).
Alberta. Ontario and even Quebec and maybe BC actually have industry.
It's a high share on Alberta, but definitively not close to "the entire economy"
According to the most recent Statistics Canada's National Economic Accounts, the Mining and Oil and Gas Extraction industry accounted for approximately 26% of Alberta's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2020, an increase from 23.3% in 2010.
However that 23.3% undersells its importance. Primary industries like mining, oil and gas extraction have large knock on effects on the rest of the economy. Many of the retail and service companies would go out of business if the fossil fuel industry were to disappear overnight.
Right. I wish we had a better metric than GDP for capturing the downstream impacts of an industry.
Say a town grows up around a single manufacturing plant. That plant might only account for 30% of the town's GPD because people use their wages to buy food, housing, etc. But when that plant closes up and 90% of the towns income disappears, it's hard to argue that the plant only contributed 30% of the economy in that case.
GPD != economy. GPD describes how money is spent, not necessarily in what order it is generated.
Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town? I've never seen it applied to any unit except nations as a whole (or the EU).
I suspect you need to collect reliable information on imports and exports and capital flows to calculate GDP, and a town can't collect it because it doesn't have, e.g., a customs bureacracy.
> Does the notion of a GDP even make sense for a town?
Yes, of course it does. Why wouldn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP
BC has Coal as it's number 1 export, and logging a close second.
“Almost all of the thermal coal Canada produces comes from coal mines in Alberta and is exported, mainly to Asia, from ports in B.C.”
https://globalnews.ca/news/10392382/canada-coal-exports/
More than half of Canada's coal production is metallurgical coal, suited for steel production. Most of that is mined in BC and exported. The grandparent comment and the above response are both true.
Washington state refuses to allow for coal export terminals, while California’s two coal export ports are too small, so a lot of western American coal is exported via BC also.
You can't eat cars, coal, and oil. If you're trying to say only those matter.
Once upon a time, whale oil from whaling was a major factor in the Canadian economy. Then whale oil was replaced by kerosene and then the electric lightbulb. Tar sands will go the same way, and Canada's booming wind turbine economy will replace it to some extent (wind power can be exported in several different forms).
Not at all and has never been the case, maybe only in some regions of Alberta like a century ago [1].
The largest oil reserves in the planet, though, are in Canada, unfortunately it's all unconventional.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_petroleum_indus...
That used to be the case, now it's real estate.
Real estate is about 13% of Canada's GDP[1]. It's considerable, but hardly "wholly dependant". This number is very similar to the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Canada
Ah yes, you've been fooled by the oil and gas propaganda. The entire oil and gas industry is only 3.2% of Canada's GDP. However, you'll never hear that from the army of O&G lobbyists who permanently reside in Alberta 24/7.
It is frustrating as someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money to remove coal that India and China have said FU to the world and increased their coal usage.
I guess given that those two countries are keeping Russia afloat by buying their oil it shouldn't be a surprise, but its still disappointing to see those countries choosing the path they did.
As an Indian immigrant to Canada, it is frustrating to see people believe it's a choice. I also hear a lot of hate for the carbon tax and rebate program in Canada. I support the program, even though it costs me money.
> someone who lives in Canada and has spend so much money
Which means Canada has money. India is much poorer on a per-capita basis. They can become wealthy by developing their economy. India can't spend as much per-capita on clean energy as Canada or any other wealthy nation.
India has much more to lose from climate change compared to Canada. The heatwaves are already horrific, and many cities have water supply problems so drought due to climate change could spell disaster.
The air quality in most Indian cities is terrible. No one is burning coal for fun.
Gasoline is CA$1.81/l in Mumbai, in a country with a fraction of the per-capita income of Canada. Cars are much smaller on average and most people take public transport.
The electricity grid isn't as reliable as Canada and of course most people don't live in houses. It's mostly apartments, often with no assigned parking. Despite that I saw many electric cars and scooters on my last trip, even in small towns. I don't know how they charge. But I began to question why the US or Canada can't build enough charging for apartment-dwellers.
The "choice" India and China are making is no choice at all. They can either develop their economies or languish in poverty. Poverty means less food, less medical care, less education. It means lower life expectancy, higher infant and maternal mortality, an overall lower quality of life. Staying poor means when climate change gets worse, they'll have less money to mitigate it.
If you want developing countries to decrease their carbon emissions, invest in cheaper clean energy. Support programs and policies that give developing countries subsidies on clean energy technologies.
India needs electricity to develop their economy. The cheapest electricity is solar.
When the sun shines, no question about it solar is the cheapest. But is it still the cheapest when you account for battery storage?
Remember, poor countries can't just print dollars to buy batteries from China. If they don't have domestic manufacturing capacity, they have to spend foreign exchange reserves to pay for the imports. That gets expensive real quick.
Developing countries also often lack the technical talent available in wealthier ones. Quickly spinning up battery manufacturing can be difficult to do.
All I'm saying is: don't assume these countries haven't done the math for themselves. Saying "just use solar" might be sound advice. But it might also be a rich person telling a poor person to buy a Costco membership because it saves money. It's objectively correct but it may not be feasible for the poor person.
If anything developing countries are more open to the cheapest solution. They can't afford to get into ideological debates about whether climate change is real or worry about saving coal jobs by promoting "clean coal".
> But is it still the cheapest when you account for battery storage?
In India where the biggest load will be air conditioning and thus correspond with sunshine? Definitely.
But the answer was different two years ago. Electricity projects are often decades in scale and takes time to propogate.
But you're right about costs. Solar and batteries are all the cost up front. Poor people and poor countries are often forced to buy more expensive things just because they can be purchased on an installment plant. A fossil fuel plant is cheaper up front but you have to continuously buy fuel. It only becomes more expensive after ten years or so.
Helping with the financing would go a long way.
India needs to focus on decreasing its birth rate, which it completely ignores. They can’t just keep making more people and expect things to world out
Are you from 1995?
India's population density (people/land) is about the same as the Netherlands. The birth rate is nearly at replacement and continues to drop, and it's still a poor country! That's nearly unprecedented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
India's birthrate is 2.01
>India and China have said FU to the world and increased their coal usage.
China is building an unbelievable amount of renewables and nuclear, more than the rest of the world combined. Like every other part of the world, they're backstopping these variable power sources with fossil generation -- mainly by building modern coal power plants that can be spun down when renewable generation is high. They've also developed a framework to pay coal plants not to generate. And of course they're leading the world on the deployment and pricing of battery storage, pumped hydro and HVDC grid upgrades.
I'm posting this because your conclusion ("China has said FU" to the world) is almost the polar opposite of what's actually happening. If we survive the climate crisis, it's going to be because of what China is doing with renewable buildouts and manufacturing.
