PM Carney announces largest clean energy investment in North American history

ggarbawarb about 3 hours ago 19 commentsRead Article on pm.gc.ca

ZH version is available. Content is displayed in original English for accuracy.

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion Sentiment

67% Positive

Analyzed from 888 words in the discussion.

Discussion (19 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

sleepyguy•about 1 hour 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....

petermcneeley•25 minutes 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.

diego_moita•about 1 hour 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•31 minutes 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•23 minutes 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•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 1 hour 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.

nish__•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours ago

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

igor47•about 2 hours 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•about 1 hour 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•about 2 hours ago

Lakes Powell and Mead would like a word...

amazingamazing•about 2 hours 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

NishanStepak•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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•about 2 hours 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

toomuchtodo•about 1 hour ago

Fossil fuels receive ~$7T in global subsidies per year, per the IMF, even when less cost efficient than renewables. Markets can remain irrational longer than you can stay solvent. It’s government’s job to step in and correct market failures, when appropriate, including mispricing of potential investments.

https://www.imf.org/en/topics/climate-change/energy-subsidie...

(the world has already deployed 3TW of solar, and is approaching 1TW/year deployment rate, so we’re almost to the tipping point where fossil fuel subsidies will no longer be relevant; until then, finger on the scale when needed)