Could SK meet its energy needs from solar & wind?

Could SK meet its energy needs from solar & wind?

Postby Oscar » Wed Oct 14, 2020 8:40 am

Could Saskatchewan Canada Meet Its Domestic Energy Needs From Solar & Wind?

[ https://cleantechnica.com/2020/10/07/co ... olar-wind/ ]

October 7th, 2020 by Michael Barnard

Saskatchewan isn’t just a hard-to-spell Canadian province, but also an interesting and unfortunate outlier in the country.

As this shows, it’s one of the few provinces with substantially increasing CO2 emissions as opposed to recent declines. But that’s not the entire story. While it’s a huge land area covering 651,036 square kilometers, making it larger than 80% of the countries in the world, it only has 1.17 million inhabitants, so its emissions per capita are among the worst in the world. As a province, instead of cutting coal and gas, it had decided to accept the lobbying efforts of the fossil fuel industry and try carbon capture and sequestration, along with the usual enhanced oil recovery that makes it a bait-and-switch. Their Boundary Dam coal plant CCS and EOR plant has failed miserably, and they wasted the usual billions before admitting that carbon capture is too expensive because physics. Unsurprisingly, they are also one of the provinces without an electric vehicle rebate. . . . .

Saskatchewan has the best solar resources in the country, and solar panels work better when they are cooler, so Saskatchewan’s winters may have shorter days, but they have excellent generation opportunities.

Similarly, Saskatchewan has excellent wind energy resources, yet again among the best in Canada. They are blessed with free energy, yet still dig up oil and gas for the majority of their energy needs. And it already has a lot of transmission running around the place to tap into. . . . . . .

Saskatchewan, in other words, could go from a Canadian laggard, a regressive province that along with Alberta is causing other provinces’ efforts to meet national emissions standards to fail, to a progressive province which leads the country in transforming to a modern energy economy. But it probably won’t, and will become even more of an outlier in Canada than it already is."
Oscar
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