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They've massively increased their capacity to build coal by a massive amount. They've also massively decreased the capacity factor of their coal plants. It used to be that their coal plants mostly ran 24/7, now their coal plants mostly just run at night while the sun isn't shining.
More coal plants burning less coal.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants
Canada emits more Co2 per capita than China today, by 1.5x.
But Co2 doesn't only count in 'last years'. It counts as a cumulative effect. The Co2 damage of Canada per capita is way beyond that of China, cumulatively.
In cumulative terms, China has emitted 'only' 7.5 times as much Canada despite having 35x the population. In other words, Canada's per capita cumulative emissions are about 4.5x those of China.
And that's a lot. It means Canada has damaged way more, and should have a bigger burden to reduce future damage, or undo damage already done.
Generally yes it's always frustrating to see any country keep emitting Co2. But Canada is a worse offender, both in the past, as well as now, and that's a pretty sad record for one of the richest countries in the world which also happens to be the country with probably the biggest per-capita natural renewable resources of all time. (land for wind and solar, as well as insane hydro).
Please cite the raw numbers you used to make your claims, and their sources.
I don't doubt that on a per capita basis Canadians emit more than Chinese do; furthermore, China is the source of many of the goods that western nations consume, and so they're producing emissions "for" the western nations in a sort of de facto shell game.
However, China has no interest in giving its manufacturing base "back" to the west, and does not take emissions reduction seriously. It is a deceptive claim that Canada is "worse than China"; China is out-emitting Canada, doesn't take emissions reduction seriously, and plans to continue to out-emit Canada into the future.
> and so they're producing emissions "for" the western nations in a sort of de facto shell game.
Then the solution is to ban Chinese imports or tax them to a level that it's no longer economically viable to import them.
Problem "solved," right?
I mean, it depends on what problem you're trying to solve. If you want to dramatically skyrocket the prices of consumer goods, reduce every American's individual buying power, tank the stock market, crater everyone's retirement accounts, and destabilize the current world economic order, then that would be a terrible move.
I kind of want all that to happen, though, so I think it's a good move. I don't like living in a nation that is able to consume at a functionally unlimited level for very little national sacrifice or engagement in manufacturing and production. If manufacturing is inherently pollution-heavy, then it would be healthy for Americans, Canadians, etc. to actually bear the consequences of pollution in their own countries and then decide as nations whether or not to sustain the current levels of production, or curtail their consumption habits properly.
It’s impossible for Canadians to “emit” more on a per capita basis than China does, in fact Canada is a net sink of carbon emissions in the world. The “emissions” from Canada are a net negative because of its immense forests!
What does China to do their forests? They chop them down
Bit of a double-edged sword, those forests.
"Canada's Record-breaking 2023 Wildfires Released Nearly 4 Times More Carbon than Global Aviation"
Slightly unfair because climate change makes those forest more likely to burn down. But still.
https://www.wri.org/insights/canada-wildfire-emissions
I got everything from: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics
All your claims in your last sentence I'd like to see sources for as well, because it appears to be the opposite. They're at the forefront of renewable energy production, has ambitious goals for reduction, despite already producing less per capita emissions than much richer countries with cumulatively larger emissions.
I’m not sure you can say China’s total is 7.5x Canada’s total and say Canada has caused more damage. It might well be true that per capita is higher however you seem to be comparing apples to oranges here.
And as others have mentioned sources for numbers greatly help the collective conversation.
> I’m not sure you can say China’s total is 7.5x Canada’s total and say Canada has caused more damage.
Of course all on a per capita basis, I thought I was sufficiently clear.
What is the apples to oranges comparison?
Source is https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics
Ratios matter little to the climate. Total volumes do. When you build your infrastructure from scratch, it makes sense not to go for XIX century technologies.
I agree. It would be much better if wealthy nations subsidized clean energy technology for developing countries so that they can leapfrog the fossil fuel stage.
On the other side of the argument, borders also don't matter to the climate, so everyone should be doing everything they can instead of finger-pointing, no?
Ratios matter a lot. If everyone behaved like Canadians we'd be fucked. If Canadians behaved like Chinese, we'd be less fucked. I was replying to someone who felt upset with China as a Canadian, and I explained his own country and its population behaves worse.
Unless you're not a big fan of productions - things like food, you can't compare CO2 emissions alone. It all comes down to cost-benefit.
The goal is the maximum production per unit of CO2 - for every unit of CO2 you maximize what is produced from it.
Yes, the US produces 13.49% of all global CO2, but it also produces 25.22% of all output.
China produces 31% of all CO2 emissions, but only 17% of all production.
If these were metrics for your startup I’d call them vanity metrics. You just used data to explain that the US captures higher margins on their products and China does a lot of low margin or commodity production.
The data doesn’t help us inform an opinion of whose carbon use is better than others.
Huh? Money is fungible so higher margin generation of CO2 is better.
Whatever profit you captured can be spent on whatever.
Then the US should be able to do without dirty, polluting imports from China. Right?
Yes, and it will happen, it would just colllapse the world economy and start a world war if international capital flows to China stopped overnight
And why? A collapse of the world economy would be imminent, but a global world war?
Imports from China are $0.5T. US economy is $25T.
So the US imports 2% of its GDP from China.
Rounding error.
This is very naive thinking. Let's begin with the fact that imports aren't GDP. GDP is the value of goods and services produced inside the country. Imports, by definition, are produced outside the country.
Imports power GDP growth. Let me illustrate.
60% of Wal-Mart's imports in 2023 came from China.[1] Wal-Mart is also the largest private employer in the world.[2] Wal-Mart generates billions of dollars of revenue and profit - GDP in other words - by selling imports from China.
Imagine the economic hardship if even just Wal-Mart was cut off from Chinese imports. They'd lose at least half their sales overnight. Up to half their stores might close, or half the workforce might lose their jobs. That's almost 800k people. The unemployment rate goes up 60 basis points overnight. That's just one company.
Extrapolate that to the rest of the US economy.
1. https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/walmart-shifts-to-indi...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walmart
That's % share of global gdp, of which US bias services. For production, closer proxy is gross manufacturing production where PRC is 35% vs US 12%.
That only tells us China produces lower-margin goods. It isn't surprising that a developed country has higher labor productivity than a developing or middle-income one. Using that to decide whose carbon emissions are "fairer" is a fools errand.
Yes, but I think gross output as % of global share still illustrative proxy of how much resource intensive physical goods are produced relative to emissions. That's closer to maximizing "production" than using GDP/value added as % of global share which is proxy for maximizing "value".
