Reverse Zone - Alberta Overtakes Ontario in Coal-Fired Generation

►◄ Reverse Zone

	Home About Reverse Zone, weblog on urban planning, sustainability, and technology. Martin Laplante Subscribe to an RSS feed of this weblog. Links A few favourite links. Planetizen Cyburbia LookWAYup dictionary RES Policy Research Inc. Medical Reference AI Topics Pattern Language Scale Down, Windsor Raise the Hammer Price Tags Urban Squares NYC Streets New Urban News Grush Hour Planning Politics Emergent Urbanism DNS Help Friends' Blogs David Wilson Viktor Toth Michael Geist Recent posts Canada and US Driving No Longer Dropping This Year Ontario No Longer Needs Coal Shaping the Public Realm The Days of Sprawl Are Officially Over The Telescope is Backward Stop The Earth Amazon CloudFront New Pricing, Cheap At A Million Dollars Canada Spends Billions in Energy INefficiency Density as Persons Plus Jobs Per Unit Area Now is the Time for New Transit Investments UNFCCC Confuses Journalists on Direction of Greenhouse Gases Canadian Business Prefers Carbon Tax Streets To Home: Down With Continuum of Care! Close Roads to Reduce Congestion Science and Economics of Climate Change Canada and US Driving Continue To Drop Alberta Overtakes Ontario in Coal-Fired Generation Everyone Not Living In The Suburbs Is Fooling Themselves Canada Almost Studies the Possibility of Eventual Road Pricing Rogers Messing with DNS Will Canada Reach Kyoto Targets With New GHG Inventory Figures? The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown Internet Identity Keystone Kops LA Transit Plan Aims to Save 725 Metric Tons of GHG Annually by 2030 New York City's Congestion Pricing Plan Dies Yet Again New York Discovers Existing Direct Democracy Zoning Rule Driving is Going Down in the US The Commuting Turnaround in Canada Vancouver Churches Get a Licence to Break the Law Carbon Capture and Storage For Canada 2009/01 2008 2007 2006 2005 Complete List of Posts Top Posts Close Roads to Reduce Congestion The Delicate Balancing Act of Downtowns and the Death of Griffintown Places to Grow - Pictures Tell the Story Why We Still Need Separation of Uses Dense Condos Do Not Revitalize Hot Air - How to Beat Climate Change By Burning More Coal What's Best for Renewables, Merton Rule or Feed-In Tariff? LEED for Neighborhood Development Pilot Rating System Main Arterial Woonerf More on Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments? Which is Greener, Houses or Apartments? Zoning Exceptions and the Failure of Planning 18th Century Planning is Still the State of the Art Ontario Municipal Board Says City Can't Plan for Mix or Density of Mixed Use Brownfield Brutalism - Urban Planning for Sale The Causes of Sprawl Energy Star Sprawl Is High Density the Cure for Transportation? Why not Build Medieval Towns Here? Vancouver has it right - Ecodensity Ontario has it wrong - Places to Grow Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and Barry Wellman Review of This Land: The Battle over Sprawl and the Future of America New York's Downzoning Uprising Community Planning - are citizens powerless? Paris riots and urban planning Minimize Greenhouse Gas Emissions through Reverse Zoning Social Sciences: So Much Left Undone View blog top tags	Wed, 01 Oct 2008 Alberta Overtakes Ontario in Coal-Fired Generation It may already have happened or it will happen soon. With Alberta building new coal-fired plants and Ontario shutting them down, as of 2006, the National Energy Board reports that Alberta's coal-fired generation capacity equals Ontario's This comes after Ontario's shutdown of the Lakeview Generating Station and the opening of Alberta's Genesee 3 station. Ontario intends to shut down all remaining coal-fired plants in the next 6 years while Alberta intends to build more. In 2006 Ontario's coal-fired capacity stood at 6329 MW, while Alberta's was at 6217 MW. Since very little new coal-fired capacity has been added or removed in the intervening years, why do I say that Alberta may have overtaken Ontario? Well it's hard to tell from released figures, but essentially Alberta uses coal for base load while Ontario is increasingly using coal for peak load. That means that Ontario's coal-fired generators are burning less coal than before. The 4 remaining coal-fired plants, excluding Lakeview, generated 36,224 GWh in total in 2003 and only 28,179 in 2007, without significant change in capacity. Current figures for Alberta show that its electricity generation from coal is more like 45,000 GWh. Those figures are from different sources, but they are roughly comparable. So in the future will the drops in GHG emissions from Ontario's electricity generation be sufficient to compensate the increase in Alberta's? Ontario Power Generation is awfully quiet about the schedule for further shutdowns. And Alberta, to be fair, will be replacing many old inefficient coal plants with somewhat more efficient ones. There are even plans to burn bitumen directly without the energy-intensive process to produce synthetic crude. Not a bad idea, actually. It's certainly better than coal and not processing the bitumen frees up a lot of natural gas for more constructive uses. Since we probably already have more bitumen production than will be economically feasible to exploit, with the world turning away from high-carbon fuels, this is one way to save the investment in the short term. Tags: Greenhouse Gas Climate Change Kyoto Protocol Ontario Alberta Canada Energy Coal [] permanent link Comments: 0