Juno News - January 21, 2024


Alberta power crisis highlights flaws in green energy transition (ft. Kris Sims)


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

189.68987

Word Count

2,263

Sentence Count

3

Hate Speech Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.880 i know for people in alberta it was a very very rough weekend uh we had temperatures my friends
00:00:14.820 in alberta which i have a great many were sharing screenshots of their uh temperature readings and
00:00:20.300 of thermometers and it just looked absolutely miserable i think at some places it went down
00:00:24.240 below minus 40 and because of this you have the alberta government telling people to not
00:00:29.820 use electricity to rein in their electricity usage now many people in canada have reigned in energy
00:00:36.360 usage because they can't afford the carbon tax or the power bills but it was a bit of a different
00:00:41.280 situation in alberta a saskatchewan to the rescue by the way scott mo announced that saskatchewan was
00:00:47.880 giving a bit of surplus power to the people in alberta but what does this all mean chris sims
00:00:53.020 is the alberta director with the canadian taxpayers federation and joins me as always on monday i'm
00:00:59.480 not going to let the atlantic ocean get in the way of this uh chris always good to talk to you
00:01:03.400 thanks for coming on how are you keeping by the way we're okay it was actually pretty scary there
00:01:08.840 on saturday night a lot of people might be familiar you know any 80s kid that remembers the cold war
00:01:14.800 this is an emergency broadcast system it was like that and instead of being worried about the ruskies
00:01:21.680 we were worried about the lights suddenly going out and when it's minus 42 outside without the
00:01:27.800 wind chill that's pretty scary because then you're getting into like pipe bursting cold so if all of
00:01:34.880 a sudden your power goes out and you're in the middle of a january in alberta with this kind of
00:01:39.020 wind and this kind of cold um that was pretty alarming and then we saw to your point premier
00:01:44.320 daniel smith taking to social media and saying things i never thought i'd hear or say saying things
00:01:49.600 like hey folks um only use your microwave don't use your oven you know cover your windows with
00:01:54.560 your curtains turn off all your lights please everybody like we have to make sure we don't
00:01:58.800 have rolling blackouts and this is largely apparently because a few years back a previous government had
00:02:06.040 shut down some power plants but they didn't replace the generation so just apparently the story goes
00:02:13.560 we've lost a lot of power generation here in alberta and we've added a lot of people coming to alberta
00:02:20.040 myself included so they've really wanted a larger population of people coming here lots of people
00:02:25.000 moving here to do business as well so the grid just couldn't take it apparently and the alberta
00:02:30.860 government says that they're really being hindered by federal government regulations when it comes to
00:02:36.380 expanding their power base and so here we had this strange situation of a province of alberta
00:02:43.280 which if you close your eyes and picture it you imagine natural resources right you picture them
00:02:48.360 as like an energy patch but here we were facing rolling blackouts luckily that didn't come on saturday
00:02:55.900 night and so i wanted to remind people that this was how scary and critical it was this is how essential
00:03:02.620 it is to be heating your home and prime minister trudeau is nuking us with the carbon tax on home
00:03:08.980 heating as well so it just really added insult to injury well yeah he heard the warning about having
00:03:14.220 to use your microwave that's why he's nuking uh new thing anymore it's a terrible pun i'm sorry
00:03:18.260 yeah it was twins yeah fair enough but let me ask you about the electric vehicle aspect because this was
00:03:25.760 like buried in the list of things we weren't supposed to do in alberta they're like you know oh and
00:03:30.360 delay charging your electric vehicle which is good i think the alert went out yeah basically it's just
00:03:35.080 like you know three city blocks in edmonton are all the electric vehicles in alberta i think in in
00:03:39.360 downtown edmonton but uh but then you had this ridiculous cbc story i wanted to uh to share with
00:03:45.980 people i know you've read it but basically what cbc has said here is that uh the winter is the perfect
00:03:52.700 time to have a an electric car their uh headline here electric cars the best vehicle in frigid
00:03:59.940 temperatures they're saying uh meanwhile the government is like no no no stop charging these
00:04:04.540 things we can't sustain it on the grid yeah exactly this is literally part of what they said
00:04:09.780 turn off all unnecessary lights and electrical appliances minimize the use of space heaters
00:04:14.840 delay use of major power appliances delay charging electric vehicles okay and so okay i'm not an
00:04:22.020 electrical engineer but i was a journalist for an awful long time so i've spoken to you know a
00:04:26.740 a trillion people about all sorts of things including things like electric vehicles the story
00:04:32.320 goes is if you have your own electric vehicle quite often you have to have an upgrade to your panel at
00:04:39.940 home in order to be able to pull enough juice off the grid to plug your own car in okay therefore
00:04:47.260 it uses a little bit more power than a laptop to charge the thing the point here being electric vehicles