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Note that China's coal usage was basically flat in 2023 and expected to decline in 2024.
China's coal capacity is increasing dramatically, but they're increasingly using their coal plants as peaker plants rather than for base production.
Medium term - China is going to lead the world in emissions reductions. They have the most to reduce and the most to lose if they don't move to renewables rapidly.
Short term - nothing much is happening. Rome wasn't built in a day.
The US can idly sit around and burn it's own natural gas and oil. The US at least has the option to maintain the status quo for a long time (it won't). But China doesn't even have this option.
Additionally, auto manufacturing (ICE cars) accounts for ~5% of US employment. For China ICE auto manufacturing is ~0, and they have the opportunity to produce a huge chunk of the worlds EVs. They're not only incentivized massively to get off oil - they're incentivized to get EVERYONE ELSE off of oil, too.
China needs to IMPORT natural gas and oil. They'd much rather lead the world in renewables EXPORT EVs and renewable generation than be reliant on Russia & KSA for energy (the basis of their current economy)...
China will likely cut their emissions faster than the US has - which if you're realistic - the US has done an impressive job.
The US emits ~30% less carbon per capita than it did in 2000. And we're on pace to be at ~40% less by the end of 2030: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1049662/fossil-us-carbon...
In 20 years, China is likely to be around ~75% less than today. The US probably won't get from ~40% to ~75% over that time.
The lobbying from our own energy producers will too much to cut that deep that quickly.
The US and China are close to ~50% of emissions: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/each-countrys-share-co2-emi...
No one else besides India is really going to move the needle (certainly not in the wrong direction - no one else is growing fast enough).
India will be the wild card. Will they import renewable energy generation from China or fossil fuel from Russia and KSA?
China will (supposedly) reach as well as potentially exceed their 2030 renewables target by the end of this year [1], and the solar manufacturing and deployment flywheel is still coming up to speed (global solar deployment is anticipated to reach ~660GW/pa by end of year, should achieve 1TW/pa within the next 18 months assuming current trajectories [2]). China and India being close geographically while also having enormous fossil generation to push out of the generation mix is convenient; not far from factory to solar farm.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-leads-renewabl...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40727619
For those unaware, China and India do NOT like getting their power from coal. They've both had decades now of abysmal smog and pollution that literally (like, statistically trackable) kills people every year, including people otherwise productive in society. China is absolutely dumping the price of solar panels. A fully renewable energy China is one that is harder for Western countries to sanction, has more prestige with bright blue skies, and exports cheap solar panels to everyone else. India will trend the same way.
Every geopolitically relevant country will feel more secure with renewable, and therefore utterly independent, energy generation.
A reminder that Texas, a uniparty state literally run by Oil Barron families for decades, still gets at least a third of it's power from renewable sources, because it's so goddamned cheap. It doesn't matter how profitable oil is, or how much you pump, it will always be cheaper, and therefore more profitable, to replace it with power that just manifests itself out of the sky or wind for merely the cost of maintenance.
Each oil well requires tens of highly skilled, rather well paid tradespeople to manage, drill, run, explode, etc. An entire field of wind turbines requires one or two small teams of somewhat well paid maintenance engineers.
As far as I am aware, Texas offsets the volatility of renewable with carbon based energy. Those renewable are not viable in a world with no carbon based energy.
https://grid-analytics.ece.utexas.edu/chart/fuel-type-genera...
Texas would be a lot less vulnerable to such volatility if they got out of their own way and connected their grid properly to either (or both) of America's east and west grids.
"Plan to link Texas ERCOT electric grid to southeastern U.S. states is in the works."
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38861358
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/watchdog/2024/01/03/plan-to-...
Of the five links between this comment and the other, I can only access one of them. Interchange domain is blocked, khou is access denied, dallasnews is a paywall.
What I do hear about is this (possibly outdated, I'm increasingly noticing the references there are not kept up to date) claim on Wikipedia:
> On October 13, 2009, the Tres Amigas SuperStation was announced to connect the Eastern, Western and Texas Interconnections via eight 5 GW superconductor links, although the Texas Interconnection does not intend to connect for regulatory reasons. The Eastern Interconnection withdrew from the project in 2015, rendering the project moot. Construction was never started.
Yes, they mostly use carbon energy to offset volatility. That doesn't mean that there aren't other viable ways to do so.
Like what? Energy storage would push the combined price of renewable way beyond nuclear. You would need an alternative source of energy that is 1) on demand, and 2) which does not cost much when it is not activated. Not sure what that would be.
California pays 4 cents per kilowatt hour for solar + storage.
That's storage for a few hours to smooth the volatility intraday. Nothing like the sort of storage capacity you would need if you don't have an alternative source of energy when there is no wind for a week.
Your original comment was talking about the volatility.
No wind for a week is the volatility of renewable. And that's a common occurence. You can easily have 3 weeks without wind.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/texas-wi... ("Texas will add more grid batteries than any other state in 2024.")
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/energy-storage/how-texa... ("How Texas became the hottest grid battery market in the country")
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/09/12/texas-power-grid-bat... ("As brutal heat tests Texas’ power grid, batteries play a small but growing role in keeping the lights on")
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/batteries-texas-consumers-6... ("Batteries saved Texas consumers $683M during 2-day January freeze: Aurora Energy Research")
https://web.archive.org/web/20240707022007/https://www.eia.g... (EIA 12 month forward looking generator deployment; scope to Texas and gray icons, which indicate battery storage)
vel0city's recent comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40504630: "Texas has 6.3GW of battery capacity installed largely in the last three years and is on track for another ~15GW (a bit over 20GW total) by the end of 2024. There's 141GW of battery projects in the queue for connection to ERCOT, with a large chunk of that coming online in 2025 and 2026."
If you look at California, what happens is that renewables grow rapidly, pushing out fossil generation (coal first, and then fossil gas, as fossil gas is more flexible from a generation perspective wrt throttling and commodity cost). At some point, you arrive at a situation where your spot prices drop below zero during daylight hours (as you're generating power in excess of grid demand, renewables can bid to give away the power or curtail, fossil gas and coal cannot, they'll take the L to keep spinning while paying for fuel and the per hour O&M costs). This is when battery deployment takes off, as batteries can charge when power is almost free, and discharge in the evening hours after sunset when it is profitable to do so. You can see California's ~10GW of batteries "breathe" daily in the data doing this. This revenue, combined with grid services (synthetic inertia, black start capability readiness [jump starting fossil generators during a grid outage]), makes batteries a strong economic proposition from an investment perspective.
