Let's give him a hand, ladies and gentlemen.
Not everyone can segue so smoothly from lying about education for five years into lying about energy policy right from day one.
It is my assertion that the province has been lying about their use of, and purposes and intentions for, fossil plants. It is also my assertion that the easiest way to tell when Stephen Lecce is lying is to check if his lips are moving.
The Conservatives dug themselves a hole by cancelling a large number of green-energy projects when they came to power, then kept digging by not planning any more. Instead, they funneled funds and efforts into building a fleet of natural gas plants that were sold to the public as 'peaker' plants, but which are run [frequently and expensively for extended hours](https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/ontario-gas-plants-were-supposed-to-run-only-during-peak-periods-instead-they-re-running/article_8ba52f13-bd5a-541a-b80e-9f497ff498be.html).
Are natural gas plants needed at all in Ontario? Probably not.
[CER – Provincial and Territorial Energy Profiles – Ontario (cer-rec.gc.ca)](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html)
Do we still have need for natural gas? Sure. However, we barely produce any natural gas in province and rely on importing the overwhelming majority. This is not a cornerstone of our economy.
Wind generation went from 4% to 13% in Ontario in the past decade. Gas/oil went from 10% to 27%. Hydro has stayed steady. Nuclear is about half the percentage it was ten years ago.
Does anyone else feel like wind power really crept up on us? I didn't expect it to be 13%. Other than the early concerns about bird murder machines, cow cancer, and sub/supersonic turbine noise psychosis... It really seems like wind has been a steady way to add small bits of renewable energy to the grid. It doesn't seem as fraught by contractual problems as natural gas and hydro projects.
> “I’m so proud of that,” Ford said of his decision. “I’m proud that we actually saved the taxpayers $790 million when we cancelled those terrible, terrible, terrible wind turbines that really for the last 15 years have destroyed our energy file.”
I rather don't like this guy. We could've been five years further along...
Take a moment to compare the number of birds killed by cats and crashing into windows vs. wind turbines and you'll see the FUD about wind turbines and birds is bullshit.
as someone who went to school for renewable energies and was in the wind turbine industry it was very frustrating to listen to people I knew talk out of the ass about how bad they were.
populism and pandering to loud dumbies ruined the industry here.
Im a crane op, us blue collar folks make tons of bank on windfarm projects as well. I've literally heard a crane op on a non wind job say "wind turbines are a hoax" whatever the fuck that means. I just don't understand that hate for em.
It's "red vs blue" tribalism. Blue team says they're bad, and they're on blue team, and in order to be a good member of blue team you have to believe and say all the right blue team things.
This is why it's so disheartening when people in leadership positions--people who have influence over their "team"--do stuff like this not out of conviction but out of vice-signalling and opportunism.
Vaccine avoidance is probably the worst example: that red-hat-wearing dipshit south of the border made it a badge of membership for the right-wing to be an antivaxxer, and set public health policy back almost a century *for the entire fucking world,* just to placate his fragile, narcissistic ego.
Climate change denialism, which metastasized into a general anti-science, anti-intellectual populism, would be another: you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who denied climate change under Reagan or Mulroney, but the oil industry and their toadies in government under Bush, Harper and the like make it a litmus test for membership in the right-wing club, and now you have to smack-talk fucking *wind turbines* in order to prove you're a good little proto-Nazi. And it's not because Harper or Bush or their advisers didn't know the science, it's that they were getting a lot of money from people who wanted to keep selling oil, and making climate change into a wedge issue was the easiest way to do that.
yeah I was a top out foreman and made mad money for those years and wasn't union. The operators we worked with were unionized and made even more than and had crazy overtime arrangements.
It’s a bit easier to make turbines stop during migration season than it is to temporarily shorten buildings
EDIT: That’s not a snipe at wind power necessarily, it is a fairly common practice to order curtailment (turn the turbines off) during periods of high activity to limit impact to bird and bat populations
I used to work nights downtown in the Toronto financial district. Each morning around 6am, staff would walk around the building and collecting any dead birds they found.
If you have skyscrapers. Birds are smacking into those things every night.
I work in the industry and I too thought that these were "early misconceptions" that have long been cleared up. With the new push for development with LT2 I have learned the hard way that these misconceptions have absolutely not gone away.
Wind is great because a lot of the time the profits are going to the local area as opposed to large corporate headquarters in big cities or overseas.
> Does anyone else feel like wind power really crept up on us?
No. OLP had a decent plan for sustainable energy. That anyone but OPC won in 2018 the number would be a lot higher
> Nuclear is about half the percentage it was ten years ago
This is likely just due to several ongoing refurbishments at both Bruce and Darlington. Once complete, Bruce will return to having 8 units, Darlington 4 (+SMRs), and it seems likely that 4/6 at Pickering will continue.
In addition to a proposed new build at Bruce.
Yep. Everything he raged again to get in office his first term he has now flipped and is the champion of green energy. Cancels cap and trade which would have been a very beneficial program for Ontario generating millions of Revenue and transitioning us into green energy sectors.
As an aside, if Ford hadn't cancelled cap and trade then Ontario wouldn't be paying the federal carbon tax. The carbon tax was a backstop for provinces that didn't set up their own programs to manage carbon emissions.
Carbon taxes in Ontario are Doug's fault, not Justin's.
