PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history

PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history(pm.gc.ca)

64 points by garbawarb 46 days ago | 36 comments

sleepyguy 46 days ago |

14 Gigawatts for 70 Billion? Is that a good dollar value?

An announcement means nothing unless it is followed through. It's results that matter. Carney likes to make a lot of announcements but there have been no results or even the start of any of these announcements.

I am of the opinion this is much to do about nothing, like every other announcement made by not just Carney but his predecessors. It's all just theater for the masses.

Why not just do it, like they did it decades ago, why does it have to be some kind of announcement or is this just a political ploy to garner more support while doing nothing?

I don't believe anything any of these guys say because talk is cheap and building anything in Canada is nearly impossible.

Junk away....

ameixaseca 46 days ago | |

    > As part of this agreement, the federal government will provide $10 billion in federal financing to:
    >
    > - Upgrade and expand the Churchill Falls Generating Station.
    > - Develop the massive Gull Island hydroelectricity project.
    > - Unlock co-investment opportunities with the Innu of Labrador in a major new Labrador onshore wind project.
    > - Build associated transmission lines.

70 billion is the combined amount invested from all the parties into all the projects.

petermcneeley 46 days ago | |

Low balling it is about 10 billion a year CAD in electricity. That is assuming full uptime which is not realistic. It is also going to take several years before these projects complete.

I think the ROI is better than 5% even if you include a variety of factors. Of course if the budgets go >> 70 billion then likely it is a poor investment.

NishanStepak 46 days ago |

A major contributing factor to what is being described is the development of superconducting technology. This is includes high temperature superconducting wind turbines, superconducting hydroelectric turbines, and superconducting transmission lines. From reading the outline, it looks like this project will capitalize on these new technologies.

toomuchtodo 46 days ago | |

Even without these superconducting technologies, it’s shrewd capital investment policy. This decarbonizes the last 20% of Canada’s electrical generation, replaces any demand growth with clean energy instead of fossil fuel, and allows more domestically produced (Alberta) fossil gas to be exported if needed. Importantly, just like China, it enables self sufficiency and potentially eliminating any dependency on the US for energy needs (with optionality to export excess clean energy to northern US states in the future).

Per ElectricityMaps, all of Canada has less than 20GW of fossil generation capacity, as of this comment. China, on average, installs ~1.75x that much wind and solar in a month.

TLDR Capital is the bottleneck slowing global decarbonization.

snapplebobapple 46 days ago | | |

It would be more accurate to say "better investment opportunities bias investment away from the weak returns of allegedly clean energy" capital is not the bottleneck anymore than it has always been the bottleneck. Higher returning things to choose instead are the bottleneck

rjrjrjrj 46 days ago | | |

> This decarbonizes the last 20% of Canada’s electrical generation

I don't think so. Churchill Falls is ~5000km from Alberta

diego_moita 46 days ago |

Well, finally!

One of the reasons I voted for him were his environmental credentials. But what he did since elected was cozying up with Alberta and their oil barons.

canada_dry 46 days ago | |

Carney is one of the most popular "Liberal" PMs west of Ontario in decades. His popularity in Alberta is higher than Daniel Smith. This can only be good for Canada as a whole IMHO.

petermcneeley 46 days ago | | |

Probably the most evil PMs that we have ever had. Literally a international banker! Its like electing the monopoly man lol.

hn_throwaway_99 46 days ago |

It's really ironic I think that Donald Trump, despite his "drill baby drill" rhetoric and paying billions of dollars to halt wind projects, will likely be responsible for the largest surge in clean energy developments in history.

Trump has shown that the US can not be trusted and is not a reliable ally, and his Iran-scapade, like Russia's invasion of Ukraine before it, has shown every other country that the absolute worst thing you can do is be dependent on energy imports from despotic nations (US now included) and volatile areas of the world. All these countries are racing to wean themselves off fossil fuels as fast as possible, largely due to Trump.

Barrin92 46 days ago | |

>largely due to Trump

I know the US has a main character syndrome but this has been going on for decades now, Donald Trump is not responsible for what happens in the rest of the world regardless of what US news says.

