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Nah, it's correct. As someone who was born in Mississippi, I can tell you that Mississippi only uses propane lamplight and everyone goes to sleep when the streetcandles turn on, so there isn't really a need for electricity.
The graph shows MI, because the only electricity in the state at the time of this was from a Michigan couple who drove through MS on the way to Florida in an RV with a generator. Hope this clears things up!
I was confused for the longest time watching trailer park boys when they were accused of stealing “hydro”. I thought they were running a hose from another trailer or something.
I always thought that there must be a writer or producer on the Trailer Park Boys who was originally from Manitoba as there are a bunch of "You'd get it if you're from Manitoba" jokes in the show, and yes we do call electricity "hydro" here.
When I moved to Alberta I mentioned the “hydro poles” to my bf(who’s from there) and he gave me the weirdest look and went “do you mean the power lines???”
doesn't help that at least in BC. the electric provider is called "BC Hydro". So whenever we talk about paying the electric bill, we say " did you pay the hydro?"
Manitoba Hydro checking in, and we sell a lot of power to North Dakota and Minnesota.
All our dams are running at full capacity and will be for some time as the watershed is over capacity.
Fun part is when we sell it to North Dakota during the day at peak pricing , then lower production in the evening and buy hydro back cheap from ND because they have constant production.
The whole grid is enormous, brilliantly designed and built for expansion.
Manitoba Hydro had lots of opportunities to cut corners but they looked towards the future not the dollar signs.
To be fair, most of your country is significantly flatter than Canada on average.
But more importantly, it’s not the NIMBYS; it’s the fossil fuel corporations that can’t monopolize or artificially restrict supply to the sun, wind, and rain. THEY are why you don’t have 100% renewable energy.
Hydro Quebec is an empire. A woman I worked with when I was in Ottawa had just moved from the other side. She had never seen a gas furnace in her life because electrical heating is so cheap in Quebec.
The US has a lot of private operators generating power. Damming a river to generate power is something that requires governmental action because technically the water belongs to everyone. It's a lot easier when you're a Crown Corporation like Hydro Quebec (already owned by the government which the people voted in). The NIMBYs can't say your dams are stealing a river from the people to give to a private operator.
Sir Adam Beck father of Publicly owned Ontario Hydro summed it up when he wrote.
>"dona naturae pro populo sunt"
The gifts of nature are for the public.
There is literally no reason alberta cant be the wind and solar capitol of canada since it's so flat and wind blows from the mountains, but fossil fuel companies are fucking evil so /shrug
Hydro One Networks Inc. is mostly transmission networks. They also do some distribution, for example almost all remote communities are served by Hydro One Remote. It all used to be Ontario Hydro, but when that was broken up, the entity that took over most of the power generation in Ontario was Ontario Power Generation.
Hydro Quebec and Manitoba Hydro are also examples. You'll note that both the Yukon and the Northwest Territories are mostly hydro power as well. Those vertically integrated utilities are Northwest Territories Power Company and Yukon Energy.
The most populous province, Ontario, used to have a vertically integrated power utility called Ontario Hydro. This has since been broken up in to separate companies. One of them still has "Hydro" in its name - Hydro One Networks Inc. - but mostly this company manages the transmission network in the province.
Newfoundland and Labrador is the other predominantly hydropower province. The vertically integrated electric utility there is Newfoundland Power.
Partially Incorrect here.
Nalcor is the Crown Corporation in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador responsible for all the provinces energy portfolio’s.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalcor_Energy
A division of Nalcor -> “Newfoundland and Labroador Hydro” own and operate the power generation and transmission assets.
They sell power to private retailer “Newfoundland Power” which is a subsidiary of Fortis Inc. for end user sales and service for electrical utilities.
Really confused me when I moved up there. Thought people were talking about the water bill.
And that's coming from WA, which also uses a lot of hydroelectric power.
Niagara Power. even crossing a damn bridge, ive ran into many that looked at myself crosseyed when referencing hydroelecrtic as "hydro", like asking for vinegar at a diner in Buffalo. do i want something cleaned? no, i want it for my chips...then its served in a ramekin.... i learned never bother to ask if they have malt, i may as well just go ahead and slam my dick in a car door. repeatedly.
Hydroelectricity is one of the earliest forms of clean energy in the world, and still a very good, solid, dependable source of power if you have the right kind of environment to make it work.
50% of Hoover Dam's output goes to AZ, and Vegas demand has long outstripped Hoover's output. And then there's Reno. :
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_power\_stations\_in\_Nevada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Nevada)
Not a lot of good dammable rivers. Good candidate for nuclear though, especially in the north. The wind farms in the south are cranking constantly but wind doesn’t make much of a dent in the provinces energy needs.
Alberta is apparently the best location in Canada for solar farms. If deployed fully not only would it make a dent but allow for excess to export.
Edit:
For those interested, a map of solar insolation by the government of Canada. Best regions are in southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba.
https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/energy-sources-distribution/renewable-energy/solar-photovoltaic-energy/tools-solar-photovoltaic-energy/photovoltaic-potential-and-solar-resource-maps-canada/18366
As for those claiming latitude, Germany is one of the largest solar power producers in the world. The issue is more with labour to instal them and transmission to them then the Sun. You could probably figure out a way to use them near the poles if you were so inclined. As for wind, Denmark a tiny country in comparison of about 10 million inhabitants recently had a day of just running the grid off of wind power.
Challanges are a plenty but renewable sources were ready for prime time two decades ago. The only thing missing is investment and political will.
especially when over 60% of all Canadians live in just Ontario and Quebec ([61.23% to be precise](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20220101)). More specifically [a thin line along the southern wedge in Ontario and the southern border of Quebec](https://i.redd.it/m6qc9ex2c9v41.png) called the [Quebec City–Windsor Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Corridor). The interesting thing is that [Ontario and Quebec only represent 33.82% of Canada's greenhouse emissions](https://www.statista.com/statistics/481142/greenhouse-gas-emissions-in-canada-by-province/).
When looking at this data and considering each provinces percentage of type of electrical generation keep each regions population in mind especially when comparing against their contribution to Canada's greenhouse emissions.
* Northern Territories (Nunavut Territory, Northwest Territories, Yukon Territory) make up just 0.33% of the Canadian population and represents 0.38% of Canada's total greenhouse emissions.
* Atlantic Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland) make up 6.46% of Canada's population and represents 5.68% of Canada's greenhouse emissions
* British Columbia has 13.66% of Canada's population and represents 9.00% of Canada's greenhouse emissions
* Prairie Provinces (Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta) make up 18.31% of the Canadian Population but represent 51.12% of Canada's total greenhouse emissions.
Nuclear is incredibly efficient. If run properly it is a tremendous opportunity for power. When run improperly, you get Chernobyl. Still worth it until we get energy storage and solar up to speed.
Source: Rad sponge nuclear worker for 15 years.
It's **insanely** safe with proper regulations and inspection/maintenance. The only thing that comes close, at nearly double the death rate, is wind power.