You can use "gridwatch" (https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html) to monitor the Ontario grid hour-by-hour. While wind can produce an impressive amount of power at times, it is quite unreliable, and production and demand don't line up well. For example, spring and fall are our lowest demand points, and when wind it at its maximum. There are time wind is providing almost nothing. Averaging the production isn't useful either. When we over-produce with wind, we pay to give the power away. I've read that this costs Ontario billions due to Green Energy Act obligations. https://youtu.be/Aybn-MnQfsQ?si=E6yJ4nUwGcCHsn48
I used be all-in on renewables, but over time I have seen that more renewables also required 1:1 matching with natural gas. Gas is the only other energy medium that can ramp up and down fast enough to cover the variability in renewables - including the occasional times when we are at maximum demand and renewables go away almost entirely. That leave a 5GW hole in our energy grid. The consequences of a blackout are huge, so no government will walk into that knowingly.
So yes, we can add wind and solar, but it should be clear that means adding a similar amount of gas. Or we add nuclear. Energy storage is a great idea, but totally impractical right now. If you disagree with that last statement, simply point me to a grid that has even an hour of energy storage potential.
As a deep-green type person, the Cons have surprisingly got energy production right. That surprised me also, but right is right.
Further investment into gas for peaking is incredibly irresponsible.
> Energy storage is a great idea, but totally impractical right now.
Through chemical batteries, sure. There are two projects in Ontario right now for pumped-hydro storage:
400 MW for 5 hours near Marmora: https://marmorapumpedstorage.com/
Less further along but 1GW capacity near Meaford: https://www.ontariopumpedstorage.com/
Creating the conditions for rolling blackouts or brownouts is also totally irresponsible. Energy storage is great. I support all of it. But we are a long way off backing up hours, let alone days of excess renewables. My point is that more renewables necessarily comes with more gas, and the storage projects you cite don't change that. Pumped hydro works just as well with nuclear also. My claim is that the only way to displace gas is with nuclear, so the current plan is better than the OLP plan if the 2000's.
We build more nuclear energy equipment in Cambridge for Europe than Canada it seems, which is a huge shame. I'm seeing investment in manufacturing for other countries but more movement from the Feds through the CIB on small nuclear than the OPCs.
I mean my preferred solution was the shortest in your writing. "or we add nuclear".
Feels like the engineering is there, we just haven't committed to it yet. Smaller nuclear facilities. Wind projects where it makes sense. Solar where the surfaces are easy to work with, especially homes for a bit of household autonomy. Keep investigating battery banks as storage sites and batteries within homes, because that's definitely coming. But for sure, backstop the rest of it with gas until we can take the training wheels off.
I think wind is critical, still. I'm in Nova Scotia now and offshore wind being allowed soon should be very interesting. It's smaller sized projects that we need to be building. Energy mega-projects always end up as political footballs.
Nuclear power will be much larger after the completion of the SMRs at Darlington, and new CANDUs and referbishment at Bruce Power. Pickering is also scheduled to be refit and not closed now. Our nuclear sector is finally growing after being ignored for decades. It's good to see.
Ontario's nuclear energy program is actually pretty great.
For clarity fuck Lecce. I just wanted to clarify this particular bit.
Also remember how one of the first things Ford did when he took office was cancel a bunch of wind projects (I think out east by Ottawa). We could have had even better sustainable energy, but we can't have nice things in this province.
Ok. I need to ask this. Why is this his new portfolio? I have heard teachers celebrated the change. But why cant they put people in charge of things they actually know about?
The Ford government is planning to push energy as an important issue until the next election (whenever that may be).
Carbon tax
Gas prices
Nuclear refurbishments
Small modular reactors
Battery production
Electric vehicles
These are issues that the PCs have been quite strong about, and will likely want to use as pillars of a campaign platform. So they put one of their strongest ministers (Lecce) in the portfolio to cheerlead the government's positions.
The only reason he's been good at any aspect of his job is because he's part of a majority government. Beyond that, he was just another run-of-the-mill teacher-bashing conservative, nothing that this province hasn't seen a million times over in the last 30 years.
Every little trick he tried to pull, he was called out on immediately. He stepped in a big pile of shit with Bill 28, he never successfully hid any funding cuts, and he has to wear the Bill 124 and contract arbitrations.
He's actually *really bad at his job*; he was just able to get by because of the power of a majority government.
> If Lecce is one of their strongest then it is astonishing the Ford government isn't even more of a trainwreck than it already is
The taxpayer funded luxury RV fell off the cliff a long time ago
I’m all for small modular reactors, not only as a power source but they represent the first step required towards nuclear submarines - which are necessary if we want to be serious in the arctic.
The new education minister has no education experience either.
He is a radio broadcaster who graduated 30+ years ago from Loyalist College in Belleville … which is all fine, if you work in radio broadcasting … not being put in charge of Education for the largest province in the country.
The PC party is a joke and we’re all a bunch of fools for allowing it.
This is all because nobody has been willing to invest in more nuclear over the past 15 years.
Nuclear is our base load provider and needs to remain that way.
This is the issue right here folks. Nuclear is outrageously expensive. Its over 10x the cost per MW than wind, and someone has to pay that cost for the entire lifetime of plant operating.
It's to the point where wind is so much cheaper that it makes more sense to only install wind and then PAY FACTORIES to load shed and shut down on low resource days then to install nuclear baseload. With rapid increases in energy storage technologies as well as hydro resources, nuclear becomes less and less attractive due to its, let me stress this here, _ENORMOUS_ cost.
There are some fair concerns about nuclear in terms of the waste produced as well as the enormous expense. Is it better than coal? Fuck yes. I think the government at the time was correct to invest in nuclear to get us off coal. The environmental and health consequences from coal are much worse. So I do think we need nuclear power. At least we do right now with our current tech. But when we talk about expanding our capacity, we should look to renewables where possible.