Battery firmed renewables compete directly with fossil gas from a cost perspective. As of ~6 months ago, Texas had 100GW of solar in ERCOT’s interconnect queue, in comparison to ~65.8GW of fossil gas generation and ~14.3GW of coal generation currently operating. Even assuming worst case capacity factor (20% hypothetical vs 25% actual per https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...), 75GW of solar with a storage component is enough to push that coal generation out of the mix. It's also unlikely solar deployments stop or slow down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40601878 ("HN: Lazard: IRA brings LCOS of 100MW, 4hr standalone BESS down as low as US$124/MWh")
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost... ("Lazard 2023 Levelized Cost Of Energy+")
As far as I am aware, these are short term batteries to deal with intra day volatility (intra hour to switch between different sources in fact I believe). It's not capacity to deal with a week without wind. You would need to quote the capacity not in GW but in GWh for that (or GW-days).
Batteries are short duration storage (4-12 hours); overbuilding renewables, generation diversity, and transmission solves for your problem statement around longer duration lulls in certain generation types.
Related citation wrt battery costs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40919052 ("HN: China’s Batteries Are Now Cheap Enough to Power Huge Shifts")
China & India get almost all of their coal internally, so coal is also fairly sanctions proof.
The rest of your post is spot on, though.
I can understand the frustration from a climate change perspective, but you still get the benefits of cleaner air locally, increasing energy independence and freedom from commodity cost fluctuations.
> India and China
Oof. Before we start pointing fingers, over 50% of China's energy consumption is manufacturing, and a significant chunk of that manufacturing is western countries outsourcing their manufacturing needs, i.e. claiming to be coal-free while really just burning the coal elsewhere and then blaming the landowner.
If you want to truly be coal-free, don't just pay for it to be built in Canada for your wooden house that consumes a few kilowatts. Pay for it to be built in China for all your manufacturing outposts that make your computer, TV, phone, kitchen gadgets, kitchen ware, disposable items, containers for food delivery, and everything else, that take an enormous amount of power to create. They are equally a part of your energy footprint.
Do you have iPhones in Alberta? It takes about 1 GJ or 278 kWh to make a single phone [1], which is about enough to heat an entire house for a month. For a computer you're looking at about 1 MWh, about a large house's heating usage in an entire year.
[1] https://conferences.sigcomm.org/hotnets/2011/papers/hotnetsX...
I mean, you basically ignored the point about them buying Russian oil/gas, thus enabling the Russian war. But yes, I agree that China makes things. India doesn't really have that excuse for using coal.
India's government is dirt poor in comparison to China's government. Clean energy is expensive.
Both governments are actually very pro-clean-energy and more willing to deploy it, given the money, than a certain two ~80-year-old farts that take turns every 4 years playing stupid politics games and picking fights.
> Clean energy is expensive.
Eh, nuclear sure but in general no. That's the whole reason solar is becoming so popular is that it's cheaper [2].
If you have to pair solar with storage then it becomes more expensive [1] (general X+Y is more expensive than just X or Y). But uh, people tend to work when the sun shines so you can add a ton of solar to offset the increased energy usage during the day.
[1]: https://www.powersouth.com/is-solar-cheaper-than-natural-gas...
[2]: https://venturebeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/natural_g...
If it's such slam-dunk, why aren't all Western nations already at 100% solar and wind?
New builds are ~100% solar and wind.
Not all. In Alberta, all that coal has switched to natural gas, and we have had large natural gas powered plants come online as of late.
https://www.aeso.ca/market/market-updates/2023/new-assets-ca...
I'm not talking about new builds.
New builds in developed countries can be 100% renewable because there's enough installed non-renewable capacity available as fallback. Developing countries don't have that.
You just answered your own question. Developing nations aren't at 100% renewable because they already have a large amount of installed non-renewables.
Err...no. Developing countries tend to not have a large amount of anything. Definitionally they're poor and under-resourced.
If their economies are growing, the grids are constantly playing catch-up with demand. Otherwise they're in a state of managed decline, or are an actual dumpster fire.
Whatever the case may be, the one thing they don't have is reliable base generation capability. A safety net for when renewables can't produce enough.
Arg, typo.
Developing -> Developed in my original comment.
Gotcha. That's also why developing countries can't go 100% renewable.
This is complete nonsense. India is among the world’s five largest economies and is continuing to grow. Part of a growing economy is falling poverty and growing electrical demand.
how exactly do you propose India meet the growing electric demands of her residents?
The Russian gas and oil story is more pragmatism than evil intent.
One part of your comment is accurate - India’s exports are tiny relative to its population and economic size.
Indeed, one of the more nonsensical threads i've seen. Alberta farts rainbows because it doesn't make anything and nobody lives there. USA imports oil from KSA enabling KSA to do whatever the hell KSA feels like doing, all the while periodically starting wars and bombing the more stubborn oil suppliers like Libya and Iraq into submission. India and China similarly use whatever energy they can get their hands on, especially China so it can produce half-a-trillion dollars worth of cheap consumer goods every year to supply the said Americans (and even Albertans too). The ignorance is amazing.
Renewables, conservation, and stop growing so many people.
> stop growing so many people
lol they did just that. China is not "growing so many people" anymore, and neither is India, really. I suppose they could cull some of the previously grown people to get under 5 million like Alberta and to make your advice actually useful. But maybe your obvious solutions just haven't occurred to them yet.
You need to update your racist stereotypes. India's birth rate is below the replacement rate.
wrong thread? you need to reply above for the stereotype.
You need to update your racist stereotypes. India's birth rate is below the replacement rate.
Canada (and US) has no leg to stand on because domestic emissions reduction is offset by simply choosing to be increasingly large net crude exporters after domestic use. At the end of the day, Canada is trending to enable more net fossil fuel use, whereas PRC is trending to reduce net fossil fuel (coal used for peaking not baseload) and via renewable exports that reduce demand for fossil.
As Canadian, the only disapointment is influence ops against Canadian fossil industry has stalled development so much for so long that we're not a larger fossil exporter and reaping in benefits of current geopolitical turmoil. EU could have been buying overpriced Canadian oil + lng.
You do realise that vast majority of India's new electricity generation is renewable right? And Canada just replaced coal with petroleum not green sources.
Its amazing how most western countries bash coal so much and then proceed to generate electricity using natural gas.
To me it's Canada that is saying FU to the world and then preaching about it.
As a Canadian it’s hard for me to be upset given we still emit far more carbon per capita than China or India.
I suppose there could be worse problems though. According to Bloomberg, as of a few years ago there were more people in India who didn't have access to electricity at all than live in all of Canada, and not insignificant portion of our population is of recent Indian descent. This source reports ~10% of their population https://www.iea.org/reports/sdg7-data-and-projections/access...
