- cross-posted to:
- canada@lemmy.ca
- cross-posted to:
- canada@lemmy.ca
Renewable energy met all new demand for electricity in 2025, according to a new review of global power generation, halting the growth of fossil fuel-powered generation and highlighting the promise of clean sources like wind and solar.
The authoritative Global Electricity Review released annually by Ember, an international energy research organization, says clean sources — especially solar — are growing fast enough and are cheap enough that they are stopping new fossil fuel-powered electricity generation. Electricity from solar and wind increased while there was no change to the amount of electricity produced from burning fossil fuels.
“We’re really talking about a large-scale change in how the energy system works. And solar is among the most scalable technologies that can deliver fast change,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember.
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It is not the future. It is NOW if we finally put this gas bullshit behind us.
Just like we are the only G7 without high speed rail. Canada lags behind on everything.
Canada lags behind in everything because our only bar is “slightly better than the USA”
our healthcare lags, but its slightly better than the US
Education lags, but still slightly better than the US (is it?)
We lag behind in resisting populism and facism, but slightly better than the US
The list goes on…
Where does the US have high speed rail?
“High-speed rail (HSR) in the US is currently dominated by Amtrak’s Acela (150–160 mph) in the Northeast Corridor, with major projects underway to bring 200+ mph service to the West, including Brightline West (Las Vegas–LA, 2028) and California High-Speed Rail. These initiatives aim to connect city pairs in under 3 hours, offering alternatives to regional flights”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_the_United_States
LOL. The LA-SF high speed rail has already spent $14B and not laid a single track.
The Toronto-Ottawa rail would be built by the same three contractors that ballooned the Eglinton LRT from $9B to $12B and delivered years late. That was for 20km. Now we want to try 450km??
Estimates now are $90B , so we can safely double that, if it ever gets finished in our lifetimes, while ON land owners corrupt with Dougie and Mark sell us the land at hyper-inflated prices. All for a rail line no one will actually use.
We can already do that distance with electric planes.
We could have overhead wire electric extended buses do the route on current highways on dedicated lanes at high speed, for a tiny fraction of the cost and time, but who gets rich off that?
In reality it’s Detroit/Windsor to Quebec City. That’s an extra 4million people living in the Detroit area, making the train even more valuable and used.
Just like we are the only G7 without high speed rail.
We are the largest and least populated in the G7. We are also the coldest with most severe winters.
Makes little sense to use a high speed rail to connect cities with poor transit. Exactly who will use these rails? Tourists?
A vast majority of Canadians live in the Windsor-Quebec City coridor. With high quality and affordable HSR, I could travel from my home in Ottawa to any city inbetween for a show, job, whatever and be able to sleep in my own bed that night. Maybe you actually enjoy driving 6-10 hours to the nearest other city but I can assure you that most of Canada would prefer to take a 1-2 hour long train ride where you can sit back and turn your brain off instead of staring at the bumper of the person ahead of you for hours
And Canada is a massive country, yeah, but where does our population mainly live? If you just focus on our main population centres then it’s easy to connect us all. Nobody’s asking for a rail link to far northern Nunavut.
NOT TO MENTION the fact that we managed to connect the entirety of Canada by rail a century ago with far less advanced technology
I would argue Ontario needs better GO and local transit service before we spend >$100B on a pork barrel project that will link up cities with little/no transit.
And good luck in Winter.
I think every parking lot should be covered with solar. It could be used to help keep the snow and rain off pedestrians and help offset the electricity used for electric cars.
It would help if we removed the idiotic tariffs on chinese solar panels.
Plenty of other places to buy cheap panels from. Including Canada.
Silfab and Heliene also have manufacturing in canada. All 3 of these companies are only completing the cells in canada, not full manufacturing, or atleast a few companies have told me that.
There are really cheap and good panels from Vietnam and Taiwan that beet/meet the same price point as topcon and some of the other Chinese panels.
The hard one is getting a canadian made inverter. Canadian solar rebrands the Chinese solis and deye inverters and calls them theirs.
Why doesn’t tidal energy generation come up in the conversation for renewables? Canada has a long coast line, surely there are a lot of great spots to utilise this technology?
I understand it’s not viable for interior provinces, but the coasts could use it.
Solar is so stupid cheap to maintain. Just sit and watch to see if a sensor reads bad values. No moving parts. No water boiling. Works best when it’s hot too (when lots of AC is being used).
Definitely, solar seems to be the best of all options. However, having multiple sources of power as redundancy increases stability, and helps with overlapping coverage. By this I mean, tidal can work regardless of sunshine levels/during night time, so it can cover the off hours of solar production.
Additionally, the coastal regions tend to be more wet and cloudy than other areas, so solar may not be as effective compared to say the prairies.
Genuinely it isn’t a problem on today’s grid. Just build solar and the storage methods will come through time. In the meantime existing fossil fuel infrastructure can fill in the gaps.
Makes sense, thanks!