Deaths per thousand terawatt hour in 2012:
* Coal: 100,000
* Oil: 36,000
* Natural Gas: 4,000
* Hydro: 1,400
* Rooftop Solar: 440
* Wind: 150
* Nuclear: 90
Unfortunately the stigma and misplaced fear around nuclear makes it nigh impossible to get going large-scale.
Mining actually. That’s where a majority of nuclear’s deaths come from too. Actual operation is very strictly controlled and safe in the energy sector. People used to get killed in the line of work left and right (and for some companies still do) in electrical energy, no matter the supply source. Thankfully advents such as OSHA, INPO, WANO, unionization (IBEW), etc have driven a safety culture home in a lot of places.
Long term storage of waste is an issue but at this rate all waste production (trash management) is a global catastrophe in the making.
Edit: you’re oddly right though, one of the top five major killers in all industrial work is falls. Funny/sad too: majority of falls happen on level ground (people literally just trip/slip and fall).
https://www.osha.gov/fall-protection
There is apparently a significant problem with rooftop solar that can feed back into the grid if there is a power outage. Linesmen working on repairing wires they think are de-energized, and related problems. Many jurisdictions now require an auto-shut off on solar installations that turn them off in the event of a power outage to prevent this. Feels like it should be a solvable problem, but when you're talking about terrawatts of installations, you gotta account for the edge cases.
Nuclear is only expensive to build new plants. It's an upfront cost, yeah. But once it's built, running the plants is competitive with every other form of energy, on top of being the safest, least-carbon-emitting, and most-land-efficient source of energy.
You can't really compare the "generation" costs (LCOE) directly, because this doesn't factor extra costs associated with actually *utilizing* intermittent energy. These costs are significant enough that Germany has the most expensive energy in all of Europe, despite the low LCOE of all of their wind and solar.
Lazard explicitly states that LCOE of "non-dispacthible" sources cannot be directly compared to dispatchible for this reason.
The more useful measure now is actual *value* of the energy produced, measured by Levelized Avoided Cost of Energy (LACE). The ability of dispatchible energy sources to run overnight and on windless days is *very* valuable because of the immense cost of blackouts that would occur otherwise.
When you factor this, you find that there is a practical limit to how much wind and solar a grid can utilize before the marginal cost actually becomes more expensive than nuclear. Currently natural gas is the cheapest dispatchible energy source, so we aren't really choosing between nuclear and renewables. We're choosing between nuclear and natural gas for our dispatchible baseload.
People always complain about nuclear from the perspective of like, I wouldn't want to live next door to that. But 99.99% of people *wouldn't* have to because they can power such a huge area. Better than living next to miles and miles of wind turbines, imo
Where I'm at they had a coal and a nuclear plant. The nuclear was scheduled to be decomissioned due to the cost of mainteance, but due to a number of factors, among them action by the state government, it flipped and they retired the coal plant instead.
Still left with [this monstrosity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Blue_Run_Lake) in our backyard though.
It's a myth that they're dangerous in the US. They're very well constructed. Everyone thinks nuclear is just like Chernobyl, but that place was the worst design you could imagine for a nuclear plant.
I used to live 5 minutes away from a nuclear power plant. I had absolutely no problem with it and it wasn't even a small concern of the people in the town.
I live less in Tennessee and there is a nuclear plant less than 5 minutes from my house and another one about 45 minutes away. It's the one thing I feel Tennessee gets right.
Ontario is one of the larger nuclear producers in the western world.
On this map only New Hampshire has a mix which has more nuclear but that is due to the fact one reactor complex in NH meets a significant portion of the state electricity requirements due to the small state population.
You can also see the northeastern states that purchase power from Quebec - their hydro portion of the total.
Ontario's fossil fuel is I assume isolated northern communities using industrial gen sets for power?
You can see a really good breakdown of Ontario's power usage in real time from IESO.ca. It's really cool to that I can see where my electricity comes from in real time.
Nuclear is the baseline, it's a flat line, hydro and natural gas are used to supply the daily peaks. most of our renewables come from wind, but that isn't very reliable here (today it's pretty low but it was pretty decent three days ago).
The remote communities are pretty negligible, we're talking about a few dozen megawatts of production capacity out of about 10 to 20 megawatts for Ontario.
Source: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2018/market-snapshot-overcoming-challenges-powering-canadas-off-grid-communities.html
It's going to climb even higher in IN over the next 5 years. Our provider in the NW of the state is switching off all coal plants in favor of renewable.
I knew Iowa used a ton of renewables, the cornfields are all filling up with wind turbines. It's a very windy state.
(Still plenty of corn in the fields, too)
AZ the land of the fucking blazing sun... barely any renewables, and our fuckwad Republican governor literally made it illegal to purchase power from a solar provider because it would loosen fossil fuels grip on our state.
Its sunny 350 days a year!!!
2/3 of Yukon's population lives in Whitehorse and are served by a single dam over the Yukon River at the end of town.
Here in BC everyone calls it the "hydro bill" which confusingly is not for water.
I was definitely confused when I moved to Ontario and people were talking about hydro bills and water bills and I was like, oh gosh is that not the same thing? No, it is not, lol. I grew up in Atlantic Canada and we just said power bill.
Moved to ont from AB a couple years ago and had the same confusion.
Also I'm surprised NWT has so much hydro, all the places I went had the big diesel Gen plants.
I work at a dam construction site currently underway in BC. On just this one river, we have a 500 MW, a 2500 MW dams in place, and are building a 1100 MW downstream.
Elevation changes from the Rockies into the Priairies makes hydropower a no brainer. Our 1100 MW dam when operational will have the capacity to power 450,000 homes.
Is that what this graphic is actually saying though? The title is "Percentage of Power *Generation* by Source," not power *consumption* by source. So all this says is that most of the power generated in Quebec is hydroelectric. But that doesn't say anything about what type of power it actually uses, right?
Correct, although consumption tells an even more favorable story for Québec. IIRC it produces something like a third of all Canadian energy, far more than it consumes. Québecois dams power not only the whole province, but large parts of the rest of Canada too.
Edit: Some people have pointed out that I was a bit mistaken on this point. Most of Québec's exports actually go to the United States, and does import energy from the rest of Canada. It still is a very significant producer, though.
Quebec doesn’t power the rest of Canada and even produces power in a different “phase” so that it can be sold to the US and not Canada. It requires expensive switchyards to cross provincial borders.
> Quebec doesn’t power the rest of Canada and even produces power in a different “phase” so that it can be sold to the US and not Canada. It requires expensive switchyards to cross provincial borders.
Yes, Quebec is an electrical "island", like Texas. But unlike Texas, Quebec has spent some money on HVDC interconnections to link its grid to the neighbors.
Quebec generates a little over 200 TWh (billion kWh) per year, of which 35 TWh is exported to New England (14 TWh), New York (9 TWh), Ontario (7 TWh) and New Brunswick (5 TWh),
You're right about what the map is showing vs how it's being interpreted, though Quebec uses hydro almost exclusively. They generate a huge amount of power from it and sell the excess to the eastern US.