As a Canadian (but not Albertan) I've never had direct access to the residual economic effects of oil resources, or the slight tax offset that comes with having no Provincial Sales Tax, aside from general gov redistribution. I've never not had electricity, and I've never not had renewable electricity, which is quite remarkable.
“Canada could already be absorbing 20 to 30 per cent more CO2 than we emit”
https://financialpost.com/opinion/canada-may-already-be-carb...
If “all this undeveloped land is a huge carbon sink we want to take credit for,” then we’re going to have to take responsibility for the terrible amount of carbon release as peatlands continue thawing.
This is frankly a dumb article. It’s an unhelpful reframing of the issue at hand by trying to take credit for what’s happening across large swaths of undeveloped land that happen to be within our border. It will quickly be abandoned the moment the natural carbon release of former permafrost regions cause us to be a colossal emitter instead.
Consider how unhelpful it would be if countries began trying to solve their emissions issues by laying claim to vast swaths of ocean, to take credit for algal carbon sinks.
But would that be true if Canada had 1 billion people?
BC electricity is completely hydroelectric. And they encourage homes to go all electric with no gas.
If BC's population went up by a factor of 1.1B/40M = 27.5x, most likely the hydroelectric resources in the province would become insufficient and BC would have to switch to alternate forms of electric power. Maybe that is solar+wind+nuclear, but maybe it's just gas and coal.
Please note that in Canada, electricity, heat, and transport emissions dwarf those from all other sectors [1].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-emissions-by-sector?t...
IIRC most people's carbon emissions come from transportation, electricity, heat. My guess is the efficiency of scale at ~40M is within spitting distance of what it would be at 1B. So it ought to scale linearly, for the most part?
A lot of it comes from consumption, material goods, food ect as well.
It depends how we situate ourselves. We have a lot of land and a lot of potential to hypothetically grow to 1B in the dumbest way possible.
I really think you should be taking responsibility over your own current and historical consumption and production patterns instead of pointing fingers at countries who have much larger populations and are much more poorer per capita. Lead the world with better technology, show everybody how it can be done. Everybody does their bit and we will all benefit.
So gaining wealth by burning coal by US or Europe was fine back then and now you want to ban developing country to achive wealth in same way?
ElectricityMaps zone CA-AB: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/CA-AB?wind=false&solar=...
Total fossil gas generation capacity is ~12.7GW. Seems straightforward to replace with solar, wind, batteries, and interconnects with neighboring grids.
Wind and Solar Potential resource: https://www.pembina.org/pub/wind-solar-alberta
If you're curious, you can actually see the real-time stats for what's going on in Alberta: http://ets.aeso.ca/ets_web/ip/Market/Reports/CSDReportServle.... There's lots of solar and wind installed but wind right now isn't producing much at all. Solar's doing decent though!
Thanks for sharing that resource! ElectricityMaps parses it [1] for showing real time data as well as creating a data source for carbon intensity estimation models. Alberta has the most favorable wind and solar resources in Canada (citation in my root comment), so solving for the remaining fossil gas generation should occur in due time simply out of economics [2].
[1] https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...
[2] https://archive.is/2024.06.24-223854/https://www.economist.c...
Honest question: Is it clear that wind really could not produce more electricity right now? Depending on the way producers are chosen and the net is "congested" the wind farms might just not be allowed to contribute.
https://imgur.com/a/CD8Q5zJ
The area west of Edmonton and Red Deer where it’s more like 5-6kt (still not particularly windy) is in the Rocky Mountains and would be pretty challenging to build wind turbines in.
>> the wind farms might just not be allowed to contribute.
Alberta uses a bid system where everyone who bids under the price that (based on demand) ends up getting set, gets to participate and get paid. Because renewable is tough to store, they almost always bid zero to make sure it gets included. The same thing happens for the renewable portion of integrated providers; they bid low on the renewable to make sure they're included, and high on the variable fossil fuels (i.e. gas can be turned off or brought on line) to drive up the price. It's a complicated system with lots of opportunities for manipulation, but renewable tends to be prioritized for participation because it's hard to store for later.
In the EU the merit order principle is used ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merit_order ). So, sometimes that might mean a large energy company finds that their wind farm suddenly needs a break for maintenance work, so a much more expensive source can raise the price for everyone. ;)
It seems straightforward but it isn't.
Alberta is about twice the size of Germany, 50% larger than California and has a meager population of 4.3 million spread out across that area.With a latitude that ranges from 48' to 60' and a wide variety of geography there's a range of availability in solar and wind.
Alberta politics is also a factor.
Alberta is a complete aberration in North American democracy in that more or less one party have been in power there for over 50 years. While the party has always been blatantly pro O&G industry at the expense of everything else when they issued an unexpected moratorium on a solar and wind projects last year.
This has thrown the renewable industry in Alberta into chaos and has likely damaged investor confidence in Alberta for decades[0]
https://www.theenergymix.com/tsunami-engulfs-alberta-renewab...
>Alberta is a complete aberration in North American democracy
Hmm, seems to me several US states have been the same: Vermont, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Idaho...
Being larger isn't a disadvantage. Wind correlation drops exponentially as a function of distance. Land use becomes a non issue.
>Wind correlation drops exponentially as a function of distance.
By what principle? I'm just curious, first time I'm hearing this.
They just mean if you have geographical diversity, it helps with the availability of renewables.
For example, if wind is in 5 different locations across Alberta (for sake of example), you're less likely to run into issues with losing it all at once like you would if all your wind came from a single area and the wind stopped blowing there or dropped to a very low value.
Yeah, and notably it's exponential in distance, not linear.
There's also a diversification benefit for solar due to two reasons, one reason is rainfall is less likely to impact a large land mass at the same time, second is the sunset occurs at different times so you can have a one hour window to offset the evening peak of the other side of the country and vice versa in the morning. Although I don't believe these benefits are exponential as they are for wind.
Yeah but the downside to that in a place the size of Alberta is that you need to run electrical infrastructure that can handle the load of 4.3 million people across a 1000km distance.
Sounds like Sweden or Norway, not very hard to do.
> Being larger isn't a disadvantage.
It most certainly is for distribution and generation near population density.
Or easier. With germany you can't just put solar panels around a big city because either the city is too big or the land is occopied by something else.
But hey good that we talked about it :D
There's plenty of land in cities. Rooftops and solar canopies (parking lots with solar panels over them) for example. Solar canopies can even go above outdoor public transit lines.
They're all over the place in my area. I've seen them in church parking lots, supermarkets, you name it. Added benefit: you and your car are shaded from sun, snow, rain..