China has been adding a United Kingdom's worth of solar for several years now, Pakistan replaced 40% of its energy supply with solar after floods in recent years, Germany over the last 30 days produced 70% of its energy from renewables etc.

"Drill Baby Drill" in 2026 was already the mentality of a Japanese holdout soldier years after the war is over. It's a purely ideological thing.

amanzi 46 days ago | | |

Here in NZ, what Trump has been doing in the Middle East is having a huge impact on policy, especially with the upcoming elections this year. Trump has reminded us (and I imagine many other countries too) that relying on other countries for fuel is fraught with danger. EV sales have spiked here, and all of the political parties are scrambling to come with electrification policies. So for NZ at least, I definitely agree with the OP comment about Trump's influence.

hn_throwaway_99 46 days ago | | |

I agree with most of what you wrote - the energy transition has been happening for a long time now. Indeed, my argument that Trump's malfeasance is causing countries to accelerate plans for energy independence wouldn't even be possible if costs for renewables hadn't come down drastically in the last few decades.

But it's undeniable that the deglobalization that is occurring, and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz (not to mention issues in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait), is causing many countries to accelerate their plans, if just for the simple reason that the cost pain now makes the economics of renewables all the more favorable.

tw04 46 days ago | | |

Decade not decades. Which coincides with… Trump’s first term.

https://statbase.org/data/chn-solar-power-generation/

nish__ 46 days ago |

At the end of the day, nothing beats hydro electric power. It's hidden, consistent and the technology is very mature. Really the OG of renewable energy. If we could get our appliances running efficiently enough, I think we could run the whole grid on it.

nickff 46 days ago | |

Hydro power (dams) causes massive declines in native fish populations in the affected rivers, which is especially significant for salmonids. There have been attempts to mitigate these issues with 'fish ladders' (as well as more complicated schemes), but they haven't been very effective.

bickfordb 46 days ago | | |

And they fill up with silt and generate less power over time.

igor47 46 days ago | |

One problem with hydro is we've long ago exhausted the easy wins, and then went on to build the kinda wash outs. See the fight over Glen canyon, which even its architect went on to admit was a mistake. The wins now are in closed loop pumped hydro; see https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-pumped-hydro

hn_throwaway_99 46 days ago | | |

> which even its architect went on to admit was a mistake.

Who are you referring to? A quick Google search didn't confirm what you wrote.

mwcremer 46 days ago | |

Lakes Powell and Mead would like a word...

amazingamazing 46 days ago | |

Huh? Solar has all of that and doesn't even have moving parts. The only arguable downside is it increases more sunlight absorbed by the earth (as opposed to reflecting it). You may say but what about nighttime - im talking about in aggregate on earth, just like hydro only works well with only water

igor47 46 days ago |

This is a genuinely huge deal, and I think it's worth appreciating why hydro makes sense here specifically, even though the headline cost looks steep. On paper, this project runs around $5M per megawatt of capacity, while utility solar can be built for roughly a fifth of that. But that comparison is misleading once you factor in capacity factor --Churchill Falls runs near 74% of its max output almost all the time, while solar in most places only hits 20-25%. To match the same annual output, you'd need to build solar at more than 3x its nameplate capacity. And even then, batteries only solve the day/night problem. Labrador can get stretches of overcast, snowy weather for a week or more at a time, and multi-day battery storage is still wildly expensive compared to a reservoir that just stores water until it's needed. Try this same approach somewhere sunny and cloud-free like Texas, and solar+storage would almost certainly win, especially when accounting for the land area that needs to be submerged by the reservoir. This project makes sense because it's matched to the geography.

> As part of this agreement, the federal government will provide $10 billion in federal financing to: > > - Upgrade and expand the Churchill Falls Generating Station. > - Develop the massive Gull Island hydroelectricity project. > - Unlock co-investment opportunities with the Innu of Labrador in a major new Labrador onshore wind project. > - Build associated transmission lines.