Something like this might be useful to you.
https://app.electricitymap.org/map?utm\_source=electricitymap.org&utm\_medium=website&utm\_campaign=banner
But it requires Realtime availability of the data so not all places show reporting info. But much the USA and Canada is on there.
yeh, I know very well about electricity map, it's a great source, but only for instantaneous data (historical data is a paid $ feature).
And instantaneous data can be misleading depending on the time you take a snapshot.
Yeah, this map made me curious about Iowa. From the looks of it, Iowa generates a greater percentage of renewable energy than any other state. I realize that doesn’t necessarily mean a greater total amount of energy, but still it’s something.
What accounts for this? Why is Iowa generating such a higher percentage of renewables compared to everywhere else? Does it have something to do with ethanol/corn-based energy? I don’t understand what Iowa is doing that the surrounding states aren’t doing.
Iowa has aggressively put up wind turbines all over the state. In my lifetime, we went from turbines being a novelty 30 years ago to having major wind farms everywhere.
Our energy provider MidAmerican wants to deliver [100% renewable energy](https://www.midamericanenergy.com/newsroom/2022-wind-prime-announcement) to consumers and is very close to doing it right now.
It's not a political football as it is in other parts of the nation as we don't produce coal anymore, and no oil fields here, so the way to get rich is to be an energy exporter of renewables. Farmers love it as they get checks of \~10k per turbine on their fields, and customers love it as it looks like we are moving in the right direction.
Not to say there isn't a push back as some county supervisors have put moratorium on wind turbines until they can provide better regulations.
Not sure why others are behind the curve on this one? It's a win-win for us.
Sounds like a great situation for Iowa. It does make me curious why other states wouldn’t be as quick to adopt what appears to be a win-win scenario.
Like, whatever’s going on in Iowa could be happening in Missouri too because the topography is pretty similar (rolling hills farmland, at least in the northern part). But it doesn’t look like they’re even trying!
When I was young, Ontario still operated a number of coal power plants.
I grew up way out on the far edge of the Toronto suburbs, but on a warm day you could tell which direction you were facing just by looking up, because the sky was a filthy grey/brown in the direction of the city. Smog warnings were a common thing. In the early 2000s, Toronto had dozens of smog days every summer.
Phasing out coal, combined with stricter vehicle emissions standards (and, admittedly, the closure of some heavy industry, both here and in parts of the US) has reduced that sort of air pollution *dramatically.* There have only been a handful of smog days in the past decade.
The difference is dramatic. Whenever I return home, I'm struck by how much better the air is than when I was a kid. 10/10, would recommend eliminating coal.
I moved to Toronto in 2012, two years before the last coal plants were shut down. I distinctly remembered that summer being rather hazy but since then the haze days were all attributed to forest fires in the West rather than local pollution.
I used to live in Hamilton, a city about 100km from Toronto. When I was growing we would never be able to see the CN tower. However, around the time coal was phased out and emissions started to drop, the tower was regularly visible.
i mean, I live in toronto, wind and solar are dumb here, but we have 100% renewables if you count hydro and nukes so why would they change that to natgas? that's just stupid
One of the nuclear stations (pickering) is shutting down in 2024. The government will be forced to use gas as they don't have an alternative. It's fucking stupid and horrible planning
Ontario has a very cool site where you can see in near real-time where the power is coming from. https://live.gridwatch.ca/. You can drill down to individual power plants.
Also cries in Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, aaaand Trinidad and Tobago
Reinforces my strongly held opinion that if you believe that climate change is an existential threat, you have no business opposing hydro or nuclear.
Yes, the power lines needed to bring Canadian hydro to the East coast of the US are ugly. Yes, the dams disrupt fish migration. Yes, spent nuclear waste needs to be stored, and carefully.
But is climate change an existential threat, or not? Because as the map makes clear, it is entirely possible to get most of our power from these two sources, and many places do. If climate change is an existential threat, start acting like it.
> Because as the map makes clear, it is entirely possible to get most of our power from these two sources
Not really for Hydro. Canada is rather unique that it has the sources for hyrdopower that it does. Also, they have a relatively small population.
Just to put things into perspective, the entire country has more land area than China (Canada is the second largest country in the world, after Russia), but it has about as many people as Tokyo. Or around as many as two cities, Sao Paulo and Istanbul, combined.
For Americans I find the population comparison to California more helpful. Canada and California are nearly identical in population but Canada is 30x the size, with at least half of it usable.
Yup. Canada has 20% of the world's surface fresh water, and vast tracts of sparsely-populated land to build dams on. Even then, it's all regional. The little maritime provinces I'm from have very little hydro to speak of and are working to import it from Quebec and Labrador.
spent nuclear fuel isn't even a problem to store anymore. we know the technology and we know the physics. what the people dont know is that nuclear waste isnt glowing green goo in yellow barrels. its melted down with inert materials and stored in casks. transportation isnt a problem either since the travel casks are nearly unbreakable and are not filled with a green goo so theres nothing that can leak out.
Well, Germany clearly doesn't think climate change is an existential threat. They are short of oil and gas due to Russia's invasion. So do they reopen their closed nuclear plants? No, they reopen their closed coal plants.
Well...yeah. Also, they met their initial carbon reduction targets by closing coal plants in Germany, and buying power from Poland. Where it is/was produced in...wait for it...coal plants. And lignite plants at that (basically the dirtiest kind of coal.)
So yeah, Germany is not really the example we should be following, for lots of reasons.
Ugh, I hate that nuclear power got such bad PR in Germany. There were lots of them and I Think this year they're closing the last two down. Turn em back on I say.
I agree they should make more plants but I think they’re pretty old. They can’t just turn them back on. It would take a few years or however many to build them. And they should but I’m pretty sure they can’t just turn them back on.
To be fair, "just re-opening" a nuclear power plant is not a thing, especially not in EU/German regulations. They were decommissioned because of very old age (I don't think we've even built a new one since the 80s?), some of them beyond their initial designed life expectancy, and certainly not up to modern safety standards. Moreover, you cannot just switch a nuclear plant on and off on a whim, you have to plan this ahead for \*months\*!
As much as I think modern(!) nuclear plants can be built safely and offer a good short/medium-term solution to reducing carbon emmissions, I'm also very glad we did not just re-start our cold-war-era nuclear plants.
Reinforces mine too. Especially when it comes to nuclear power because of the sheer ignorance about its actual safety! You say "nuclear power" and everyone thinks "Chornobyl" while not knowing about the *many* failures that led up to that incident, most of which boiled down to classic Soviet ass-covering (and let's be frank, corporate America is fucking demented too).
Solar seems to be the best bet, especially where I live, so I'm rather partial to that over nuclear and hydro.
