The nuclear renaissance is in full effect as Canada joins an international movement to dramatically increase the amount of nuclear energy produced across the country.
If they triple the production, the increase would cover all combustible fuels approaches and more. In this case Canada could be 100% renewable/nuclear by 2050.
Do you have any idea how much energy is used in the form of combustibles to heat homes, and power vehicles? It’s absolutely massive. Beyond this - the energy density of Petrol is something like 25-45x that of batteries - meaning for the same weight of fuel as a battery, you can go MUCH further, even factoring in the lower efficiency of an ICE engine (20-30%) vs. Electric (something like 90%). However, Electric Vehicles also have higher ware and tare on roads, tires, breaks, bridges, etc. And that means a higher TCO (Total cost of Operation) outside of the vehicle itself.
You might say “Improve Public Transport” And I’m all for it - but that requires doubling the average population density in urban centres to START to be practical. And achieving that is a decades long (like closer to half a century, if not longer) undertaking that has a huge environmental cost do to the tare down of existing buildings.
What all this means: To replace combustibles, we don’t just need a tripling of Nuclear - we need to increase it by an order of magnitude (10x it for clarity), 2 orders of magnitude increase of wind (100x), and we should aim for three orders of magnitude for solar (1000x). If you do that, AND improve average home insulation value, then we can start to get somewhere reasonable.
To be clear: We can do it.
Solar Roof Incentives for generally sunny cities (ex. Calgary)
Off Shore Wind
Dual Use Installations - So Parking Lots with Solar Covers for instance. Bonus points for onsight energy storage to buffer generation for charging cars.
SMR’s for remote area’s (think far northern area’s where diesel generators are the norm, as it reduces the need to ship fuel)
You will note that Hydro isn’t listed here - and for good reason: The environmental destruction, and long term upkeep is extremely impactful on the environment.
All of this, by the way, is something like a trillion dollar investment. And what is the Canadian Governments investment plan? 4-5 billion by 2035? If the Canadian Government wants to get serious - they need to start making the entire government beaurocracy far more lean, far more mean, and take the savings and throw it into everything that reduces power use, as well as renewable generation.
And finally: Start jacking up the minimum wage, start increasing labor protections, and the entire why? So that people can afford to invest into these things for themselves on a wide scale.
I admit I did not count the future demand from electric vehicles. When I mentioned that it would cover combustible fuels, I mean in terms of using combustible to produce electricity (e.g. to power home, etc.), not cars.
If you look at the Statistics Canada annual electric power generation tables, you can see that 82/636 TWh is currently nuclear, whereas 119 TWh comes from combustible. That means that tripling nuclear would add 164 TWh, which is 44 TWh more.
Obviously, with EV adoption, as you pointed out, this will not be enough. I agree that increasing Hydro would not really make sense, since a lot of the “good spots” are likely already taken. As for your recommended 100x and 1000x, considering we are currently producing 4TWh of solar energy and 36 TWh of wind, so at respectively 1000x and 100x, that’d be an extra 4000 TWh + 3600 TWh = 7600 Twh, i.e. 10x more than what is produced today. Let’s say a Tesla S uses 100 KWh to move 640 km, that is, 100 TWh will go for 640 million km. This means 7600TWh can power 48,640M km, so if we have a population of 50M people, that is 972M km travelled per person in a year.
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If they triple the production, the increase would cover all combustible fuels approaches and more. In this case Canada could be 100% renewable/nuclear by 2050.
Do you have any idea how much energy is used in the form of combustibles to heat homes, and power vehicles? It’s absolutely massive. Beyond this - the energy density of Petrol is something like 25-45x that of batteries - meaning for the same weight of fuel as a battery, you can go MUCH further, even factoring in the lower efficiency of an ICE engine (20-30%) vs. Electric (something like 90%). However, Electric Vehicles also have higher ware and tare on roads, tires, breaks, bridges, etc. And that means a higher TCO (Total cost of Operation) outside of the vehicle itself.
You might say “Improve Public Transport” And I’m all for it - but that requires doubling the average population density in urban centres to START to be practical. And achieving that is a decades long (like closer to half a century, if not longer) undertaking that has a huge environmental cost do to the tare down of existing buildings.
What all this means: To replace combustibles, we don’t just need a tripling of Nuclear - we need to increase it by an order of magnitude (10x it for clarity), 2 orders of magnitude increase of wind (100x), and we should aim for three orders of magnitude for solar (1000x). If you do that, AND improve average home insulation value, then we can start to get somewhere reasonable.
To be clear: We can do it.
You will note that Hydro isn’t listed here - and for good reason: The environmental destruction, and long term upkeep is extremely impactful on the environment.
All of this, by the way, is something like a trillion dollar investment. And what is the Canadian Governments investment plan? 4-5 billion by 2035? If the Canadian Government wants to get serious - they need to start making the entire government beaurocracy far more lean, far more mean, and take the savings and throw it into everything that reduces power use, as well as renewable generation.
And finally: Start jacking up the minimum wage, start increasing labor protections, and the entire why? So that people can afford to invest into these things for themselves on a wide scale.
I admit I did not count the future demand from electric vehicles. When I mentioned that it would cover combustible fuels, I mean in terms of using combustible to produce electricity (e.g. to power home, etc.), not cars.
If you look at the Statistics Canada annual electric power generation tables, you can see that 82/636 TWh is currently nuclear, whereas 119 TWh comes from combustible. That means that tripling nuclear would add 164 TWh, which is 44 TWh more.
Obviously, with EV adoption, as you pointed out, this will not be enough. I agree that increasing Hydro would not really make sense, since a lot of the “good spots” are likely already taken. As for your recommended 100x and 1000x, considering we are currently producing 4TWh of solar energy and 36 TWh of wind, so at respectively 1000x and 100x, that’d be an extra 4000 TWh + 3600 TWh = 7600 Twh, i.e. 10x more than what is produced today. Let’s say a Tesla S uses 100 KWh to move 640 km, that is, 100 TWh will go for 640 million km. This means 7600TWh can power 48,640M km, so if we have a population of 50M people, that is 972M km travelled per person in a year.