News & Articles on Fossil Fuels
Fossil Fuels ares not renewable, obviously. They are listed here for organizational reasons. I don’t write about fossil fuels–as a rule. However, fossil fuels and those who promote them are not going away quietly. Thus, I felt it necessary to include the topic to distinguish articles that are not about nuclear power or renewable energy.
Canada’s Carbon Price Working, So Of Course It’s Being Attacked
By
Michael Barnard
Canada’s carbon price, which is mostly invisible to most people, most of the time, is back in headlines. For fiscal and political reasons, the Liberal government exempted homes heating with oil from the tax for three years. Naturally, the Conservatives have used this to raise populist grievances that mostly don’t hold any water. I’ve been avoiding writing about this as it’s a bit sigh-worthy, much tempest in a teapot without much Earl Gray coming out of the spout. But a long-term acquaintance, the executive who gave me great career opportunities in Canada and Latin America a little over a decade ago, reached out recently with a good question.
Another Month & Another Delay & Cost Overrun For Canada’s Black Elephant
By
Michael Barnard
Canada’s Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project never had a business case that made the slightest sense. Perhaps that’s why its construction project is such a train wreck. In the latest installment of the tragicomedy, TMX — the Crown corporation that owns the dead asset — has requested a route deviation that will delay completion by at least nine months and add costs to the effort.
The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind
By
Jérôme Guillet
Oscar Wilde famously wrote that people “know the price of everything and the value of nothing” suggesting there is a difference between the two concepts of price and value. In the power market, due to some of its structural features, it is even more confusing as you also need to deal with the cost of power, which may again be different. The below, derived from an article I wrote almost 15 years ago, tries to make sense of the differences between the 3, and how these are ultimately decided by political choices.
A Feast of Fools: What happens when politics gets lost?
By
Alan Simpson
Sunak’s next distraction will be ‘pylon wars’. Thousands of miles on high voltage cabling are needed to ship electricity from off-shore wind farms to towns and cities. This requires hundreds of thousands of new pylons. Everything that was off-shore and out-of-sight suddenly becomes an environmental battleground. Communities are already mobilising to challenge the process.
Zeroing In: Pathways to an affordable net-zero grid in Alberta
By
External Source
By the end of this year, Alberta will have successfully phased out coal-fired generation, which was the dominant source of electricity just six years ago. Alberta is already becoming the renewable energy capital of Canada. More than three-quarters of solar and wind generation capacity built in Canada last year was in Alberta.
How Many Things Must One Analyst Get Wrong In Order To Proclaim A Convenient Decarbonization Minerals Shortage?
By
Michael Barnard
Yesterday, as I’m writing this, Dave Borlace of Just Have a Think dropped a new video. This one was debunking the somewhat infamous Simon Michaux un-peer reviewed document which purported to prove that there weren’t enough minerals in the world to enable us to get off of fossil fuels.
