Tag Archives: environment

SaskPower Plots To End Drinking Water Availability

Posted on by John Klein

Corb Lund is among the Albertans who’ve had to fight mountaintop mining to maintain drinking water safety for Alberta and Saskatchewan. SaskPower is eager to find a path to creating social acceptance of nuclear power. Nuclear power is costly, and is planned to be delivered too late to address the climate crisis, even before we get to addressing its other serious problems or potential benefits. If they can convince people that it’s not important to maintain drinking water availability, that would aid their goal in promoting water-thirsty nuclear power.

Monopoly utilities conscript beholden ratepayers into partisan fights against the climate and our ecosystem. David Roberts of Dr. Volts podcast discusses the problem from an American perspective. The problem clearly extends well beyond Saskatchewan’s Crown corporation (monopoly) SaskPower. Here, Chris highlights how SaskPower’s utility bill serves as anti-Trudeau and anti-carbon price propaganda for its SaskParty masters:

This is not a new problem. Here’s a tweet from 4 years ago about the Sask Government’s Crown utilities interfering in a transition to renewable energy as they fought in court against the price on carbon required by the federal government.

Methane EMIT

Posted on by John Klein

There’s a European satellite watching for methane pollution. It spotted a big leak in Alberta.

ISS has a camera called EMIT attached and it can see methane plumes on Earth. The data is public, but not as easy as surfing around like on Google Earth to map it.

“Jan Gorski, director of the Pembina Institute’s oil and gas program, said consistent regulation is vital to spotting emissions.

“The source, location, and generation of methane emissions is unpredictable, which is why we need good measurement and monitoring to catch these rare events,” he said. 

“If it’s something caught by satellite it shows that it was a pretty significant source of methane emissions.”

Gorski said the current data on the average level of methane emissions from the gas sector is based on studies from more than a decade ago.”

Get The Ducks Out Of Here

Posted on by John Klein

At lunch, a bunch of ducks got stuck in a courtyard and needed to be shepherded to the lake.

Switch to Wind, Water, Solar, and Save Billions

Posted on by John Klein

“$2B saved since Ukraine war

Wind and solar power plants generated 46.3 terawatt-hours of electricity between May 1, 2021 and April 30, 2022, the data [in Turkey] showed.

“Without these power plants, underutilized gas-fired plants or coal power plants relying on imports would have had to run in order to compensate for them,” the report added.

“Assuming that all 46.3 TWh power was generated by gas-fired plants, this would mean wind and solar power replaced $7 billion extra gas imports during that 12-month period.””

SaskPower: A Job Half Done

Posted on by John Klein

…is as good as none.

If you’re impressed by SaskPower’s objective to reduce emissions by only half, by 2030, you’re setting the bar way too low. A big reason Saskatchewan is among the world’s worst per-capita polluters is because our electricity is a large lignite coal and fossil/natural gas component. The electricity utility crown corp has been testing solar since at least Y2K when it installed panels on the Sask. Science Centre, yet 22 years later it still has drivel like this on its website:

The federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault says the latest IPCC report from the UN is “sobering”, and fossil fuel companies “cannot do business as usual”, but SaskPower is sticking with its goal from half a decade ago, while it’s actually lost ground on its aim to be 50% renewable, and only “40% less emitting by 2030”. Despite putting a new 200MW wind farm online near Assiniboia, and adding a little 10MW utility solar to the mix soon, it’s added or is adding over 700MW of fossil fuel generating power since 2019.

““Right now, SaskPower is on track to reduce our carbon emissions more than 50 per cent below our 2005 levels by 2030 and we’re looking to get to net-zero emissions by 2050,” Joel Cherry, spokesperson for SaskPower said in an interview Monday.”

I don’t see how that is possible to claim given the numbers I’m seeing. This is not a sprint you want to leave 90% of the work to the last 10 metres.

Yet here’s their homepage claim:

“Renewable Power

IN SASKATCHEWAN

We’re on our way to reducing our emissions by half.
Find out how we’re getting there and the projects underway.”

Plague Update: BA.2 Taking Over

Posted on by John Klein

Our society has entered the phase of the pandemic where most people are trying to pretend that everything is normal, and there’s nothing dangerous about eating in restaurants or sending kids to school. It reminds me of the climate crisis, how we’ll still fly domestically, and buy SUVs, despite the poles of the Earth hitting record temperatures 30 and 40 degrees above seasonal averages.

Saskatoon was out of ambulances yesterday? Has that ever happened before?

The latest widespread Omicron variant is in Saskatchewan in a big, and growing way. Many people who are required to wear masks still keep them below their nose or even their mouth, pretending they’re a fashion statement instead of a medical device to keep others (and themselves) more safe. Few people I see in any given day are wearing N95 or well fitting masks, mostly it’s fashionable cloth ones, or loosely fitting black or blue medical masks.

Plague Update: Moe’s Precedent For Spreading Misinformation

Posted on by John Klein

It’s extremely NOT unprecedented for the feckless Premier of Saskatchewan to spread anti-science mumbo jumbo. He’s called the fossil fuel industry “sustainable“.

BONUS MOE MISINFO:

SaskPower’s War On Solar

Posted on by John Klein

SaskPower told me last decade that their Y2K test of solar panel technology at the time convinced them there was no utility future for solar. Never mind that the tech was already more than a decade old at that point, and costs had dropped while efficiency of the panels had risen significantly.

Over 4 years ago they promised to build a 10MW array of solar panels. They’ve yet to deliver. Instead, they dealt a body blow to the solar installer industry in the province by cancelling Net Metering and replacing it later with Net Billing. This is in large part to the governing party of Saskatchewan taking corporate donations that would be illegal in the rest of Canada.

The Crown utility has lied about solar technology on Twitter even. They can’t be trusted, and that’s a damn shame, because we could be at a near 100% solar grid by now if we started building 6 years ago like I and others proposed.

Saskatchewan Party Produces Pollution

Posted on by John Klein

Back in 2012, there was a problem:

Provincial water too polluted, says research

Back then, the SaskParty was promising to address climate change with a plan that included a 20% emissions cut below 2006 pollution levels, by last year, 2020. They soon deleted that target.

Then this happened, and continues to happen:

Sask. leads country in per capita greenhouse gas emissions

“Provincial environment minister says climate plan needs time to work”

No! It doesn’t. When we give the SaskParty time for their plans to work, they make emissions worse, not better. And they promote their failed Environment Ministers to party leader too.

Other jurisdictions are too Canadian/polite to give us the F grade our Petrostate deserves.

https://www.conferenceboard.ca/hcp/provincial/environment/ghg-emissions.aspx

Co-op Refinery VOC emissions 10x higher than average of other refineries

Sour gas emissions at refinery ‘problematically high’ says expert

That’s from back in 2015, and my understanding is that it’s been addressed to some degree. For the latest be sure to follow an expert like Prof. Eaton.