It's a lot more expensive to put panels on roofs than to put them on a meadow somewhere.
So settle on something in the middle -- cover parking lots.
wow, i think you really missed the point:)
Germany is a relativly small country even compared to Alberta. therefor the population is pretty centralized with makes it far easier to supply with energy.
Alberta has 2 larger cities but the population is spread far a nd wide which makes distribution and supplying power that much harder.
Judging by this population density map: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/01/Canada_P...
And the ever-useful "The True Size Of…": https://www.thetruesize.com/#?borders=1~!MTU1OTcwMjU.MTI5MjQ...
I think you're overstating the difficulty given that population distribution.
And those two large splotches on the map representing Calgary and Edmonton and with most of the population pretty close by, they're only 282.6 km apart.
A 10cm^2 cross section of aluminium between them would have a resistance of 7.3 Ω, and even when bought from the first random supplier I found on Amazon that would only cost about €14m:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=resistivity+aluminium+%...
https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Aluminium-Square-Solid-Material-S...
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=282.6+kilometers+*+€5%2...
It would be about 12% of that price, €1.7m, if bought at bulk rates: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=282.6+kilometers+*+10cm...
At 1e6 V, 12.7 GW is 12.7 kA; I^2R losses over a 7.3 Ω link for that current is 1.18 GW: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%2812700+amperes%29%5E2...
--
But even without any of that, there is one very important point you've overlooked:
Alberta has already got a power grid.
Appreciate the response but I'll be honest I don't understand what point you are making.
My only point is that Alberta being larger than Germany means its more expensive to deliver power to all its various small towns distributed around the province.
That seems pretty tautologically correct to me given that power lines have a cost and must be constantly maintained and built to support new power demands.
I'm unsure about what the cross section of aluminum has to do with the size of a province, but i'm willing to learn:)
Run a simple thought experiment. Would it be easier to deliver power 100 meters or 100 km's? That's what we are debating here.
We currently transport already energy from big producers to small towns left and right.
Solar Energy reduces the load of the grid because the renewable energy will be consumed locally first. This puts less strain on it.
But you will still need to maintain a grid that's sized to handle situations when there's no solar.
I already have a grid which handles this situation. I'm lost on what your issue is with the grid?
The biggest issue in germany regarding grid and renewable is a distance of 800km between north germany which has a lot of wind and south germany which has a lot of solar.
Diverge it a little bit better and no issues
The grid which already exists because it was built before solar was interesting.
The grid which connects the Suncor Fort Hills mine in Alberta to Tijuana in Mexico.
Even if you want to expand that grid to the level of everyone getting their winter midnight electricity from the midsummer sun on the opposite side of the planet, the material element of the "electric highway" isn't what stops it, it has a low cost compared to the last-mile stuff that already exists.
> Run a simple thought experiment. Would it be easier to deliver power 100 meters or 100 km's? That's what we are debating here.
What you're debating is the cost of using a grid that already exists and is already in use.
> I'm unsure about what the cross section of aluminum has to do with the size of a province,
The answer is right there in the same post. Multiply them together to find out how much material you need (and by extension cost); likewise resistive losses.
The material costs for making an extremely efficient grid are trivial compared to everything else involved in the supply of energy that already exists and has already connected all those "various small towns distributed around the province".
--
Also, I demonstrated with my maps that if you put a copy of the German borders around the Calgary-Edmonton conurbation, you'd get almost the entire population of Alberta, so your stat is misleading.
the nice thing about solar is that it's naturally diffuse, it's actually more effort to push it into a dense urban area than to have it spread over a rural place
>> more or less one party have been in power there for over 50 years.
you know we had a majority left-leaning (NDP) government < 10 years ago, right?
The province splits pretty predictably between Calgary, Edmonton and Rural.
The bigger problem with the comment is that said party threw in the towel in 2020. How they managed to enact something last year from the dead is a head scratcher.
Alberta is somewhat unique within Canada, with electricity trading on a market operated by AESO https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alberta_Electric_System_Operat...
Doesn't Ontario's IESO also do this?
Not really. Talking to energy producers, it's a lot easier to add new generation in Alberta than it is in Ontario.
Hey folks, I live in Alberta. This isn't as big of a win as you all think it is. We replaced coal burning with natural gas and gasoline burning power generation.
For those who will say, "but Alberta has wind and solar!" please know that our current premiere (similar to a governor) is actively attacking all of our renewable energy investments. Her name is Danielle Smith and she's quite literally a former oil and gas lobbyist.
The only reason this is being touted is because big oil in Alberta is happy we've switched over to burning their carbon emitter of choice.
Take that into account when you read this feel good piece about Alberta being "coal free".
I'll still count it. Natgas is much cleaner than coal. And economics will eventually force their hand as solar costs continue to fall
At present, solar is about 6% of Alberta's electric generation capacity.
The provincial government suspended planning permission for all renewable energy projects across the province for six months, then outright banned the installation of grid-scale solar in much of the province. This resulted in the cancellation of tens of billions of dollars worth of private investment in renewable energy in Alberta.
Solar is also not as cheap as elsewhere in the world, as Canada has import duties on the cheap Chinese solar panels are driving the change elsewhere. The duties roughly triple the price, with a tax of ~160% on the purchase price and per-watt charges on the panel's rated output.
I'm sure that in five years things will start to shift. Heck, there's workers installing solar panels on my neighbour's roof right now — but it's not going to change much while Danielle Smith is in charge.
It's not as much cleaner as we often think. Only a small % of leakage means that overall the warming potential (from leaks and burnt gas) can be more than coal.
Actual gasoline? Unless you're talking about super-isolated northern communities on generators [which should still be using diesel rather than gasoline], that seems... insane.
They fire up gasoline generators when the load is high as a back-up to natural gas generation.
There have been periods of rolling brown outs due to high industrial demand where I live. I know people in the industry and also watch the local news where they report that the gasoline backups have been activated and the brown outs should stop. Can confirm, they sometimes burn gasoline for power generation.
As posted elsewhere anyway, Alberta doesn't have any oil-fired power stations: https://app.electricitymaps.com/zone/CA-AB
How much is natgas? I Do think it's still better than coal in terms of emissions and particulates and such.
Unfortunately they did it by switching to natural gas instead of the massive sustainable buildout they needed. Good job on reducing thorium and uranium emissions, at least.
Other hand when talking about functional operation. Solar, Wind plus Nat Gas works well together. Where Solar, Wind plus Coal doesn't.
It's technically easy to shutdown, restart, and take Nat Gas plants in and out of standby to make up for shortfalls in solar and wind production. Where you can't do that with coal and nuclear for both technical and economic reasons.