The U.S. and Canada share 2 power grids, so their economics is about the same. Demand for new connections in the U.S. is really high, but regulations slow how many can be built. It limits how expensive electricity has gotten, at least somewhat. So unfortunately all that renewables have done is let us use more electricity.
It really is, hard part is sorting through the errors and figuring out just what in the world caused the error. The amount of hardware between the inverter and grid is impressive when you have a 100kw+ system. Over 250kw it gets even better because hydro needs to be able to remotely kill your power.
Great comment, I am compelled to translate for non-locals: “hydro” is canadian for ‘the electric company’.
The solar panels on my roof have been there for ten years, through at least five major hailstorms, and still work like new. What a bunch of FUD.
Yea this could be prevented by having adequate glass protection on the panels in areas where the risk of hail is worth that investment.
Its not like traditional power generation fares any better in extreme weather. The renewables were what survived the ice storm outage in Texas while oil and gas plants went down.
A more vertical angle or double sided would also mitigate that risk.
Some places just get freak storms with boulder hail. Rare.
What a bunch of FUD. So the Texas hailstorm was fake news?
Why bother to provide links when Lemmy just substitutes their own convenient versions of reality?
Ok. Here’s that link you wanted.
“hail stow protocols successfully prevented widespread physical damage at several utility-scale solar farms near Fighting Jays that were also exposed to very severe hail.”
https://www.pv-tech.org/reevaluating-hailstorm-damages-fighting-jays-solar-project/
So one solar farm’s missteps in one freak storm don’t define an entire industry.
It’s a testament to solar’s resiliency that the surrounding farms near the one mentioned in the article didn’t have the same problems because they were designed differently.
Also I will admit that the solar panels on my roof probably would incur damage from a freak hailstorm like the one in your link that dumped tennis ball size hail. In a storm like that, the panels would probably be the least of my concerns.id be lucky to have a roof left on the house. I am grateful however that they have made it through multiple Texas hailstorms without any damage so far.
The bottom link mentions steps that modern farms take to protect their panels to lower insurance costs and to protect them from adverse weather events.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2024/11/11/hail-prone-texas-solar-project-cuts-insurance-costs-72/
I do solar O&M for commercial sites. We have lost 2 panels out of our nearly 20,000 to hail in 16 years of operation. Baseballs and birds dropping turtles have killed far more panels for us.
Largest killer is squirrel, those little monsters love the flavor of pv cable it seems.
Oh no! “Thousands” of panels out of however many that article refused to say?? This is much worse than a nuclear meltdown or natural gas explosion.
out of however many that article refused to say
It can be hard to read some text with one’s head up one’s ass, so I’ll highlight:
- hail claims now average around $58.4 million per claim and account for 54.21% of incurred costs of total solar loss claims attributable to hail. This creates a gap between the insurance requirements for solar projects and what is available in the market, leading to project delays and cancellations.*
The point was damage claims are so high insurance is pulling out.
News Report of home solar damage.
And
News report validating the videos of damaged solar farms.
But maybe your versions of reality don’t have hail, wind or ice.
I live in Arizona we barely have wind.
I’m sure we can find a solution to creating more durable panels if we as a society give a shit and appropriately allocate resources.
Probably because it’s so uncommon. The only commercially viable tidal generator ever built in Canada (and one of the few in the world) was the one on the Bay of Fundy, and it didn’t produce all that much electricity in grid terms (20MW, thank you Wikipedia). You need a lot of tidal water level change to get decent power out of tidal generation, so there are likely fewer sites than you think. Plus, one reason the Bay of Fundy station was shut down was that it was rather hard on the local sea life, although I expect some of the same mitigation strategies used on inland hydro dams could help with that if they wanted to replace it with a new station.
Getting turbines reliable while in salt water proved to be difficult.
Everything Has a Cost
Huh, TIL, thanks!
Solar is cool. But storage is the issue. I have panels at my house and Im on my second set of batteries for storage. But cold weather and snow not only kill panel output but if they’re not properly insulated, it freezes batteries and destroys them. Lithium batteries cost a lot more and are even more susceptible to cold weather than lead acid or AGM. I can make a ton of power in summer, not so much in winter… which is why our house is still powered by a fuel powered grid and heated with gas.
Canada has the same issues just on a much larger scale. We can MAKE the power, we just cant store it easily or prevent snow from stopping generation without difficult workarounds. And no one wants to power a house with power that works part time - we’re used to 99.9% reliability, no ones going to spend money on something LESS reliable.
The Drake Landing Solar Community (DLSC) was a planned community in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada, equipped with a central solar heating system and other energy efficient technologies. This heating system is the first of its kind in North America, although much larger systems have been built in northern Europe. The 52 homes (few variation of size and style, with average above-grade floor area of 145m2) in the community are heated with a solar district heating system that is charged with heat originating from solar collectors on the garage roofs and is enabled for year-round heating by underground seasonal thermal energy storage (STES).[1]
The system was designed to model a way of addressing global warming and the burning of fossil fuels. The solar energy is captured by 800 solar thermal collectors[2] located on the roofs of all 52 houses’ garages.[3] It is billed as the first solar powered subdivision in North America,[4] although its electricity and transportation needs are provided by conventional sources.