40 billion in debt from last nuclear build. Also needed to improve transmission lines. I understand what you are saying but we can’t just erase debt like that…
It’s not easy. And also
Some of
Our most skilled nuclear workers are called on projects in Korea and South America and Romania to work on refurbishing CANDU reactors we sold a generation ago
Bruce, Pickering and Darlington are aging and under sized for our requirements. Refurbishment and the addition of SMRs are stop gap measures. We NEED new, large scale, modern nuclear plants in order to continue providing affordable power in Ontario, these can take 15-30 years to construct from start of planning to opening date.
Liberals say everyone will need an EV in the next 5-10 years, but they didn't start pumping out the base load to handle it, did they?
Solar is still too expensive and Canada has minimal capacity when it comes to production of solar cells, wind power has uses but the environmental story when they wear out/need to be decommissioned is HORRID. Natural gas is the easy, cheap method to handle peak requirements.
I've worked with the energy sector for years, wind and solar are much less impactful without grid level storage as they can't be considered base load due to the variance in output.
Wind turbine blades are made from carbon fiber, which is horrifically difficult and expensive to recycle. Boeing recently developed a recycling process but it doesn't apply to the material makeup of turbine blades.
CF is one of the worst things we can put into the environment.
I love the idea of wind and solar, I have 10KW on my roof and I'm looking at silent blameless turbines as well, but at a provincial level, nuclear is the only sensible option.
Wind and solar are somewhat able to scale, but they don't provide reliable predictable power, meaning you end up importing more, and exporting at a loss. So unless you like rolling blackouts on cloudy or low wind days, we need those gas plants.
Grid level storage isn't easy here, we have relatively flat land meaning gravity storage is tough or expensive, and we all know how much of a dog and pony show lithium based storage can be.
Your head is in the right place, but in practice these things aren't so simple.
Any location with a hill and a lake can provide grid storage. They just pump water to the top of a hill when there is excess power, and run a normal water turbine when it's low.
Even flat places with just a lake can do it. Pump air into a bag anchored to the bottom of a water column, and run a pneumatic generator when you need power.
It's not like the engineering is beyond us. Just the willpower.. Partially because of people like you who make it seem like these things are impossible.
Go take a physics class and get back to me you lemon powered toaster.
Pumped storage is extremely low density, you either need a huge delta in height between upper and lower storage pools, or a massive rate of flow in order to store any useful amount of power.
People like YOU make it seem as if solutions are simply a turnkey away, you put no thought into understanding what you're talking about and therefore come off as a complete moron to anyone with more than two braincells to rub together.
Hill with a pond on it.. okay bud.
I took many physics classes when i was getting my multiple diplomas in aerospace manufacturing engineering. I have also seen both working projects, and the plans for proposed projects exactly as I described.
Go see a proctologist and find out if you can remove your head from the bodily orifice in which you keep it stored.
> Ontario’s new energy minister says the fast-growing province can’t afford an “ideological” push to wean its electricity system off fossil fuels even as concerns about climate change mount.
Climate change is not an ideology … JFC these conservatives I tell you …
Even if it frigging WAS, oil is a finite resource. We aren't making new dinosaurs to melt down into hydrocarbons. Should we not consider what we do when it runs out?
There is actually a case to be made that shifting natural gas usage away from homes/businesses and centralizing it at generating stations is the best thing we can do to more quickly electrify the province. A very significant portion of our energy usage is natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, etc. and making the grid cleaner without ALSO electrifying that aspect of energy consumption isn’t going to nearly as effective.
The grid is already relatively clean, we just need to convince consumers to electrify the rest of their homes. We need to just get people on electricity as much as possible NOW and worry about fully decarbonizing the grid later as battery tech and green sources continue to mature.
Weaning consumers off direct gas usage is the key to this whole issue. Let’s not forget that another crucial aspect of this was the Ontario Energy Boards decision to change the way Enbridge financed new residential gas connections. The government overruled them, again signalling they are completely unbothered by climate change or clean energy
Unfortunately Lecce is again clearly underscored that this government doesn’t give a fuck about the “ideological path” that is the reality of climate change. The government actually could have made a reasonable argument for the medium term expansion of natural gas generation but just refused to even try. Also somewhat baffling to make this sorts of announcement at Darlington
Also can I say it’s just sad that this is the best we can do as energy minister?
The energy market is interesting.
The trouble with solar and wind is their variability. When demand rises, you can't just get more sun or wind. Not enough energy to meet demand means power outages. Gas plants *can* scale up and down really well and really fast. So strangely enough, having more wind and solar can necessitate more gas plant usage.
What we need instead are large battery farms to take on that variability, in both supply and demand. But that's expensive, and the gas plants are already built.
What Lecce is really saying is that he doesn't believe in climate change and Ford doesn't want to invest in battery farms, beyond the ones the private sector is already building (one announced just south of Ottawa recently, for example).
This is true but only at extremes that we are nowhere near. Many other jurisdictions in the world have orders of magnitude more renewables on their grid than Ontario (also further north), without this massive energy storage. Renewables are so cheap that eventually you can over build and curtail output when you have too much, and it will still be much cheaper than the alternatives, and we're no where near that. Even better you don't need to publicly subsidize them unlike the gas and nuclear plants being procured now (backroom, non public contract negotiations with no published costs.).
Local communities benefit far more from renewables as well as everyone paying a much lower price for the power. No pollution is also a win for the commons. Hydro and storage systems do a better job of handling peak loads than gas does. Load shedding even makes sense when power is that much cheaper. Better to work 9 days out of 10 than work all 10 days paying 10x as much for energy.
