4 ms·

Are there no rains in western Canada? Why is hydro not an alternative?

by yxhuvud 2y ago

kgabis 2y ago
Even if hydro is a viable option, it's still terrible for the environment.
DrJokepu 2y ago
No rain in winter, the snow won’t melt until much later.
- yxhuvud 2y ago
  Same is true here in Sweden, we just have deep enough reservoirs. We also have nuclear, but hydro is also a really big part and as Canada has even lower population density than we do it shouldn't be unreasonable. But perhaps terrain in many areas isn't helpful.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tonyarkles 2y ago
Where I’m at (Saskatchewan) everything is very flat. We have some hydro but all of the “economically viable” hydro resources have been tapped. I worked out the math once on doing pumped hydro storage and the best siting I came up with involved building a massive reservoir in the middle of one of the most beautiful provincial parks we have and putting the downstream low point 80km away. There’s a really interesting nomenclature thing in Canada with respect to electricity. Every province (except Alberta) has a government-owned power company. If you want to tell whether or not a given province has good water resources for generating electricity you just need to look at the name of their power company: BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro… all good places for hydroelectricity. SaskPower? Not so much. We have recently bought into the SMR idea and one of the questions I used to have was “why the hell didn’t we build nuclear 20 years ago here”. The problem, I understand now, is overall grid sizing. You don’t want to have a single power plant that provides more than about 10% of your grid capacity. In SK, our total generation capacity is around 3500MW; a conventional 1+GW reactor would have dramatically exceeded the 10% cutoff. Smaller 300MW reactors provide a much better fit for our grid.

4 ms·

Are there no rains in western Canada? Why is hydro not an alternative?

by yxhuvud 2y ago

Are there no rains in western Canada? Why is hydro not an alternative?

kgabis 2y ago
Even if hydro is a viable option, it's still terrible for the environment.
DrJokepu 2y ago
No rain in winter, the snow won’t melt until much later.
- yxhuvud 2y ago
  Same is true here in Sweden, we just have deep enough reservoirs. We also have nuclear, but hydro is also a really big part and as Canada has even lower population density than we do it shouldn't be unreasonable. But perhaps terrain in many areas isn't helpful.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tonyarkles 2y ago
Where I’m at (Saskatchewan) everything is very flat. We have some hydro but all of the “economically viable” hydro resources have been tapped. I worked out the math once on doing pumped hydro storage and the best siting I came up with involved building a massive reservoir in the middle of one of the most beautiful provincial parks we have and putting the downstream low point 80km away. There’s a really interesting nomenclature thing in Canada with respect to electricity. Every province (except Alberta) has a government-owned power company. If you want to tell whether or not a given province has good water resources for generating electricity you just need to look at the name of their power company: BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro… all good places for hydroelectricity. SaskPower? Not so much. We have recently bought into the SMR idea and one of the questions I used to have was “why the hell didn’t we build nuclear 20 years ago here”. The problem, I understand now, is overall grid sizing. You don’t want to have a single power plant that provides more than about 10% of your grid capacity. In SK, our total generation capacity is around 3500MW; a conventional 1+GW reactor would have dramatically exceeded the 10% cutoff. Smaller 300MW reactors provide a much better fit for our grid.