Winter Is Coming

A country with vast natural resources chooses to freeze:

An environmental group called the Ontario Clean Air Alliance is demanding that natural gas power generation be phased out by 2030. It’s a predictable stance for an environmental group, but the worrying thing is that the alliance’s wobbly plan to replace natural gas has been endorsed by 32 municipalities, representing about 60 per cent of Ontario’s population. Among them are Toronto, Hamilton, Ottawa, Mississauga and Windsor. The federal Liberal, NDP and Green parties all promised zero emissions electricity in last month’s election.

Zero emissions electricity has to be taken seriously, not because it’s feasible in Ontario in this decade, but because it’s just the sort of simplistic idea that appeals to people who believe the planet will perish without just the right mix of government policies in Canada. These would be the same people who call for a future in which electricity powers all cars and home heating, but they want only their sort of electricity. That doesn’t include natural gas or emissions-free nuclear, which combined provide 62 per cent of Ontario’s generation capacity. ...

If gas plants were shut down by 2030, as the environmental group and myriad city councillors propose, there would be some pretty noticeable side effects. Those would include the need to spend $27 billion on alternative generation and transmission lines, plus additional operating costs of $5.7 billion a year, which would push the average homeowner’s bill up $100 a month. Oh, and there would also be rolling blackouts without the reliable natural gas power.

None of that is slowing down the clean air alliance, which accuses the IESO of trying to scare the public. Its own plan relies on Quebec investing in wind and solar so that it can sell its own hydro power to Ontario, plus an emerging idea to draw power from electric car batteries. ...

Before they get too keen on phasing out gas plants, Ontario politicians might want to consider the situation in Europe. Countries there enthusiastically embraced wind and solar but then made the mistake of shutting down nuclear plants and not replacing coal power with sufficient natural gas. Now they find themselves short of power and the price is increasing sharply.

 

This Europe: 

Russia is signaling that it won’t go out of its way to offer European consumers extra gas to ease the current energy crisis unless it gets something in return: regulatory approval to start shipments through the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline.In exchange for upping supplies, Russia wants to get German and European Union approval to begin using the pipeline to Europe, according to people close to state-run gas giant Gazprom and the Kremlin.

“We cannot ride to the rescue just to compensate for mistakes that we didn’t commit,” Konstantin Kosachyov, a top pro-Kremlin legislator in the upper house of parliament, said in an interview, without specifying what Russia is seeking. “We’re fulfilling all our contracts, all our obligations. Everything on top of that should be a subject for additional voluntary and mutually beneficial agreements.”

 

They have a point.

 

 

Well-funded environmentalists have never spent a winter in minus forty weather:

Environmental activists in the United States are seizing on Canada’s decision to invoke a 44-year-old treaty with the United States as an “audacious,” misguided and misleading gambit aimed at short-circuiting Michigan’s effort to shut down the Line 5 cross-border pipeline.

McBrearty called the treaty tactic a “direct attack on our sovereignty” that intentionally misinterprets the treaty itself “to make the audacious claim that we must leave a major risk pumping oil indefinitely through the heart of the Great Lakes.”