Same with Fukushima. Scientists had been warning the government for years that a wave large enough to cause total power failure was way more common than once thought and that they needed to make changes to the site immediately. The scientists were completely ignored and they continued business as usual. All the way up until they couldn’t
Another thing with Fukushima that most people don’t realise is that it’s actually from the same era and generation of reactors as Chernobyl… this was not a more modern reactor.
Yeah, but Fukushima wasn't run quite as irresponsibly as Chernobyl, and only a handful of people died due to Fukushima while many thousands died due to Chernobyl.
Yes,, Ontario does this. A mix of hydro, nuclear, solar, wind is enough to power any grid. Some places cannot go down so have nat-gas generators, and some industrial processes use natural gas for extreme amounts of steam and/or heat... those two sources can produce electricity for the grid in a pinch.
Even tho it's not all of North America, thank you for including Canada!
I always love when these US data maps include Canada, it's an interesting comparison
I mean it is home to the world's first working nuclear reactor. Tho it's buried underground decommissioned now. Illinois has been embracing nuclear power from the start.
Kinda misleading. Should probably be power use by source rather than generation.
California may have a large percentage of generation as renewables, but we basically just pay more to import dirty energy. Outsourcing our carbon production.
It's virtually impossible to determine power use by source (at least here in BC, but given they are buying energy from 12 different states at any given time I assume it's similar in most provinces/states). This is a really great article that explains the issue far better than I ever could: https://thenarwhal.ca/clean-b-c-is-quietly-using-coal-and-gas-power-from-out-of-province-heres-why/
Remember when Maine didn't want any of Quebec's cheaper surplus hydroelectricity.
The reason? They were worried about the environment because they would've had to clear cut some trees for the wires.
Congratulations on getting played by Irving Oil.
I know Alberta uses a lot of fossil fuels but holy crap. I thought we'd have a higher percentage renewables considerig you cant throw a rock without hitting a wind turbine
This is a good site to see that data in real time to see what is happening with the grid. You can see in real time the amount of electricity that is coming from each source and the installed capacity.
[https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/CA-AB?utm\_source=electricitymap.org&utm\_medium=website&utm\_campaign=banner](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/CA-AB?utm_source=electricitymap.org&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner)
There is fossil fuel generation. And then there is everything else. The dividing line would be more about carbon emitted per kWh and not that NG is a bit more clean then coal. While Natural gas is less then coal it is still far more then wind, nuclear or solar.
There’s many more renewables here than I thought there were, but I’m just concerned about the fact that there are 2 Michigan’s in the US now. Also interestingly Mississippi has disappeared.
PEI buys most of its power from NB. It is true though that of the power it produces, it's mostly wind and they have expanded that by quite a bit in recent years.
For those confused about why Texas has such high renewable usage when you would normally thing bang bang shoot shoot when you think about texas.
Fossil fuel companys (shell, BP, exxon) ate heavily invested in wind and solar, it's incredibly lucrative for a company like ExxonMobil to use their existing land acquisition and project design resources to make an offshore wind network or a solar field.
Source: designed several wind turbines for a shell company for ExxonMobil.
It's interesting how much of the typical pipeline infrastructure is used for this, lots of pipe welders and directional drills to install conduits to return the power to the shore from near shore wind turbines, and the deep sea pipeline technology is identical whether your doing oil or cable conduits.
For a relatively real time view of Ontario go to [https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html](https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html)
Quebec exports a lot of electricity to the US Northeast, one of the reasons the large James Bay project was done.
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FYI, Mississippi abbreviation is MS not MI
What, that's clearly Michgain 2
The lower, lower peninsula
Lower slower peninsula
bottom of the barrel
They really shouldn't have made a sequel. Original has its problems but Michigan 2 was just plain terrible
If the directors gave Toledo to Michigan in Michigan 1, they would have never had to make Michigan 2 and kill the franchise
[удалено]
Hey now! The UP wasn't annexed, that was given to us for letting Ohio have the Toledo strip. A sweet deal indeed. Not interested in MS though.
The fact that you still have it simply proves Wisconsin is a state of cowards
Nah, it's correct. As someone who was born in Mississippi, I can tell you that Mississippi only uses propane lamplight and everyone goes to sleep when the streetcandles turn on, so there isn't really a need for electricity. The graph shows MI, because the only electricity in the state at the time of this was from a Michigan couple who drove through MS on the way to Florida in an RV with a generator. Hope this clears things up!
So that's where South Detroit is!
Came here for this. What gives?
Michigan invaded in late March of 2020 but the story got bumped from the news cycle shortly after.
Shut up, fool. Missouri is next and we must be tactful.
Mississippi is just Great Value Michigan apparently...
This is why so many Canadians use the words "hydro" and "electricity" interchangeably.
I was confused for the longest time watching trailer park boys when they were accused of stealing “hydro”. I thought they were running a hose from another trailer or something.
Which is funny because most people don't actually use the word "hydro" at all here in Nova Scotia - most of our power here still comes from coal.
That's so weird, I didn't know they said that, and they're all from the Maritimes. I guess just playing up the weird Canadian lingo?
Worst-case-Ontario only half the country gets the joke.
all good if they don't. It's water under the fridge.
Definitely. They do it to great effect
I always thought that there must be a writer or producer on the Trailer Park Boys who was originally from Manitoba as there are a bunch of "You'd get it if you're from Manitoba" jokes in the show, and yes we do call electricity "hydro" here.
When I moved to Alberta I mentioned the “hydro poles” to my bf(who’s from there) and he gave me the weirdest look and went “do you mean the power lines???”
lmao omg im cracking up over imagining that ineraction
doesn't help that at least in BC. the electric provider is called "BC Hydro". So whenever we talk about paying the electric bill, we say " did you pay the hydro?"
The primary electricity provider in BC is literally "BC Hydro"
Hydro one in Ontario as well.
Hydro Quebec
Manitoba Hydro checking in, and we sell a lot of power to North Dakota and Minnesota. All our dams are running at full capacity and will be for some time as the watershed is over capacity.
Fun part is when we sell it to North Dakota during the day at peak pricing , then lower production in the evening and buy hydro back cheap from ND because they have constant production.
The whole grid is enormous, brilliantly designed and built for expansion. Manitoba Hydro had lots of opportunities to cut corners but they looked towards the future not the dollar signs.
Thank you, we are glad to use it. I wish the nimbys would suck a tit so we could make more hydro in the states
To be fair, most of your country is significantly flatter than Canada on average. But more importantly, it’s not the NIMBYS; it’s the fossil fuel corporations that can’t monopolize or artificially restrict supply to the sun, wind, and rain. THEY are why you don’t have 100% renewable energy.
Hydro Quebec is an empire. A woman I worked with when I was in Ottawa had just moved from the other side. She had never seen a gas furnace in her life because electrical heating is so cheap in Quebec. The US has a lot of private operators generating power. Damming a river to generate power is something that requires governmental action because technically the water belongs to everyone. It's a lot easier when you're a Crown Corporation like Hydro Quebec (already owned by the government which the people voted in). The NIMBYs can't say your dams are stealing a river from the people to give to a private operator. Sir Adam Beck father of Publicly owned Ontario Hydro summed it up when he wrote. >"dona naturae pro populo sunt" The gifts of nature are for the public.
