Weekend Watch: Juice: Power, Politics & the Grid
This video series is a spectacular take on many of the energy issues of the day. It starts with the February, 2021, Texas blackouts, and goes on to tackle renewable power in the form of wind and solar. It doesn’t speak too fondly of coal, but goes broadly into the adoption of nuclear power. Canada and its experience with nuclear figures heavily into this series, including the influence of Dr. Chris Keefer, a Toronto ER physician who had lead the crusade to bring nuclear power back to the fore. And the series gets into why nuclear all of a sudden is in a renaissance after decades of being in the dumps.
This applies directly to Saskatchewan, where just last week, SaskPower inked a deal with GE Hitachi Canada to continue the development path of small modular reactors. And in that press conference, SaskPower president and CEO Rupen Pandya, when asked by Pipeline Online how many reactors we’re going to build, said Saskatchewan’s grid is expected to grow from 5,400 megawatts currently to 13,000 to 15,000 megawatts by 2050. That’s about 2.5x what it is now. And nuclear appears like it’s going to play a huge part in that. So the issues presented in this series are very topical for this province.
Juice really highlights a lot of the issues Pipeline Online has been focusing on for the last two years. In particular, reliability trumps all, and wind and solar can only be relied upon to be utterly unreliable.
I strongly suggest anyone in the decision chain of Saskatchewan going nuclear – all MLAs, including cabinet and opposition, all executives, board and management of SaskPower, and union leadership and membership, take the time to watch this at some point in the near future. This is the reality Saskatchewan is rapidly heading towards.
This series was put together by Robert Bryce and Tyson Culver. Bryce one of the most astute energy analysts out there. You can follow his Substack at https://robertbryce.substack.com/
This was originally a feature, but broken up into manageable chunks and posted for free on YouTube. Each episode is around 22 minutes long. It’s definitely worth watching all five. All five videos are in the story link above.
Good Luck.
Need more biofuel…trees.
Problem usually is they need to dry first or additional corrosion occurs.
Hardwood and softwood burn and generate heat differently as well.
Rain and snow makes drying challenging as well…
Busted… humidity cops will shut you down too.
A very good documentary and outlines clearly where things went wrong. Start with Enron. Start with poliicians who imagined that electricity is just another commodity. The electricity system along with reliability and customer cost began to collapse when vertically integrated utilities were broken up. In Canada, Ontario Hydro had been enormously successful in providing low cost power effectively and with very high system reliability. It started breaking down when a combination of both strident left wing and right wing politics started intruding into what should have been a purely technical issue.
The direct result was the grid collapse of August 10,2003. More recently it was followed by the ERCOT grid collapse in 2021. Break up your vertically integrated electric utilities, and this is the chaos you get and deserve.
Educate me please: why the need for repeated regulatory reviews for the installation of every new small modular nuclear reactor? The ignorant cynic in me sees it as various parties looking for a slice of the revenue stream.
You are right to be cynical about this. Bear with me: giving you an accurate answer will be lengthy.
EAs (environmental assessments) are a legal requirement created by federal and provincial environmental assessment legislation. These laws require a separate EA for each project, one by the federal government and one by the provincial government. In the case of most provinces, two separate EAs can be combined into one hearing. This prevails for all nuclear projects, as a single rerview is done by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. But it’s frequently the case for highways that two EAs must be done in sequence.
Much worse is the Law List. This is all of the various pieces of legislation which will require specific licences for particular activities. One of the pieces of federal legislation with enormous amount of regulatory capture is the Canada Water Act. There are many, many others both federal and provincial – too many to list them all here.
“The ignorant cynic in me sees it as various parties looking for a slice of the revenue stream.”
Not really; it’s worse than that. What this is about is much like the Constitution Act of 1982. It’s intended to make lawyers rich by increasing by many times the amount of legal civil law work and cases going to court. Remember that federal environmental assessment law was designed by Lucien Bouchard when he was Mulroney’s Minister of the Environment. At least part of the reason Bouchard had was to make the government of Canada work LESS effectively and efficiently. This would make Quebec separation that much easier in the future.
In short, the design intent of the law is to make Canada work WORSE.
Your question is a good one: this system of excessive and redundant EAs makes no sense. It gives lots of income and attention to a huge assortment of environmental groups and makes lots of money for lawyers. EAs are not about the science of the impact of an actual project. They are about preventing these projects from ever taking place regardless of their merits.
So it amounts to a death of a thousand cuts, is that what you are saying – bleeding the victim bit by bit so that they don’t survive, and if they do, they cannot fight back?
Yes, that’s exactly so. Compared to all other EA regimes, (EA legislation exists in all OECD nations), Canada’s is the worst. A project proponent has to go through the entire process. At the end, success in the EA hearings provides NOTHING. You still have to get Ministerial approval. This entire process also serves the Minister having the ability to avoid having to make negative decisions and incurring the wrath of the public.
Governments have been divesting more and more decision-making to third party, supposedly “neutral” bodies such as the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency (CEAA) or the Canadian Radio-Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) for decades. This way, a government gets to say, “wasn’t me that killed this thing. It was this 3rd party independent group over there that killed it.” Avoiding responsibility for decision-making has become a necessary art of all government regardless of political stripe. Harry Truman’s famous “the buck stops here” died a long, long time ago.
This all works very much like Ginsburg’s famous description of the three laws of thermodynamics:
1. First Law, you can’t win; (you cannot get more energy out of any system than you put in)
2. Second Law, you can’t break even; (any energy transfer means some loss except at absolute zero celsius)
3. Third Law, you can’t get out of the game. (you cannot get to absolute zero)
A simpler statement is “head’s I win, tails you lose. And if you don’t play, the big man behind you with the gun at your ear will shoot you.”
I thought “death by a thousand cuts” was where you feed a man beans until he farts himself to death?
Thank you.
You are welcome. Sorry for the long answer, but some of these things are very, very obscure and can require lengthy explanations. This was a relatively short version, as in my employed life some years ago I was very familiar with the operation of CEAA the legislation and its implementation. It was and is ugly, and that was before Justatwit and his thug Gumboots started f**king with it.
And I disagree with your self-description. Your question was NOT ignorant. Asking even seemingly simple questions is wisdom. Someone who has a very good military history blog has a favourite question about some truism, “But is this actually the case?”
Thank you, very enlightened to the truth.
One other problem is that everything breaks and will eventually go back into the ground.
New technology has been quite a disappointment in the nose dive of quality in production.
The other problem is switching parts to cheaper makes them less reliable.
Those massive new Aircraft Carriers that the UK has built are racked full of problems and in constant need of repair. The Ocean is quite a corrosive experience…
JJ, “One other problem is that everything breaks and will eventually go back into the ground.”
That’s why maintenance and repair was invented thousands of years ago. As to modern problems with new technology products, product quality costs. People won’t pay for it. That’s why throwaway junk from China at Walmart sells so well. British aircraft carriers were built on the principle of lowest bidder.
Much of our environmental review processes were developed by rabid greenies and their government enablers to slow ‘bad’ development. Putting the onus on the proponent to prove every step over and over again drives up costs and delays approvals in the hope that evil corporations will give up and go away. A first step must be to review the process itself so that the important issues are addressed and the noise is eliminated. Don’t owe the whiners a thing.