Everything Electric

Once everything is electric, I wonder how we will manage. We don’t have enough electricity now to meet current needs (pun intended). I just heard a plea from the electric company to conserve power during the current (that word again) heat wave. It seems too many of us are running fans and air conditioners and not a few have electric cars and all of that impacts consumption.

Where will the electricity come from to meet the growing need? Two clear nonstarters are nuclear and diesel generation; the first because of fears real or imaginary about radiation. The second because it requires the use of that evil natural resource called oil.
That leaves just three options, wind, solar and hydro. But each have issues that have to be dealt with.

Wind generation requires the construction of large windmills on equally large areas of land and preferably in areas where there is consistent air movement. Perhaps both Ottawa and Victoria could be considered logical sites due to the volumes of hot air available in each.

Solar panels are used to absorb sunlight to generate electricity but require vast acreages to be effective and that takes the land out of use permanently.

Hydroelectric generation is the last resort as that also consumes land and river valleys and requires the construction of dams to contain the water to run the turbines to generate the power. A trial of ‘run of river’ was unsuccessful for a variety reasons. By the way, hydroelectric dams are not a very popular concept as illustrated by the controversy surrounding Site C in northern BC.

The environmental groups combined with global warming advocates will be happy when we stop using oil and building dams but how happy will they be when Netflix is off the air and their cel phones and IPads don’t work because there isn’t enough power to charge them and the electric company puts up the rates that makes it more expensive to drive their Tesla?