https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_%E2%80%93_New_England_T...
Quebec has that hydroelectric power production. And their power grid is cheap and pretty clean. And their government and populace is highly pro-EV and yeah, it's great.
Ontario a bit second to that but reliant on nuclear, and those nuclear plants will be going offline for maintenance and its ... a whole thing.
Under Doug Ford we just keep increasing the amount of natural gas in the mix and the prices keep going up on electricity. (This being the guy who lied his way into power claiming that under the Ontario Liberals we had "the most expensive power in North America" [again a total lie])
The rest of the country? Oof. Have you looked at the prairie provinces power generation?
My own research and modelling basically showed... if we're going to remain energy independent (i.e. the ability for SaskPower to power the entire province without net imports), including riding out the worst scenario (cold, dark, and calm in the winter) for a week while moving towards minimum carbon, it's going to pretty much need to be a strong mix of nuclear, solar, wind, and natural gas peakers. We keep the existing hydro capacity because it's great, but there isn't much more to be had.
Where it gets really gnarly is looking at also eliminating SaskEnergy and transitioning residential and commercial heating and cooling to electric (e.g. heat pumps) is going to require at least 3x the nuclear buildout that we've got planned PLUS significant energy retrofits to every house. Trying to move to electric-only HVAC without energy retrotifts adds like another 33% nuclear capacity requirements (+ additional solar and wind of course) and it starts to get financially infeasible.
Related, it seems like the only pull that nuclear is getting in AB as an adjunct support for the fossil fuel industry, to help with oil sands extraction. Which just shows how distorted the political-economic system is at this point.
There's two factors to this:
- Before SMRs, we wouldn't have been able to build conventional Big Reactors without violating grid redundancy requirements. Currently we have about 5,300 MW of installed capacity. With a conventional 1GW+ reactor, hitting the N-1 redundancy requirements would've been challenging. Losing ~20% of your capacity because one facility goes offline isn't acceptable unless you've got tons of extra generation capacity (either sitting idle or nominally running for export)
- The Sask NDP has traditionally been very staunchly opposed to nuclear. The SaskParty won their first election in 2007 and that was a pretty tenuous situation. They certainly didn't have much of an appetite to make any bold/potentially unpopular moves early on in their tenure. There's a large contingent of swing voters who in the early days likely would've rebelled against the SaskParty proposing nuclear. Even now it's moving very slowly; I appreciate that we're letting Darlington build the first BWRX-300 before we start building our own (Darlington is already sited for it and is honestly a better place for FOAK).
Edit: I missed this line from your comment:
> to help with oil sands extraction
That was a joke I used to tell in the early 2000s to upset my further-left anti-nuclear college friends: we should build nuclear reactors in the oil sands so that we can use the waste heat to process the bitumen. I'm honestly pretty amazed that no one had an aneurism.
These problems are very political, but also very fixable. I think (well, hope) once it becomes clear that cheap Chinese EVs are here to stay the tide will begin to turn. In terms of total lifetime cost, you can either spend 200K CAD on a Silverado or 50K CAD on a Dolphin.
They're hardly anti-O&G but they do have a slightly more reasonable position around energy mix and renewables. Investing hardcore back into the green energy sectors that Smith tried to kneecap would really improve the situation there.
(If that happens, I'll probably move back to Edmonton after 25 years away. My daughter is doing her BFA at the UofA anyways, and my whole family is still there)
you cant fix it without nationalizing control over BC and quebec hydro and alberta oil, and using them to canada's benefit rather than the individual provinces'
that constitutional reform isnt gonna happen
If there was even a vague intimation of any of that happening now, the hair-brained small Alberta seppy minority would quadruple in size and funding.
https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/pr...
The bulk of the rest of the west's population is Alberta and they generate most of their electricity from natural gas. That province is Canada's sore spot from an emissions and CO2 perspective.
(I'm from Alberta originally, and fled during the Klein years. I have many ... sensitive ... spots about that place)
That said... electricity generation aside... Massive LNG terminals on the BC coast aren't exactly a positive for the planet. In fact the approval of the first by the Trudeau gov't basically blew Canada's possibility of ever meeting its international climate commitments just on its own.
Natural gas sucks.
Not a lot of critical discussion is permitted because of the sheer money at stake. So many resource corporations, their employees, towns, and a heavily lobbied government don't want to sit and have a rational discussion about, oh, say, "How and when will we ween ourselves off LNG because we should?" :-|
Especially when it comes to economic development in Northern BC or even outside the lower mainland at all, it's difficult to walk away from extractive industries.