PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history

NishanStepak

A major contributing factor to what is being described is the development of superconducting technology. This is includes high temperature superconducting wind turbines, superconducting hydroelectric turbines, and superconducting transmission lines. From reading the outline, it looks like this project will capitalize on these new technologies.

nish__

At the end of the day, nothing beats hydro electric power. It's hidden, consistent and the technology is very mature. Really the OG of renewable energy. If we could get our appliances running efficiently enough, I think we could run the whole grid on it.

hn_throwaway_99

It's really ironic I think that Donald Trump, despite his "drill baby drill" rhetoric and paying billions of dollars to halt wind projects, will likely be responsible for the largest surge in clean energy developments in history. Trump has shown that the US can not be trusted and is not a reliable ally, and his Iran-scapade, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine before it, has shown every other country that the absolute worst thing you can do is be dependent on energy imports from despotic nations (US now included) and volatile areas of the world. All these countries are racing to wean themselves off fossil fuels as fast as possible, largely due to Trump.

diego_moita

Well, finally! One of the reasons I voted for him were his environmental credentials. But what he did since elected was cozying up with Alberta and their oil barons.

igor47

This is a genuinely huge deal, and I think it's worth appreciating why hydro makes sense here specifically, even though the headline cost looks steep. On paper, this project runs around $5M per megawatt of capacity, while utility solar can be built for roughly a fifth of that. But that comparison is misleading once you factor in capacity factor --Churchill Falls runs near 74% of its max output almost all the time, while solar in most places only hits 20-25%. To match the same annual output, you'd need to build solar at more than 3x its nameplate capacity. And even then, batteries only solve the day/night problem. Labrador can get stretches of overcast, snowy weather for a week or more at a time, and multi-day battery storage is still wildly expensive compared to a reservoir that just stores water until it's needed. Try this same approach somewhere sunny and cloud-free like Texas, and solar+storage would almost certainly win, especially when accounting for the land area that needs to be submerged by the reservoir. This project makes sense because it's matched to the geography.

sleepyguy

14 Gigawatts for 70 Billion? Is that a good dollar value? An announcement means nothing unless it is followed through. It's results that matter. Carney likes to make a lot of announcements but there have been no results or even the start of any of these announcements. I am of the opinion this is much to do about nothing, like every other announcement made by not just Carney but his predecessors. It's all just theater for the masses. Why not just do it, like they did it decades ago, why does it have to be some kind of announcement or is this just a political ploy to garner more support while doing nothing? I don't believe anything any of these guys say because talk is cheap and building anything in Canada is nearly impossible. Junk away....