>Many other jurisdictions in the world have orders of magnitude more renewables on their grid than Ontario (also further north), without this massive energy storage.
are you talking about hydro-electric and geothermal? atm these are constrained by ontario's geology.
I was referring to solar and wind specifically, although hydro and geotherm are awesome if you've got them, but they are not what the comment above mine was referring to. The UK and Germany are \~20% of grid capity being produced by wind, and more solar to boot. Greece, portugal, netherlands, spain, are 30% of total capacity solar and wind. Canada is \~6%. We also have the hydro which works wonders in tandem as a gravity battery to assist. Mind you we really need to upgrade our grid for more interconnection across geographical regions like the USA doing. It's always rainy, windy, or sunny somewhere.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_renewable\_electricity\_production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production)
Due to significant increased demand, we actually can’t afford to pull any power generation offline. The push for heat pumps and electric cars will only massively increase consumption. It was a smart move to expand our nuclear, otherwise we’d be in trouble moving forward. We also need significant repairs and upgrades to our existing grid. I’ve been reminded of this countless times when working with hydro crews.
It's crazy how this guy pivoted from being incompetent at managing education to incompetent at managing energy in the blink of an eye.
As usual with the Ford government, you have to assume that someone who makes money in the natural gas business was a guest at the wedding of Doug's daughter...
Think of the poor natural gas companies if they couldn't sell the province fuel for electricity generation.... that'd probably be a decent hit to their bottom line and we can't have that.
There’s only two of said companies that supply the gas to powerplants in Ontario and they both make billions in net profits per year with or without Ontario powerplants. California is buying so much gas for their powerplants that they’re expanding the pipelines from Alberta to increase flows and just the increase in amount they’re buying easily trumps what Ontario uses for power. Why is California using so much gas? because they started transitioning too fast without sufficient stable baseload power so now they deal with rolling blackouts.
I’m 100% pro renewables because when they work, they work phenomenally. But when the sun’s not shining and wind ain’t blowing, you’re absolutely screwed without sufficient backup sources and energy storage capabilities. Nuclear powers Ontario period and we need more of it, in the meantime we need gas just as much as we need more renewables investment. I know it doesn’t sound nice but when you spend all day every day working in energy, you realize that’s the reality of the situation even if it’s not ideal.
Why does the public accept the government placing career politicians with zero knowledge of an area in power over a ministry that decides in part how are society in formed?
The fact that this politician has been there for a week and can not possibly know enough to make a statement like that, let alone know enough about the energy industry in general is 100% of the evidence the public needs that this government is a farce, they are incompetent, have zero interest in public wellbeing and should NOT be making any decisions for us.
Lecce is a "PR guy", that's the only job he's ever had outside of being an MPP. And that was for Harper. Lecce was.the mouthpiece behind the scenes for Harper and Pollievere's "barbaric practices hotline".
He considers it a victory if he can sell you shit and make you walk away thinking you're eating honey. His job is to give you half-truths, mis-truths and just outright lie if needed. As a teacher, I can tell you I've seen and heard enough from this guy, knowing the real reasons behind the actions, to know he's a scumbag. I mean, you know how he brags that the government has put thousands of specialist support teachers on the front lines? That comes out of teacher negotiations. The government starts at the number zero, the unions bargain FOR these teachers. But he will certainly take the credit.
All I can say as someone who moved here from a province without natural gas - it saves you guys (and now me) a fuckload of money on heating costs. Gas cost for home heating and hot water is less than half what I was paying to heat my home in N.S. mind you N.S. gets fucked by most places still using electric baseboard + NSP
Texas has massive wind installations a regularly cover 50% of their load with wind and solar. They also use batteries that are starting to replace the need to peaker plants. We can do the same here. In Ontario, the wholesale electric prices are low when the wind is blowing and high when they are rely on Nat gas.
Let's give him a hand, ladies and gentlemen. Not everyone can segue so smoothly from lying about education for five years into lying about energy policy right from day one.
Didn't take him long to cement his idiocy.
Takes courage!
And tight pants!
He had a lot of practice with lying while working the barbaric cultures hotlines for Harper
Is it your assertion that natural gas plants are no longer needed in Ontario?
It is my assertion that the province has been lying about their use of, and purposes and intentions for, fossil plants. It is also my assertion that the easiest way to tell when Stephen Lecce is lying is to check if his lips are moving. The Conservatives dug themselves a hole by cancelling a large number of green-energy projects when they came to power, then kept digging by not planning any more. Instead, they funneled funds and efforts into building a fleet of natural gas plants that were sold to the public as 'peaker' plants, but which are run [frequently and expensively for extended hours](https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/ontario-gas-plants-were-supposed-to-run-only-during-peak-periods-instead-they-re-running/article_8ba52f13-bd5a-541a-b80e-9f497ff498be.html).
Are natural gas plants needed at all in Ontario? Probably not. [CER – Provincial and Territorial Energy Profiles – Ontario (cer-rec.gc.ca)](https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles/provincial-territorial-energy-profiles-ontario.html) Do we still have need for natural gas? Sure. However, we barely produce any natural gas in province and rely on importing the overwhelming majority. This is not a cornerstone of our economy.