Now it's mostly natural gas, instead! With a good chunk of wind, but the current government seems to dislike "renewables"
Well, it's hard to get someone to hate their source of income.
Their current source of income. Alberta has more sun and more wind than any place else in Canada so renewables could be quite profitable to them in the future, but what government cares about anything further out than the next election? Alberta also used to be the only place in Canada where you could just build a solar power plant and hook it up to the grid with minimal red tape so had a massive advantage in terms of number of solar jobs.
Also Alberta is next door to BC which has vast sources of hydro-electric power so it could easily trade solar & wind power to BC when the sun is shining and/or the wind is blowing in exchange for hydro power when it isn't.
I agree. The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production. The unfortunate bit about having the most sun is that during winter we still don't get much of it. It seems to me we need as much storage as we do production.
Alberta isn't very cloudy in the wintertime, the reduced insolation is mostly due to lower angles and shorter days. AFAICT, winter sunshine is more than a third of summer sunshine in Alberta. In Europe the number is often 10%.
It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage. AKA it's cheaper to put down 3X as many panels than to build seasonal storage.
Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.
> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.
Which means enormous amounts of surplus power in the summer (even with PV angled to optimize winter production.) So storage doesn't have to go far to be worthwhile, and in particular with nearly free input energy it doesn't have to be very efficient.
It doesn't have to be very efficient, but it is has to be cheap. Batteries aren't cheap but they discharge every night so their cost is spread out over ~365 days and their cost becomes feasible.
Pumped storage is ~10% the cost of batteries, but if used as seasonal storage so they only discharge once per year that makes them ~36X as expensive. Especially in Alberta where they're competing against Natural Gas which is also approximately free (it's often flared off as a waste gas from oil wells rather than captured and sold because the value is less than the cost of capture).
For seasonal storage, it would be either an e-fuel (like hydrogen) or bulk storage of thermal energy (basically, artificial geothermal). The latter could produce very hot rock at rather shallow depth, yet still have thermal time constants of many years.
Both of those are more expensive than pumped storage.
This depends on the time scale. For days or weeks? Pumped hydro is better. But for seasonal storage? The size of the reservoir becomes prohibitive.
A water reservoir is a heck of a lot cheaper to make large compared to a hydrogen tank.
Hydrogen on this scale would be stored underground, preferably in solution mined salt caverns. This is a well established technology, although it's more used for storing natural gas. These caverns are very inexpensive to build, which is why they are used.
Alberta, as it turns out, is underlaid by kilometers of sedimentary rock that includes salt formations.
Still sounds more expensive than a holding pond.
If one compares the heat of combustion of hydrogen stored at 100 bar and 20 C, to the energy of water elevated by 100 meters, the former exceeds the latter (per unit volume) by a factor of 1000. So that "holding pond" is going to be much, MUCH larger than the solution-mined cavern for storage systems of equal capacity (and remember one needs two reservoirs.)
I like this idea, but I disagree with this:
> It's cheaper to size production for winter sunshine than to build a lot of storage.
This still doesn't work - storage is mandatory. Winter peak loads, which are often the most power that the grid will require all year, are before and after the sun.
There’s a huge difference between load shifting a couple of hours and seasonal storage
That's why I didn't specify it needed to be seasonal, but it does need to be stored, as a lot of that load isn't shifting. At 7pm on a -35 day there is zero solar generation, but every furnace in the province is on and people are doing their evening cooking and cleaning.
You're right, you said "as much storage as production". That's actually a very tiny amount of storage. Generally a "24hr" solar plant for California usage patterns has about 4-6Wh of storage and about 1W of discharge per watt of solar plant. Alberta will likely need ~2X that for daily load shifting during the winter. Seasonal storage would require a couple of orders of magnitude more.
Ah. To clarify, when I said "as much storage as production", I meant focus, not quantity.
I'd note that actual -35 days are pretty rare. Per Environment Canada Climate Normal Data from 1991 to 2020, Edmonton averages only 2.5 days per year with a minimum temperature below -30.
While you're correct, they do happen and need to be accounted for, and temperatures in the -30s in general aren't rare, but we're also experiencing more extreme weather as of late. Edmonton set a few records for cold the last few years, and those moments, when the grid is at the most strain, is also when the power is needed the most to keep people safe.
> Alberta doesn't lack for hills, which is what's needed to build pumped storage which is what's cheapest for seasonal storage.
From what I understand, BC has a lot of hydro dams. I wonder if there is a way to use them for pumped storage.
They do use them as storage, but more passively - When others sources of production are high BC slows their consumption, allowing them to build up greater reserves in their dams.
> The times they are a-changing, but we have a particularly regressive government at the moment that is actively blocking renewable production.
I guess Canadian politics are not unlike US politics in the area of energy production. You'd think that most of the jobs in non-renewable energy could just transition over to jobs in renewable energy and everyone's happy. But sadly, like everything, the energy source itself has been politicized. The left favors renewables regardless of the pros and cons and the right favors non-renewables regardless of the pros and cons, so it looks like yet another ideological battle rather than a battle over concrete things like jobs and the environment.
I think there's simply not enough jobs in renewables - once a solar farm is operational maintenance is a fraction of production, unlike the oil sands or rigs which require constant human intervention.
Winter is not an issue for solar because solar panel efficiency is better when the panel is cooler. A panel blazing away in Florida is actually losing quite a bit of efficiency because of how hot the panel is; much farther north even with less light, the panels can produce more.
But it is an issue when Calgary only sees 8 hours of daylight in the deepest depths of winter.
As far as I understand it, the whole country is dependent on the tar sands, but the east still hates it.
Is really not. I don't think there are any numbers justifying narrative, and numbers presented in this thread prove it. The dependency is really just Albertan advertising.
Canada's economy is built on primary resource extraction and production in general but would have done fine without the tar sands. Most of the oil money leaves the country; the money that stays mainly fuels self-serving private agendas, pressuring other parts of the economy and stuffing politics. This could have been averted had a solution like Norway's state oil fund been adopted but would have been too socialist a measure for the empire to tolerate.
Is this not the analogous fund?
https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/heritage-fund-reaches-all-time-h...
Yep. The Alberta government has their head stuck in the sand (pun intended) around renewables as they existentially threaten their current economy. They have repeatedly shown that they’d rather double down than try and diversify.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-alberta-set-b...
To boost your point - that is literally what the Alberta government has been doing. They instituted a seven-month renewable's pause to "evaluate" them (evaluating renewables in 2023????), which introduced a lot of investor uncertainty[1]. When the pause was over they introduced rules around preventing wind turbines and solar from being developed in areas to prevent obstruction in "viewscapes"[2].