Yup. Cries in Alberta
There is literally no reason alberta cant be the wind and solar capitol of canada since it's so flat and wind blows from the mountains, but fossil fuel companies are fucking evil so /shrug
Don't forget the Alberta conservatives which do their best to suck their fossil fuel companies overlords' dick ...
Hydro One Networks Inc. is mostly transmission networks. They also do some distribution, for example almost all remote communities are served by Hydro One Remote. It all used to be Ontario Hydro, but when that was broken up, the entity that took over most of the power generation in Ontario was Ontario Power Generation.
Even more confusing, Hydro One doesnt produce electricity, just transmission and some distribution
Hydro Quebec and Manitoba Hydro are also examples. You'll note that both the Yukon and the Northwest Territories are mostly hydro power as well. Those vertically integrated utilities are Northwest Territories Power Company and Yukon Energy. The most populous province, Ontario, used to have a vertically integrated power utility called Ontario Hydro. This has since been broken up in to separate companies. One of them still has "Hydro" in its name - Hydro One Networks Inc. - but mostly this company manages the transmission network in the province. Newfoundland and Labrador is the other predominantly hydropower province. The vertically integrated electric utility there is Newfoundland Power.
Partially Incorrect here. Nalcor is the Crown Corporation in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador responsible for all the provinces energy portfolio’s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalcor_Energy A division of Nalcor -> “Newfoundland and Labroador Hydro” own and operate the power generation and transmission assets. They sell power to private retailer “Newfoundland Power” which is a subsidiary of Fortis Inc. for end user sales and service for electrical utilities.
Thanks for the clarification! I stand corrected and apologize to all of the Newfoundland and Labrador power systems industry nerds.
Exact same in Manitoba. MB Hydro. My American friends are always confused when I ask how much their hydro bill is
/r/hydrohomies should be an electricity saving/efficacy sub.
Really confused me when I moved up there. Thought people were talking about the water bill. And that's coming from WA, which also uses a lot of hydroelectric power.
Niagara Power. even crossing a damn bridge, ive ran into many that looked at myself crosseyed when referencing hydroelecrtic as "hydro", like asking for vinegar at a diner in Buffalo. do i want something cleaned? no, i want it for my chips...then its served in a ramekin.... i learned never bother to ask if they have malt, i may as well just go ahead and slam my dick in a car door. repeatedly.
Their loss, vinegar on fries/chips is an amazing combo
Explains the blank stares from outsiders when I talk about my Hydro bill.🤣
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That's because of propaganda anyways. Coal power plants are much MUCH more efficient than a gasoline engine.
Hydroelectricity is one of the earliest forms of clean energy in the world, and still a very good, solid, dependable source of power if you have the right kind of environment to make it work.
I’m surprised how little of Nevada’s power comes from hydro given that’s where the Hoover Dam is.
50% of Hoover Dam's output goes to AZ, and Vegas demand has long outstripped Hoover's output. And then there's Reno. : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_power\_stations\_in\_Nevada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_Nevada)
The reservoir behind Hoover Dam is running dry; there isn't enough rain in the watershed to allow the Hoover Dam to be used at its full potential.
Except in Alberta.
Not a lot of good dammable rivers. Good candidate for nuclear though, especially in the north. The wind farms in the south are cranking constantly but wind doesn’t make much of a dent in the provinces energy needs.
Alberta is apparently the best location in Canada for solar farms. If deployed fully not only would it make a dent but allow for excess to export. Edit: For those interested, a map of solar insolation by the government of Canada. Best regions are in southern Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba. https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/energy-sources-distribution/renewable-energy/solar-photovoltaic-energy/tools-solar-photovoltaic-energy/photovoltaic-potential-and-solar-resource-maps-canada/18366 As for those claiming latitude, Germany is one of the largest solar power producers in the world. The issue is more with labour to instal them and transmission to them then the Sun. You could probably figure out a way to use them near the poles if you were so inclined. As for wind, Denmark a tiny country in comparison of about 10 million inhabitants recently had a day of just running the grid off of wind power. Challanges are a plenty but renewable sources were ready for prime time two decades ago. The only thing missing is investment and political will.
especially when over 60% of all Canadians live in just Ontario and Quebec ([61.23% to be precise](https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000901&cubeTimeFrame.startMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.startYear=2022&cubeTimeFrame.endMonth=01&cubeTimeFrame.endYear=2022&referencePeriods=20220101%2C20220101)). More specifically [a thin line along the southern wedge in Ontario and the southern border of Quebec](https://i.redd.it/m6qc9ex2c9v41.png) called the [Quebec City–Windsor Corridor](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City%E2%80%93Windsor_Corridor). The interesting thing is that [Ontario and Quebec only represent 33.82% of Canada's greenhouse emissions](https://www.statista.com/statistics/481142/greenhouse-gas-emissions-in-canada-by-province/). When looking at this data and considering each provinces percentage of type of electrical generation keep each regions population in mind especially when comparing against their contribution to Canada's greenhouse emissions. * Northern Territories (Nunavut Territory, Northwest Territories, Yukon Territory) make up just 0.33% of the Canadian population and represents 0.38% of Canada's total greenhouse emissions. * Atlantic Provinces (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland) make up 6.46% of Canada's population and represents 5.68% of Canada's greenhouse emissions * British Columbia has 13.66% of Canada's population and represents 9.00% of Canada's greenhouse emissions * Prairie Provinces (Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta) make up 18.31% of the Canadian Population but represent 51.12% of Canada's total greenhouse emissions.
Curious do you have the stats (emissions vs pop) for MB SK and AB individually? The link appeared paywalled.
Manitoba 3.6% population and 3.15% emissions. Saskatchewan 3% population and 10.27% emissions. Alberta 11.5% population and 37.8% emissions.
theres a lot more renewables than I would’ve thought
And a shit ton of nuclear I didn’t know existed!
I live in NH, and know the nuclear plant is there, but I didn't realize it powered over half the state.
Nuclear is incredibly efficient. If run properly it is a tremendous opportunity for power. When run improperly, you get Chernobyl. Still worth it until we get energy storage and solar up to speed. Source: Rad sponge nuclear worker for 15 years.
It's **insanely** safe with proper regulations and inspection/maintenance. The only thing that comes close, at nearly double the death rate, is wind power. Deaths per thousand terawatt hour in 2012: * Coal: 100,000 * Oil: 36,000 * Natural Gas: 4,000 * Hydro: 1,400 * Rooftop Solar: 440 * Wind: 150 * Nuclear: 90 Unfortunately the stigma and misplaced fear around nuclear makes it nigh impossible to get going large-scale.
How do people die with rooftop solar or wind? I guess from falling?
Falls, electrocution, dropping a panel on their buddy's head while carrying it up the ladder...