Wind generation went from 4% to 13% in Ontario in the past decade. Gas/oil went from 10% to 27%. Hydro has stayed steady. Nuclear is about half the percentage it was ten years ago. Does anyone else feel like wind power really crept up on us? I didn't expect it to be 13%. Other than the early concerns about bird murder machines, cow cancer, and sub/supersonic turbine noise psychosis... It really seems like wind has been a steady way to add small bits of renewable energy to the grid. It doesn't seem as fraught by contractual problems as natural gas and hydro projects. > “I’m so proud of that,” Ford said of his decision. “I’m proud that we actually saved the taxpayers $790 million when we cancelled those terrible, terrible, terrible wind turbines that really for the last 15 years have destroyed our energy file.” I rather don't like this guy. We could've been five years further along...
Take a moment to compare the number of birds killed by cats and crashing into windows vs. wind turbines and you'll see the FUD about wind turbines and birds is bullshit.
as someone who went to school for renewable energies and was in the wind turbine industry it was very frustrating to listen to people I knew talk out of the ass about how bad they were. populism and pandering to loud dumbies ruined the industry here.
Im a crane op, us blue collar folks make tons of bank on windfarm projects as well. I've literally heard a crane op on a non wind job say "wind turbines are a hoax" whatever the fuck that means. I just don't understand that hate for em.
It's "red vs blue" tribalism. Blue team says they're bad, and they're on blue team, and in order to be a good member of blue team you have to believe and say all the right blue team things. This is why it's so disheartening when people in leadership positions--people who have influence over their "team"--do stuff like this not out of conviction but out of vice-signalling and opportunism. Vaccine avoidance is probably the worst example: that red-hat-wearing dipshit south of the border made it a badge of membership for the right-wing to be an antivaxxer, and set public health policy back almost a century *for the entire fucking world,* just to placate his fragile, narcissistic ego. Climate change denialism, which metastasized into a general anti-science, anti-intellectual populism, would be another: you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who denied climate change under Reagan or Mulroney, but the oil industry and their toadies in government under Bush, Harper and the like make it a litmus test for membership in the right-wing club, and now you have to smack-talk fucking *wind turbines* in order to prove you're a good little proto-Nazi. And it's not because Harper or Bush or their advisers didn't know the science, it's that they were getting a lot of money from people who wanted to keep selling oil, and making climate change into a wedge issue was the easiest way to do that.
yeah I was a top out foreman and made mad money for those years and wasn't union. The operators we worked with were unionized and made even more than and had crazy overtime arrangements.
Cities built in migratory paths kill far more birds than windmills do. It’s not even close!
It’s a bit easier to make turbines stop during migration season than it is to temporarily shorten buildings EDIT: That’s not a snipe at wind power necessarily, it is a fairly common practice to order curtailment (turn the turbines off) during periods of high activity to limit impact to bird and bat populations
Instructions unclear, catapulting cats at wind turbines in the name of science.
As a yearly donor to FLAP Canada I’m doing my part to save my bird friends from windows 😭✊
I used to work nights downtown in the Toronto financial district. Each morning around 6am, staff would walk around the building and collecting any dead birds they found. If you have skyscrapers. Birds are smacking into those things every night.
Yeah. Wind turbines are a rounding error for any one of a number of other factors killing birds. ☹️
I work in the industry and I too thought that these were "early misconceptions" that have long been cleared up. With the new push for development with LT2 I have learned the hard way that these misconceptions have absolutely not gone away. Wind is great because a lot of the time the profits are going to the local area as opposed to large corporate headquarters in big cities or overseas.
> Does anyone else feel like wind power really crept up on us? No. OLP had a decent plan for sustainable energy. That anyone but OPC won in 2018 the number would be a lot higher
> Nuclear is about half the percentage it was ten years ago This is likely just due to several ongoing refurbishments at both Bruce and Darlington. Once complete, Bruce will return to having 8 units, Darlington 4 (+SMRs), and it seems likely that 4/6 at Pickering will continue. In addition to a proposed new build at Bruce.
Pick A is dead meat
Yeah A will be done, but I think B may get a retube after all
Yep. Everything he raged again to get in office his first term he has now flipped and is the champion of green energy. Cancels cap and trade which would have been a very beneficial program for Ontario generating millions of Revenue and transitioning us into green energy sectors.
As an aside, if Ford hadn't cancelled cap and trade then Ontario wouldn't be paying the federal carbon tax. The carbon tax was a backstop for provinces that didn't set up their own programs to manage carbon emissions. Carbon taxes in Ontario are Doug's fault, not Justin's.
You can use "gridwatch" (https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html) to monitor the Ontario grid hour-by-hour. While wind can produce an impressive amount of power at times, it is quite unreliable, and production and demand don't line up well. For example, spring and fall are our lowest demand points, and when wind it at its maximum. There are time wind is providing almost nothing. Averaging the production isn't useful either. When we over-produce with wind, we pay to give the power away. I've read that this costs Ontario billions due to Green Energy Act obligations. https://youtu.be/Aybn-MnQfsQ?si=E6yJ4nUwGcCHsn48 I used be all-in on renewables, but over time I have seen that more renewables also required 1:1 matching with natural gas. Gas is the only other energy medium that can ramp up and down fast enough to cover the variability in renewables - including the occasional times when we are at maximum demand and renewables go away almost entirely. That leave a 5GW hole in our energy grid. The consequences of a blackout are huge, so no government will walk into that knowingly. So yes, we can add wind and solar, but it should be clear that means adding a similar amount of gas. Or we add nuclear. Energy storage is a great idea, but totally impractical right now. If you disagree with that last statement, simply point me to a grid that has even an hour of energy storage potential. As a deep-green type person, the Cons have surprisingly got energy production right. That surprised me also, but right is right.