In 2012 the installation achieved a world record solar fraction of 97%; that is, providing that amount of the community’s heating requirements with solar energy over a one-year time span.[5][6]
In 2015–2016 season the installation achieved a solar fraction of 100%.[7][8] This was achieved by the borehole thermal storage system (BTES) finally reaching high temperature after years of charging, as well as improving control methods, operating pumps at lower speed most of the time, reducing extra energy need as well using weather forecasts to optimize transfer of heat between different storage tanks and loops. During some other years, auxiliary gas heaters are used for a small fraction of the year to provide heat to a district loop. The systems operate at coefficient of performance of 30.
But it died after 17 successful years (was only a pilot for 4 years) because Alberta.
I am aware of that project but had no idea it died.
A little research says it didnt die “because Alberta”. It died because it became too expensive to fix and became unreliable, and the houses were converted to natural gas heating. Go figure. From cool to reliable - I rest my case. Albertans at -40c care about reliability.
Wiki: "In 2020, the system started showing signs of deterioration resulting in significant maintenance issues. System components, knowledge, and technical expertise for repairs were becoming increasingly challenging to find. In response to system failures, the Drake Landing Solar Company added redundancies to the system to be sure that homes in the community were receiving heat.
After a thorough investigation on available next steps, it was determined that the significant reinvestment required to have the system operate reliably, was simply something that neither the Drake Landing Solar Company board nor the collective community could afford.
In 2024, a decommissioning process for the Drake Landing Solar Community began, where the majority of the 52 homes were converted to natural gas-fired furnaces."
The community got free heat for 17 years and refused to maintain the infrastructure with the cost savings, so they converted to gas.
That is CLASSIC Alberta.
South of Calgary does not see -40C. Rarely below -12C.
Canada also has a lot of hydro power. In theory we could use excess solar from the day to pump water up into the reservoir to be used for hydro generation at night or during peak use. It may not be the most energy effecient, but it could be effective at scale and cheap enough to implement before building and investing in physical batteries. I may be wrong but i think there are some places that already do this.
Canada had the Drake Landing project.
This was a 52 home community in which solar heat was stored underground for recovery in winter. It was originally a 4 year project that extended to 17 years in Alberta. Very low tech. the energy was stored in salt and sand pits underground.
But it ended, because Alberta.
Even without pumping, hydroelectricity is great to complement intermittent storage. A dam is storing a lot of potential energy that can be released or not at the right time.
There is a big dam close to where I live. In winter the level goes down progressively and as soon as spring comes back, the solar panels are producing again and the electrical demands goes down so the lake level goes back up progressively.
In summer the lake is full so all the tourists can enjoy the activities on the water.
Micro hydro this is feasible. Many tall buildings already have water tanks near the top.
A 4” pipe with 400’ of head altitude feeds a 3/4” nozzle pelton wheel with around 7000w @ 120v in a basic bush install. I am sure a well engineered system could provide double that or more, but a rooftop tank might run out at night unless it was quite big, and that is definitely micro hydro.
calculations based on living with such a system
That is not sensible, hydro storage needs to scale, so be very large, to be feasible. And that without having to build the supporting structure.
You’re replying to the wrong person.
Sorry i wasn’t speaking micro, I’m talking like lake and river scaled hydro. Some places even build reservoirs specifically for pumped solar storage.
I’m just thinking they should install micro hydro on buildings that have raised water storage. Recapture some of the energy it took to get it up there.
Many tall buildings already have water tanks near the top.
how do you think that water gets up there?
Not solar panels. jfc what a weak ass reddit dunk. You should be ashamed.
Can the battery not be in the house away from the elements?
I think the fire hazard is the main reason.
That, and in my case the panels have to be away from the house to gather the most sunlight due to tall trees. Running high amp power across a yard is highly impractical due to size and expense of big cables. But you’re right, I wouldn’t put lithium batteries inside my house, nor would my insurance company like it.
Cold weather does not freeze and destroy batteries. Millions of Canadian car owners have known that since the 50’s.
It does if the panels are snow covered, stop producing, and the batteries drain flat. I have some very large lead acid batteries to prove it. Unfortunately.
If you think they die because you drain them flat, then what you need is a system preventing you from draining them flat.
What I need is for them to be carefully insulated and heated on the coldest days. Live and learn.
Hybrid solar and geothermal is the way to go.
Geothermal is cool. And impressive. But I have yet to see anyone who could afford on a single home.
For larger installations, we had a geothermal plant just a few miles from our place in the US. Was great til it started leaking sour gas. Eventually the company had to buy out the homes of the people who were closer to the plant because of the health concerns.
Every power source has issues.
*Every power source has weaker and stronger use cases
Storage is not an issue, you do not need to store solar power in Canada.
It is if you want to go off carbon based power. Where do you get power when the sun is down? Especially in winter with short days?
Canada is no where near needing to worry about battery storage. Maybe after 20 years of installing solar, this would be a concern. Currently it isn’t.