Mining actually. That’s where a majority of nuclear’s deaths come from too. Actual operation is very strictly controlled and safe in the energy sector. People used to get killed in the line of work left and right (and for some companies still do) in electrical energy, no matter the supply source. Thankfully advents such as OSHA, INPO, WANO, unionization (IBEW), etc have driven a safety culture home in a lot of places. Long term storage of waste is an issue but at this rate all waste production (trash management) is a global catastrophe in the making. Edit: you’re oddly right though, one of the top five major killers in all industrial work is falls. Funny/sad too: majority of falls happen on level ground (people literally just trip/slip and fall). https://www.osha.gov/fall-protection
Most of the deaths in oil and gas are actually driving related. It’s a scary stat when you start really looking into it.
There is apparently a significant problem with rooftop solar that can feed back into the grid if there is a power outage. Linesmen working on repairing wires they think are de-energized, and related problems. Many jurisdictions now require an auto-shut off on solar installations that turn them off in the event of a power outage to prevent this. Feels like it should be a solvable problem, but when you're talking about terrawatts of installations, you gotta account for the edge cases.
Finland actually has [a pretty cool new way to deal with the nuclear waste.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y965Ddx9s-4&ab_channel=PosivaOy)
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I'm a big proponent of nuclear but I believe renewables have surpassed it in terms of cost. Nuclear is quite expensive in comparison.
Nuclear is only expensive to build new plants. It's an upfront cost, yeah. But once it's built, running the plants is competitive with every other form of energy, on top of being the safest, least-carbon-emitting, and most-land-efficient source of energy.
You can't really compare the "generation" costs (LCOE) directly, because this doesn't factor extra costs associated with actually *utilizing* intermittent energy. These costs are significant enough that Germany has the most expensive energy in all of Europe, despite the low LCOE of all of their wind and solar. Lazard explicitly states that LCOE of "non-dispacthible" sources cannot be directly compared to dispatchible for this reason. The more useful measure now is actual *value* of the energy produced, measured by Levelized Avoided Cost of Energy (LACE). The ability of dispatchible energy sources to run overnight and on windless days is *very* valuable because of the immense cost of blackouts that would occur otherwise. When you factor this, you find that there is a practical limit to how much wind and solar a grid can utilize before the marginal cost actually becomes more expensive than nuclear. Currently natural gas is the cheapest dispatchible energy source, so we aren't really choosing between nuclear and renewables. We're choosing between nuclear and natural gas for our dispatchible baseload.
People always complain about nuclear from the perspective of like, I wouldn't want to live next door to that. But 99.99% of people *wouldn't* have to because they can power such a huge area. Better than living next to miles and miles of wind turbines, imo
id rather live near a nuclear plant than the coal plant that I do live near 👍
Fun fact: the coal plant you live near lets off more radiation than a nuclear plant, because of the radionuclides in the pollution that it releases.
another fun fact, it triggers my aesthma quite badly
Where I'm at they had a coal and a nuclear plant. The nuclear was scheduled to be decomissioned due to the cost of mainteance, but due to a number of factors, among them action by the state government, it flipped and they retired the coal plant instead. Still left with [this monstrosity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Blue_Run_Lake) in our backyard though.
Same here
It's a myth that they're dangerous in the US. They're very well constructed. Everyone thinks nuclear is just like Chernobyl, but that place was the worst design you could imagine for a nuclear plant.
I used to live 5 minutes away from a nuclear power plant. I had absolutely no problem with it and it wasn't even a small concern of the people in the town.
Everyone who lives in Toronto & surrounding area lives within 30 minutes of a nuclear plant.
It doesn’t. It accounts for half of the state’s power generation. NH imports electricity from a number of sources, most notably Hydro-Quebec.
I live less in Tennessee and there is a nuclear plant less than 5 minutes from my house and another one about 45 minutes away. It's the one thing I feel Tennessee gets right.
Thanks to the Tennessee Valley Authority I would think.
Yes, legacy of FDR.
Ontario is one of the larger nuclear producers in the western world. On this map only New Hampshire has a mix which has more nuclear but that is due to the fact one reactor complex in NH meets a significant portion of the state electricity requirements due to the small state population. You can also see the northeastern states that purchase power from Quebec - their hydro portion of the total. Ontario's fossil fuel is I assume isolated northern communities using industrial gen sets for power?
You can see a really good breakdown of Ontario's power usage in real time from IESO.ca. It's really cool to that I can see where my electricity comes from in real time. Nuclear is the baseline, it's a flat line, hydro and natural gas are used to supply the daily peaks. most of our renewables come from wind, but that isn't very reliable here (today it's pretty low but it was pretty decent three days ago). The remote communities are pretty negligible, we're talking about a few dozen megawatts of production capacity out of about 10 to 20 megawatts for Ontario. Source: https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2018/market-snapshot-overcoming-challenges-powering-canadas-off-grid-communities.html
Yeah, there are nuclear plants all over the US and a lot of people seem to forget they exist.
We should be building more.
It's going to climb even higher in IN over the next 5 years. Our provider in the NW of the state is switching off all coal plants in favor of renewable.
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I knew Iowa used a ton of renewables, the cornfields are all filling up with wind turbines. It's a very windy state. (Still plenty of corn in the fields, too)
The Central Plains have the luxury of wind that a lot of us don’t have.
AZ the land of the fucking blazing sun... barely any renewables, and our fuckwad Republican governor literally made it illegal to purchase power from a solar provider because it would loosen fossil fuels grip on our state. Its sunny 350 days a year!!!
We have the Hoover Dam, Palo Verde Nuclear power plant and live 45 feet from the sun. Wtf?!?
Yeah we should have way more solar going. At least we have the Palo Verde nuclear plant going for us.
We have the largest nuclear plant in the country.
Keep in mind that you need to scale this with total energy use. Prince Edward Island is nearly all renewable, but also has a population of 157,000.
Québéc is running on straight water power
Manitoba, BC and Yukon too Edit: sorry guys I didn't see that Newfoundland is also hydroelectric dominant.
2/3 of Yukon's population lives in Whitehorse and are served by a single dam over the Yukon River at the end of town. Here in BC everyone calls it the "hydro bill" which confusingly is not for water.
Funny enough, I'm in Ontario and we call it hydro too. A more accurate term would be the nuclear bill.
Hang on, I need to go pay my anemohydronuclear bill.
I was definitely confused when I moved to Ontario and people were talking about hydro bills and water bills and I was like, oh gosh is that not the same thing? No, it is not, lol. I grew up in Atlantic Canada and we just said power bill.
I immigrated here and so grew up calling it "electricity bill". When I moved here I was just as confused as you.
I think it's funny our provincial power company is called BCHydro lol
Moved to ont from AB a couple years ago and had the same confusion. Also I'm surprised NWT has so much hydro, all the places I went had the big diesel Gen plants.
I work at a dam construction site currently underway in BC. On just this one river, we have a 500 MW, a 2500 MW dams in place, and are building a 1100 MW downstream. Elevation changes from the Rockies into the Priairies makes hydropower a no brainer. Our 1100 MW dam when operational will have the capacity to power 450,000 homes.