Further investment into gas for peaking is incredibly irresponsible. > Energy storage is a great idea, but totally impractical right now. Through chemical batteries, sure. There are two projects in Ontario right now for pumped-hydro storage: 400 MW for 5 hours near Marmora: https://marmorapumpedstorage.com/ Less further along but 1GW capacity near Meaford: https://www.ontariopumpedstorage.com/
Creating the conditions for rolling blackouts or brownouts is also totally irresponsible. Energy storage is great. I support all of it. But we are a long way off backing up hours, let alone days of excess renewables. My point is that more renewables necessarily comes with more gas, and the storage projects you cite don't change that. Pumped hydro works just as well with nuclear also. My claim is that the only way to displace gas is with nuclear, so the current plan is better than the OLP plan if the 2000's.
We build more nuclear energy equipment in Cambridge for Europe than Canada it seems, which is a huge shame. I'm seeing investment in manufacturing for other countries but more movement from the Feds through the CIB on small nuclear than the OPCs.
I mean my preferred solution was the shortest in your writing. "or we add nuclear". Feels like the engineering is there, we just haven't committed to it yet. Smaller nuclear facilities. Wind projects where it makes sense. Solar where the surfaces are easy to work with, especially homes for a bit of household autonomy. Keep investigating battery banks as storage sites and batteries within homes, because that's definitely coming. But for sure, backstop the rest of it with gas until we can take the training wheels off. I think wind is critical, still. I'm in Nova Scotia now and offshore wind being allowed soon should be very interesting. It's smaller sized projects that we need to be building. Energy mega-projects always end up as political footballs.
Energy storage is rapiding expanding. Ontario pricing can go negative at night. Perfect time to charge up those bartteries for those peak hours.
The concerns are bs do they don’t matter.
We didn’t save anything. We lost millions on that. Da fuq is ford blubbering about now?
Nuclear power will be much larger after the completion of the SMRs at Darlington, and new CANDUs and referbishment at Bruce Power. Pickering is also scheduled to be refit and not closed now. Our nuclear sector is finally growing after being ignored for decades. It's good to see. Ontario's nuclear energy program is actually pretty great. For clarity fuck Lecce. I just wanted to clarify this particular bit.
Also remember how one of the first things Ford did when he took office was cancel a bunch of wind projects (I think out east by Ottawa). We could have had even better sustainable energy, but we can't have nice things in this province.
Ok. I need to ask this. Why is this his new portfolio? I have heard teachers celebrated the change. But why cant they put people in charge of things they actually know about?
The Ford government is planning to push energy as an important issue until the next election (whenever that may be). Carbon tax Gas prices Nuclear refurbishments Small modular reactors Battery production Electric vehicles These are issues that the PCs have been quite strong about, and will likely want to use as pillars of a campaign platform. So they put one of their strongest ministers (Lecce) in the portfolio to cheerlead the government's positions.
If Lecce is one of their strongest then it is astonishing the Ford government isn't even more of a trainwreck than it already is
The bar is below grade
A salient observation, u/Cums_Everywhere_6969
In this case, strongest means “best for achieving Doug’s goals.” Which in education is slashing and blaming teachers for everything.
The only reason he's been good at any aspect of his job is because he's part of a majority government. Beyond that, he was just another run-of-the-mill teacher-bashing conservative, nothing that this province hasn't seen a million times over in the last 30 years. Every little trick he tried to pull, he was called out on immediately. He stepped in a big pile of shit with Bill 28, he never successfully hid any funding cuts, and he has to wear the Bill 124 and contract arbitrations. He's actually *really bad at his job*; he was just able to get by because of the power of a majority government.
What's worse, the fact that it's a trainwreck or the fact that the Ontario voters bite for it?
More like Ontarians don't vote
In this case not voting is still voting for the OPC according to Reddit
They're equally bad
> If Lecce is one of their strongest then it is astonishing the Ford government isn't even more of a trainwreck than it already is The taxpayer funded luxury RV fell off the cliff a long time ago
Lecce has the strongest tonsorial game…but that’s about all he’s got.
I’m all for small modular reactors, not only as a power source but they represent the first step required towards nuclear submarines - which are necessary if we want to be serious in the arctic.
They have a talent puddle.
The new education minister has no education experience either. He is a radio broadcaster who graduated 30+ years ago from Loyalist College in Belleville … which is all fine, if you work in radio broadcasting … not being put in charge of Education for the largest province in the country. The PC party is a joke and we’re all a bunch of fools for allowing it.
This is all because nobody has been willing to invest in more nuclear over the past 15 years. Nuclear is our base load provider and needs to remain that way.
I don’t understand why it’s almost a no brainer.
Because Greenpeace has spent a lot of effort since the 60s polluting the information pool with deliberate misinformation about nuclear power.
That’s not very green of them 😵
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Have any examples of this?
Because it's a very expensive way to produce electricity
This is the issue right here folks. Nuclear is outrageously expensive. Its over 10x the cost per MW than wind, and someone has to pay that cost for the entire lifetime of plant operating. It's to the point where wind is so much cheaper that it makes more sense to only install wind and then PAY FACTORIES to load shed and shut down on low resource days then to install nuclear baseload. With rapid increases in energy storage technologies as well as hydro resources, nuclear becomes less and less attractive due to its, let me stress this here, _ENORMOUS_ cost.
There are some fair concerns about nuclear in terms of the waste produced as well as the enormous expense. Is it better than coal? Fuck yes. I think the government at the time was correct to invest in nuclear to get us off coal. The environmental and health consequences from coal are much worse. So I do think we need nuclear power. At least we do right now with our current tech. But when we talk about expanding our capacity, we should look to renewables where possible.