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-renewables-pa... [2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/alberta-viewscapes-bu...
Which is worse in terms of greenhouse emissions but it's something I guess.
Instead of "natural gas", we should just switch to saying methane, which is what that generally is.
No? Methane produces less than half the CO2 per kwh than coal.
Which is still bad, but not worse or as bad.
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
Methane burned for electricity is better than coal no doubt. But methane that escapes into the atmosphere is way worse than CO2 in the nearish term. And not every extraction company is super thrilled about proper containment.
Released methane is 27-30 times worse than released CO2 per unit mass measured over the next 100 years of warming [1]. Burning methane releases 1 CO2 molecule per CH4 molecule (CH4 + 2O2 -> CO2 + 2H2O), or 2.743 it's mass in CO2 [2].
To make up the difference in CO2 you'd have to be losing ~5% of the methane to the atmosphere along the way from extraction to burning.
Do you have reason to believe anywhere near that much is lost?
"Worse than coal" has set a very low bar for how not-bad methane needs to be.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/understanding-global-warmin...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=molecular+weight+of+CO2...
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c06458
That study puts it at 9.4% of gross production. Many other sources exist which put 5% at a very realistic number. Fossil gas is dirt cheap, invisible, and leaks are large self-reported, so the companies have 0 reasons to properly test for or stop leaks.
A very small percent is not contained though, and even most vented is flared.
I am under the impression that methane levels in the atmosphere have spiked significantly in the last decade or two, and the origin is not really understood. Extraction could be one source, but if it's from another source, that could be more bad news as it would mean that some tipping point has possibly been triggered. I'm far from an expert on this though.
Most of the consciously vented is flared. However, the infrastructure leaks like mad and there have been no incentives incentive for the companies to fix it, it's a cheap invisible gas after all with almost all reporting being self reporting.
>No? Methane produces less than half the CO2 per kwh than coal.
The important metric is CO2e, not CO2. Critically, CO2e includes measurements of methane emissions.
The problem with methane is that the methane leaks are self-reported, by an industry who have every incentive to under-report and who have a history of massively underreporting. Methane isn't clearly better than coal, and might well be worse.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
Note: even though this is published by a large and pretty well respected newspaper it's an op-ed piece from a left-leaning environmental organization (which should be obvious if you read it). Dropping coal is pretty different from dropping fossil fuels, especially right now when natural gas is dirt cheap. It's also debatable if Alberta currently needs any more solar or wind; what we definitely need is storage for these generative sources. The other components of industrial use and transportation are probably more effective targets for big wins than getting gas out of the electricity grid.
Due to its abundant wind & solar, Alberta could easily get to ~70% renewable generation without any storage. So until Alberta hits that 70% mark, investing in a dollar on wind or solar generation will provide far more fiscal and decarbonization return than investing that dollar in storage.
Similar, investing a dollar in wind & solar will pay itself back very quickly. Investing that dollar into transport or industrial decarbonization will have a much longer return.
Let's see how long it takes them to realize they should have gone with the latest nuclear power tech and will eventually be unable to meet demand with anything but coal or nuclear (unless something changes).
I'm wondering what scenario you're considering that natural gas won't suffice but coal will. Alberta is celebrating simply transitioning from one fossil fuel to another, slightly cleaner burning, one.
They are certainly still struggling with renewables when they are needed the most, such as -35 at 7PM, long after the sun has gone down and the wind turbine's hydraulics are too cold to function safely and all our furnaces are running and everyone is cooking and doing laundry. This is also when nuclear isn't a great solution, as it's a huge spike in demand.
> This is also when nuclear isn't a great solution, as it's a huge spike in demand.
Overproduce electricity, then burn off the excess to match load to demand.
It's counter-intuitive, but the cost structure of producing electricity via nuclear is different from fossil fuels. The unit costs per kW/h of nuclear is negligible compared to the capital costs of building a plant. Making it economically viable to "waste" electricity to match load to demand.
At some point down the road, people will do the cost benefit on capturing excess production in battery packs vs expanding the existing nuclear facilities to meet demand.
The fun with overproducing nuclear is it requires the ability to successfully forecast growth a decade from now.
Why would you let your hydraulics freeze?
Sorry, I did some research, it's not just hydraulics, but at below -30 materials experience significant changes in strength and many become brittle and prone to breaking, demanding that they be shut down.
My mechanic father has a saying - badly maintained stuff breaks down at -30 C, but everything can break at -40 C.
Well, then you'd better choose materials that are appropriate for the location. There are wind turbines in Antarctica. It's just a matter of engineering.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90429887/sustainable-living-less...
You... know how big Alberta is, right? It's twice the size of Germany/the same size as Texas, with a population of only a little over 4 million, with a pretty much linear trend in population for several decades now, so you're going to have to do a bit more work if you want to make the argument that they're going to run out of the power necessary to serve the province any time soon.
Alberta’s population growth trend in the last 5 years is anything but linear. It has accelerated significantly driven in large part by new to Canada immigrants and those escaping higher cost of living provinces like BC and ON.
Source: https://www.alberta.ca/population-statistics
That page shows population change measured in several tens of thousands, not several hundreds of thousands, so as a year over year increase that's basically still linear, just with a slightly higher coefficient, but nowhere near enough to scream population boom. Just an above average increase.
If we look at the population numbers for the last 24 years there's nothing particularly out of the ordinary going on [1].
Sure, the last two years could be the start of an explosive increase, but the drop in year-over-year increase as indicated by the charts from your own link suggests it's far more likely to return to the overall trend.
But of course: even if the population doubled over the next 5 years, Alberta is still the size of Texas, and has plenty of room to address those energy needs using renewables.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/569880/population-estima...
I'm not debating the merits of renewables, I'm just stating that the population growth in Alberta is not linear. And the population IS growing by hundreds of thousands annually. To quote directly from Alberta population statistics:
"Alberta’s population growth continues to accelerate. In the 12 months preceding April 1, 2024, the province’s population expanded by 204,677 people, or 4.41%." [1]
"This represents a significant increase from the previous year (3.67% between 2022-23) and the highest April 1 year-over-year growth rate since 1981. Alberta’s population expanded by 49,138 residents over the first quarter of 2024, or 1.02%." [1]
The vast majority (over 160,000) of those new residents of Alberta were immigrants to Canada, driven by the federal government's massive immigration ramp-up. The immigration levels plan targets a continued increase in immigration through 2026 [2] and with Alberta having a comparatively low cost of living and very high quality of life, it's hard to believe that trend in population growth will not continue.
[1] https://www.alberta.ca/population-statistics
[2] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/co...