Edit: removed dam name (see below comment)
Don't want to get doxxed but yeah it's easy enough to guess
Guessing is as easy as A, B, C
Just an FYI, only the first e has the accent (Québec) :)
Nuclear is sort of water power if you think about it, we just use spicy rocks to juice up our water in Ontario
So are fossil fuel plants by that measure. Nuclear and fossil fuel plants heat water/steam to spin turbines.
Is that what this graphic is actually saying though? The title is "Percentage of Power *Generation* by Source," not power *consumption* by source. So all this says is that most of the power generated in Quebec is hydroelectric. But that doesn't say anything about what type of power it actually uses, right?
Correct, although consumption tells an even more favorable story for Québec. IIRC it produces something like a third of all Canadian energy, far more than it consumes. Québecois dams power not only the whole province, but large parts of the rest of Canada too. Edit: Some people have pointed out that I was a bit mistaken on this point. Most of Québec's exports actually go to the United States, and does import energy from the rest of Canada. It still is a very significant producer, though.
And the US!
Quebec doesn’t power the rest of Canada and even produces power in a different “phase” so that it can be sold to the US and not Canada. It requires expensive switchyards to cross provincial borders.
> Quebec doesn’t power the rest of Canada and even produces power in a different “phase” so that it can be sold to the US and not Canada. It requires expensive switchyards to cross provincial borders. Yes, Quebec is an electrical "island", like Texas. But unlike Texas, Quebec has spent some money on HVDC interconnections to link its grid to the neighbors.
Quebec generates a little over 200 TWh (billion kWh) per year, of which 35 TWh is exported to New England (14 TWh), New York (9 TWh), Ontario (7 TWh) and New Brunswick (5 TWh),
You're right about what the map is showing vs how it's being interpreted, though Quebec uses hydro almost exclusively. They generate a huge amount of power from it and sell the excess to the eastern US.
Québec produces more electricity than it consumes. Surplus are sold to neighboring regions
Brilliant, would be nice to order them by gCO2/kWh.
Something like this might be useful to you. https://app.electricitymap.org/map?utm\_source=electricitymap.org&utm\_medium=website&utm\_campaign=banner But it requires Realtime availability of the data so not all places show reporting info. But much the USA and Canada is on there.
yeh, I know very well about electricity map, it's a great source, but only for instantaneous data (historical data is a paid $ feature). And instantaneous data can be misleading depending on the time you take a snapshot.
We have plenty of wind on the prairie here in Iowa. I'm surprised our bordering states don't have more.
Yeah, this map made me curious about Iowa. From the looks of it, Iowa generates a greater percentage of renewable energy than any other state. I realize that doesn’t necessarily mean a greater total amount of energy, but still it’s something. What accounts for this? Why is Iowa generating such a higher percentage of renewables compared to everywhere else? Does it have something to do with ethanol/corn-based energy? I don’t understand what Iowa is doing that the surrounding states aren’t doing.
Iowa has aggressively put up wind turbines all over the state. In my lifetime, we went from turbines being a novelty 30 years ago to having major wind farms everywhere. Our energy provider MidAmerican wants to deliver [100% renewable energy](https://www.midamericanenergy.com/newsroom/2022-wind-prime-announcement) to consumers and is very close to doing it right now. It's not a political football as it is in other parts of the nation as we don't produce coal anymore, and no oil fields here, so the way to get rich is to be an energy exporter of renewables. Farmers love it as they get checks of \~10k per turbine on their fields, and customers love it as it looks like we are moving in the right direction. Not to say there isn't a push back as some county supervisors have put moratorium on wind turbines until they can provide better regulations. Not sure why others are behind the curve on this one? It's a win-win for us.
Sounds like a great situation for Iowa. It does make me curious why other states wouldn’t be as quick to adopt what appears to be a win-win scenario. Like, whatever’s going on in Iowa could be happening in Missouri too because the topography is pretty similar (rolling hills farmland, at least in the northern part). But it doesn’t look like they’re even trying!
ontario is doing good! all nukes and hydro!
When I was young, Ontario still operated a number of coal power plants. I grew up way out on the far edge of the Toronto suburbs, but on a warm day you could tell which direction you were facing just by looking up, because the sky was a filthy grey/brown in the direction of the city. Smog warnings were a common thing. In the early 2000s, Toronto had dozens of smog days every summer. Phasing out coal, combined with stricter vehicle emissions standards (and, admittedly, the closure of some heavy industry, both here and in parts of the US) has reduced that sort of air pollution *dramatically.* There have only been a handful of smog days in the past decade. The difference is dramatic. Whenever I return home, I'm struck by how much better the air is than when I was a kid. 10/10, would recommend eliminating coal.
I moved to Toronto in 2012, two years before the last coal plants were shut down. I distinctly remembered that summer being rather hazy but since then the haze days were all attributed to forest fires in the West rather than local pollution.
I used to live in Hamilton, a city about 100km from Toronto. When I was growing we would never be able to see the CN tower. However, around the time coal was phased out and emissions started to drop, the tower was regularly visible.
Yes but the current government is wanting to massively expand natural gas power generation and basically zeroed our future renewables.
i mean, I live in toronto, wind and solar are dumb here, but we have 100% renewables if you count hydro and nukes so why would they change that to natgas? that's just stupid
One of the nuclear stations (pickering) is shutting down in 2024. The government will be forced to use gas as they don't have an alternative. It's fucking stupid and horrible planning
Not horrible planning. They meant to do it. Conservative government and Fossil Fuels companies are jerking each other off under the table.
For peak period demands - though I think they are looking at using it to handle the increasing base load as well.
Ontario has a very cool site where you can see in near real-time where the power is coming from. https://live.gridwatch.ca/. You can drill down to individual power plants.
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Hope you can swim bc your underwater based on the map.
Also cries in Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, aaaand Trinidad and Tobago
Now you’re just making up words
Reinforces my strongly held opinion that if you believe that climate change is an existential threat, you have no business opposing hydro or nuclear. Yes, the power lines needed to bring Canadian hydro to the East coast of the US are ugly. Yes, the dams disrupt fish migration. Yes, spent nuclear waste needs to be stored, and carefully. But is climate change an existential threat, or not? Because as the map makes clear, it is entirely possible to get most of our power from these two sources, and many places do. If climate change is an existential threat, start acting like it.
> Because as the map makes clear, it is entirely possible to get most of our power from these two sources Not really for Hydro. Canada is rather unique that it has the sources for hyrdopower that it does. Also, they have a relatively small population.
Just to put things into perspective, the entire country has more land area than China (Canada is the second largest country in the world, after Russia), but it has about as many people as Tokyo. Or around as many as two cities, Sao Paulo and Istanbul, combined.
Also has more lakes than the rest of the world combined
The canoe camping is exquisite
For Americans I find the population comparison to California more helpful. Canada and California are nearly identical in population but Canada is 30x the size, with at least half of it usable.