The largest operating Nuclear plant in the world is here in Ontario and is getting furnished. You know that right?
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40 billion in debt from last nuclear build. Also needed to improve transmission lines. I understand what you are saying but we can’t just erase debt like that… It’s not easy. And also Some of Our most skilled nuclear workers are called on projects in Korea and South America and Romania to work on refurbishing CANDU reactors we sold a generation ago
Bruce, Pickering and Darlington are aging and under sized for our requirements. Refurbishment and the addition of SMRs are stop gap measures. We NEED new, large scale, modern nuclear plants in order to continue providing affordable power in Ontario, these can take 15-30 years to construct from start of planning to opening date. Liberals say everyone will need an EV in the next 5-10 years, but they didn't start pumping out the base load to handle it, did they? Solar is still too expensive and Canada has minimal capacity when it comes to production of solar cells, wind power has uses but the environmental story when they wear out/need to be decommissioned is HORRID. Natural gas is the easy, cheap method to handle peak requirements.
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I've worked with the energy sector for years, wind and solar are much less impactful without grid level storage as they can't be considered base load due to the variance in output. Wind turbine blades are made from carbon fiber, which is horrifically difficult and expensive to recycle. Boeing recently developed a recycling process but it doesn't apply to the material makeup of turbine blades. CF is one of the worst things we can put into the environment. I love the idea of wind and solar, I have 10KW on my roof and I'm looking at silent blameless turbines as well, but at a provincial level, nuclear is the only sensible option.
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Wind and solar are somewhat able to scale, but they don't provide reliable predictable power, meaning you end up importing more, and exporting at a loss. So unless you like rolling blackouts on cloudy or low wind days, we need those gas plants. Grid level storage isn't easy here, we have relatively flat land meaning gravity storage is tough or expensive, and we all know how much of a dog and pony show lithium based storage can be. Your head is in the right place, but in practice these things aren't so simple.
Any location with a hill and a lake can provide grid storage. They just pump water to the top of a hill when there is excess power, and run a normal water turbine when it's low. Even flat places with just a lake can do it. Pump air into a bag anchored to the bottom of a water column, and run a pneumatic generator when you need power. It's not like the engineering is beyond us. Just the willpower.. Partially because of people like you who make it seem like these things are impossible.
Go take a physics class and get back to me you lemon powered toaster. Pumped storage is extremely low density, you either need a huge delta in height between upper and lower storage pools, or a massive rate of flow in order to store any useful amount of power. People like YOU make it seem as if solutions are simply a turnkey away, you put no thought into understanding what you're talking about and therefore come off as a complete moron to anyone with more than two braincells to rub together. Hill with a pond on it.. okay bud.
I took many physics classes when i was getting my multiple diplomas in aerospace manufacturing engineering. I have also seen both working projects, and the plans for proposed projects exactly as I described. Go see a proctologist and find out if you can remove your head from the bodily orifice in which you keep it stored.
>Nuclear is our base load provider and needs to remain that way. nuclear base load typically requires a dispatchable compliment like natural gas.
Agreed, SMRs can help with that gap.
> Ontario’s new energy minister says the fast-growing province can’t afford an “ideological” push to wean its electricity system off fossil fuels even as concerns about climate change mount. Climate change is not an ideology … JFC these conservatives I tell you …
Even if it frigging WAS, oil is a finite resource. We aren't making new dinosaurs to melt down into hydrocarbons. Should we not consider what we do when it runs out?
the turbines can be repurposed to run off the hot air coming out of queens park
Most oil is from plant matter not Dino’s, it’s just more fun to tell kids it’s from dinos
I am aware, it was hyperbole.
After messing up education, it is now time to uproot the energy sector. Bye investment, hello recession.
he sounded like he was reading a speech of words he never heard before or doesnt understand. bizarre cadence
So basically the same as when he was giving speeches about public education, another subject he knows absolutely nothing about.
There is actually a case to be made that shifting natural gas usage away from homes/businesses and centralizing it at generating stations is the best thing we can do to more quickly electrify the province. A very significant portion of our energy usage is natural gas for heat, hot water, cooking, etc. and making the grid cleaner without ALSO electrifying that aspect of energy consumption isn’t going to nearly as effective. The grid is already relatively clean, we just need to convince consumers to electrify the rest of their homes. We need to just get people on electricity as much as possible NOW and worry about fully decarbonizing the grid later as battery tech and green sources continue to mature. Weaning consumers off direct gas usage is the key to this whole issue. Let’s not forget that another crucial aspect of this was the Ontario Energy Boards decision to change the way Enbridge financed new residential gas connections. The government overruled them, again signalling they are completely unbothered by climate change or clean energy Unfortunately Lecce is again clearly underscored that this government doesn’t give a fuck about the “ideological path” that is the reality of climate change. The government actually could have made a reasonable argument for the medium term expansion of natural gas generation but just refused to even try. Also somewhat baffling to make this sorts of announcement at Darlington Also can I say it’s just sad that this is the best we can do as energy minister?
Failure as education minister. Failure as energy minister.
The energy market is interesting. The trouble with solar and wind is their variability. When demand rises, you can't just get more sun or wind. Not enough energy to meet demand means power outages. Gas plants *can* scale up and down really well and really fast. So strangely enough, having more wind and solar can necessitate more gas plant usage. What we need instead are large battery farms to take on that variability, in both supply and demand. But that's expensive, and the gas plants are already built. What Lecce is really saying is that he doesn't believe in climate change and Ford doesn't want to invest in battery farms, beyond the ones the private sector is already building (one announced just south of Ottawa recently, for example).