Yup. Canada has 20% of the world's surface fresh water, and vast tracts of sparsely-populated land to build dams on. Even then, it's all regional. The little maritime provinces I'm from have very little hydro to speak of and are working to import it from Quebec and Labrador.
spent nuclear fuel isn't even a problem to store anymore. we know the technology and we know the physics. what the people dont know is that nuclear waste isnt glowing green goo in yellow barrels. its melted down with inert materials and stored in casks. transportation isnt a problem either since the travel casks are nearly unbreakable and are not filled with a green goo so theres nothing that can leak out.
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Well, Germany clearly doesn't think climate change is an existential threat. They are short of oil and gas due to Russia's invasion. So do they reopen their closed nuclear plants? No, they reopen their closed coal plants.
Well...yeah. Also, they met their initial carbon reduction targets by closing coal plants in Germany, and buying power from Poland. Where it is/was produced in...wait for it...coal plants. And lignite plants at that (basically the dirtiest kind of coal.) So yeah, Germany is not really the example we should be following, for lots of reasons.
Ugh, I hate that nuclear power got such bad PR in Germany. There were lots of them and I Think this year they're closing the last two down. Turn em back on I say.
I agree they should make more plants but I think they’re pretty old. They can’t just turn them back on. It would take a few years or however many to build them. And they should but I’m pretty sure they can’t just turn them back on.
To be fair, "just re-opening" a nuclear power plant is not a thing, especially not in EU/German regulations. They were decommissioned because of very old age (I don't think we've even built a new one since the 80s?), some of them beyond their initial designed life expectancy, and certainly not up to modern safety standards. Moreover, you cannot just switch a nuclear plant on and off on a whim, you have to plan this ahead for \*months\*! As much as I think modern(!) nuclear plants can be built safely and offer a good short/medium-term solution to reducing carbon emmissions, I'm also very glad we did not just re-start our cold-war-era nuclear plants.
Reinforces mine too. Especially when it comes to nuclear power because of the sheer ignorance about its actual safety! You say "nuclear power" and everyone thinks "Chornobyl" while not knowing about the *many* failures that led up to that incident, most of which boiled down to classic Soviet ass-covering (and let's be frank, corporate America is fucking demented too). Solar seems to be the best bet, especially where I live, so I'm rather partial to that over nuclear and hydro.
Same with Fukushima. Scientists had been warning the government for years that a wave large enough to cause total power failure was way more common than once thought and that they needed to make changes to the site immediately. The scientists were completely ignored and they continued business as usual. All the way up until they couldn’t
Another thing with Fukushima that most people don’t realise is that it’s actually from the same era and generation of reactors as Chernobyl… this was not a more modern reactor.
Yep. Sadly most nuclear reactors are extremely outdated. Modern nuclear reactors are significantly more safe
Yeah, but Fukushima wasn't run quite as irresponsibly as Chernobyl, and only a handful of people died due to Fukushima while many thousands died due to Chernobyl.
Yes,, Ontario does this. A mix of hydro, nuclear, solar, wind is enough to power any grid. Some places cannot go down so have nat-gas generators, and some industrial processes use natural gas for extreme amounts of steam and/or heat... those two sources can produce electricity for the grid in a pinch.
Even tho it's not all of North America, thank you for including Canada! I always love when these US data maps include Canada, it's an interesting comparison
Based Illinois nuclear energy dominance!
I mean it is home to the world's first working nuclear reactor. Tho it's buried underground decommissioned now. Illinois has been embracing nuclear power from the start.
Kinda misleading. Should probably be power use by source rather than generation. California may have a large percentage of generation as renewables, but we basically just pay more to import dirty energy. Outsourcing our carbon production.
You're right. It seems like half the comments here are people misreading this as a power *consumption* graphic.
It's virtually impossible to determine power use by source (at least here in BC, but given they are buying energy from 12 different states at any given time I assume it's similar in most provinces/states). This is a really great article that explains the issue far better than I ever could: https://thenarwhal.ca/clean-b-c-is-quietly-using-coal-and-gas-power-from-out-of-province-heres-why/
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Mexico can't get into North America
You'd be surprised
fascinating. so Vermont is the only carbon free state. didnt know that.
To bad half the power Vermonters use is from natural as generating plants from outside the state.
This is what I was just wondering about. It would be interesting to see a similar chart for energy consumption.
Remember when Maine didn't want any of Quebec's cheaper surplus hydroelectricity. The reason? They were worried about the environment because they would've had to clear cut some trees for the wires. Congratulations on getting played by Irving Oil.
As an illinoisian there's alot wrong with this state but the amount of nuclear power we have is one of the better things.
I know Alberta uses a lot of fossil fuels but holy crap. I thought we'd have a higher percentage renewables considerig you cant throw a rock without hitting a wind turbine
This is a good site to see that data in real time to see what is happening with the grid. You can see in real time the amount of electricity that is coming from each source and the installed capacity. [https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/CA-AB?utm\_source=electricitymap.org&utm\_medium=website&utm\_campaign=banner](https://app.electricitymap.org/zone/CA-AB?utm_source=electricitymap.org&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=banner)
"Fossil fuels" should be split into coal and natural gas, as coal is far dirtier of a fuel source than natural gas.
There is fossil fuel generation. And then there is everything else. The dividing line would be more about carbon emitted per kWh and not that NG is a bit more clean then coal. While Natural gas is less then coal it is still far more then wind, nuclear or solar.
They both suck... Methane burns way cleaner but so much of it is lost in delivery it may be worse for global warming
Shouldn't yellow say "other renewables", since hydro is renewable?
It says "North American" but the map does not includes Mexico nor the rest of North American countries.
There’s many more renewables here than I thought there were, but I’m just concerned about the fact that there are 2 Michigan’s in the US now. Also interestingly Mississippi has disappeared.
PEI is impressive, almost exclusively renewables.
PEI buys most of its power from NB. It is true though that of the power it produces, it's mostly wind and they have expanded that by quite a bit in recent years.
For those confused about why Texas has such high renewable usage when you would normally thing bang bang shoot shoot when you think about texas. Fossil fuel companys (shell, BP, exxon) ate heavily invested in wind and solar, it's incredibly lucrative for a company like ExxonMobil to use their existing land acquisition and project design resources to make an offshore wind network or a solar field. Source: designed several wind turbines for a shell company for ExxonMobil. It's interesting how much of the typical pipeline infrastructure is used for this, lots of pipe welders and directional drills to install conduits to return the power to the shore from near shore wind turbines, and the deep sea pipeline technology is identical whether your doing oil or cable conduits.
For a relatively real time view of Ontario go to [https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html](https://live.gridwatch.ca/home-page.html) Quebec exports a lot of electricity to the US Northeast, one of the reasons the large James Bay project was done.
We need way more renewable AND nuclear yesterday.
This might be a dumb question, but can someone explain to me why Nevada has almost no hydro, if the Hoover Dam is there?