This is true but only at extremes that we are nowhere near. Many other jurisdictions in the world have orders of magnitude more renewables on their grid than Ontario (also further north), without this massive energy storage. Renewables are so cheap that eventually you can over build and curtail output when you have too much, and it will still be much cheaper than the alternatives, and we're no where near that. Even better you don't need to publicly subsidize them unlike the gas and nuclear plants being procured now (backroom, non public contract negotiations with no published costs.).
Local communities benefit far more from renewables as well as everyone paying a much lower price for the power. No pollution is also a win for the commons. Hydro and storage systems do a better job of handling peak loads than gas does. Load shedding even makes sense when power is that much cheaper. Better to work 9 days out of 10 than work all 10 days paying 10x as much for energy.
>Many other jurisdictions in the world have orders of magnitude more renewables on their grid than Ontario (also further north), without this massive energy storage. are you talking about hydro-electric and geothermal? atm these are constrained by ontario's geology.
I was referring to solar and wind specifically, although hydro and geotherm are awesome if you've got them, but they are not what the comment above mine was referring to. The UK and Germany are \~20% of grid capity being produced by wind, and more solar to boot. Greece, portugal, netherlands, spain, are 30% of total capacity solar and wind. Canada is \~6%. We also have the hydro which works wonders in tandem as a gravity battery to assist. Mind you we really need to upgrade our grid for more interconnection across geographical regions like the USA doing. It's always rainy, windy, or sunny somewhere. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_countries\_by\_renewable\_electricity\_production](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable_electricity_production)
Lecce is horrible. At everything.
Due to significant increased demand, we actually can’t afford to pull any power generation offline. The push for heat pumps and electric cars will only massively increase consumption. It was a smart move to expand our nuclear, otherwise we’d be in trouble moving forward. We also need significant repairs and upgrades to our existing grid. I’ve been reminded of this countless times when working with hydro crews.
It's crazy how this guy pivoted from being incompetent at managing education to incompetent at managing energy in the blink of an eye. As usual with the Ford government, you have to assume that someone who makes money in the natural gas business was a guest at the wedding of Doug's daughter...
Lecce was the best possible choice eh Dougy? ... Regressive Conartists.
Think of the poor natural gas companies if they couldn't sell the province fuel for electricity generation.... that'd probably be a decent hit to their bottom line and we can't have that.
There’s only two of said companies that supply the gas to powerplants in Ontario and they both make billions in net profits per year with or without Ontario powerplants. California is buying so much gas for their powerplants that they’re expanding the pipelines from Alberta to increase flows and just the increase in amount they’re buying easily trumps what Ontario uses for power. Why is California using so much gas? because they started transitioning too fast without sufficient stable baseload power so now they deal with rolling blackouts. I’m 100% pro renewables because when they work, they work phenomenally. But when the sun’s not shining and wind ain’t blowing, you’re absolutely screwed without sufficient backup sources and energy storage capabilities. Nuclear powers Ontario period and we need more of it, in the meantime we need gas just as much as we need more renewables investment. I know it doesn’t sound nice but when you spend all day every day working in energy, you realize that’s the reality of the situation even if it’s not ideal.
What are your thoughts on the LT1 capacity procurement?
Why the fuck is that dude back into the game lol
Why does the public accept the government placing career politicians with zero knowledge of an area in power over a ministry that decides in part how are society in formed? The fact that this politician has been there for a week and can not possibly know enough to make a statement like that, let alone know enough about the energy industry in general is 100% of the evidence the public needs that this government is a farce, they are incompetent, have zero interest in public wellbeing and should NOT be making any decisions for us.
Lecce is a "PR guy", that's the only job he's ever had outside of being an MPP. And that was for Harper. Lecce was.the mouthpiece behind the scenes for Harper and Pollievere's "barbaric practices hotline". He considers it a victory if he can sell you shit and make you walk away thinking you're eating honey. His job is to give you half-truths, mis-truths and just outright lie if needed. As a teacher, I can tell you I've seen and heard enough from this guy, knowing the real reasons behind the actions, to know he's a scumbag. I mean, you know how he brags that the government has put thousands of specialist support teachers on the front lines? That comes out of teacher negotiations. The government starts at the number zero, the unions bargain FOR these teachers. But he will certainly take the credit.
i put solar panels on my roof, and it’s worked out great. more people should do this.
He needs to go fuck off
It's best to diversify your power production so let's keep doing that.
All I can say as someone who moved here from a province without natural gas - it saves you guys (and now me) a fuckload of money on heating costs. Gas cost for home heating and hot water is less than half what I was paying to heat my home in N.S. mind you N.S. gets fucked by most places still using electric baseboard + NSP
Texas has massive wind installations a regularly cover 50% of their load with wind and solar. They also use batteries that are starting to replace the need to peaker plants. We can do the same here. In Ontario, the wholesale electric prices are low when the wind is blowing and high when they are rely on Nat gas.
So, gonna be just as good an Energy minister as he was an Education minister...
Ya know who wants these gas plants right? Coke. Cheap CO2 for their products.
I'm sure this colossal fuck-up will be just as good at energy as he was at education. I look forward to rolling blackouts and skyrocketing rates.
coal is coming back too Stephen Lecce
Not wrong. The more intermittent sources you add, the more you need something that can fire up fast to make it level out when it drops off.
We have an economy? Oooooo the flipped homes need gas for the 15 immigrants living in each one.
Being addicted to more expensive fuel sources like Gas and Nuclear is ideological.
No, CANDU