00:04:54.960 use a lot of energy in order to recharge their batteries the idea that while we're all being
00:05:01.060 told to avoid using hair dryers and blenders to have the cbc come out and say hey you know what's
00:05:06.920 awesome and mine is 50 windchill which it was here in lethbridge by the way an electric vehicle
00:05:11.940 while the alert itself is saying folks don't do this this is where good intentions or fanciful
00:05:19.780 notions or good planning you know i would love it if we all ran off the lithium crystal generators
00:05:25.060 i'm a star trek kid that would be fine the only problem is they don't exist so that's a bit of a big
00:05:31.100 problem when you've got minus 40 degrees outside and you don't want your house and your kids freezing
00:05:36.340 so to have this cbc article come out at this time was just bizarre yeah and and when you mentioned the
00:05:43.860 i i happen to get that lithium crystal reference only because uh ezra used it in his book ethical
00:05:49.300 oil uh back in the day so i learned it there not from star trek i'm a bit of a a weird a dork for a
00:05:55.700 different reason like that but i was gonna say we have to convert you what the heck yeah fair enough
00:05:59.360 but i don't do sci i don't do aliens i don't do sci-fi so uh it's not it's not just star trek
00:06:03.840 specifically before all the trekkies jump on me here but the thing that i i would point out here is
00:06:09.060 that everyone who talks about the transition misses what is the most painfully obvious point
00:06:14.540 which is that we don't yet have the magic thing that we can transition to that will do all of the
00:06:20.160 things we're getting rid of can and to put this back to the world economic forum context for a moment
00:06:25.080 uh we have people here uh that are on these panels talking about oh the acceleration of the transition
00:06:30.100 net zero all of this and and none of them have an answer for how you're going to get the people in
00:06:35.960 alberta through a cold that is minus 40 of how you're going to power uh the developing world which
00:06:43.040 right now only has fossil fuels available to them like none of them have or really care
00:06:48.320 about that and it's it's very you know fanciful maybe i i would say uh quite callous to be honest
00:06:54.940 it is callous because at the end of the day these are real people involved so these are real people
00:07:00.080 real families these are people who are depending in some cases imagine if you're depending on an oxygen
00:07:05.160 tank or something god forbid you know you need electricity you need power i'll give you an
00:07:10.260 example there's a gentleman out in british columbia he is a scientist okay he does these calculations
00:07:15.640 all the time we happen to disagree even on the carbon tax so he's not completely on my side here
00:07:21.120 but he understands energy calculation a few years back and you might have remembered when he did this
00:07:27.540 he calculated that say santa claus brought everybody in british columbia an electric vehicle boom you now
00:07:36.020 own it it's in your driveway and british columbia residentially started relying on electric heat
00:07:42.760 pumps for bare minimum so we're not talking industrial forget commercial just households they would need
00:07:48.860 nine new site c dams nine of them so for folks who are unfamiliar with site c imagine those big honking
00:07:59.840 gorge dams that you've seen on tv and in movies that james bond runs across they're building something
00:08:05.980 like that right now in british columbia it has taken them like 30 years from first blueprints to final
00:08:12.140 approval to get this thing going that's the kind of mega wattage we're talking about they would need
00:08:17.920 nine of them tomorrow if they all switch to electric vehicles and bare bones heat pump electricity
00:08:25.320 yeah and i we don't have it you we we go back to all of these uh different scenarios that we've talked
00:08:31.620 about in the past on the show and and you know and and to bring it back to real people because i think
00:08:35.900 real people need to be at the core of an energy transition if there's going to be one and uh real
00:08:40.460 people's needs real people's capabilities and we see that callousness on display with the carbon tax
00:08:47.000 and i don't want to sound like a broken record here because i know this has been coming up in our
00:08:50.640 discussions and other days on my i show pretty much every week now but it's important and the federal
00:08:55.440 government has made a choice here they like to say that oh well it's the climate emergency we have no
00:09:00.560 choice but they do have a choice and they have chosen to make energy which is not a luxury item it is a
00:09:06.200 necessity especially in canada but anywhere they've chosen to make that more expensive
00:09:10.720 yes they have and here's the nub so the liberal government prime minister justin trudeau and his
00:09:18.000 government have a mandatory minimum carbon tax it's 65 a ton right now it costs 12 cents per cubic meter
00:09:25.160 of natural gas 10 cents per liter of propane but most people in canada use natural gas on average
00:09:31.920 andrew that will cost uh canadian families more than 300 extra just this winter just in the carbon
00:09:39.160 tax but here's the weird catch so back in october for some reason the atlantic caucus of the liberal
00:09:45.160 members of parliament got a hold of justin trudeau and said hey we need a car vote he admitted one that
00:09:52.020 this makes life too expensive and he admitted two that they could afford then to give them a car vote
00:09:58.020 on furnace oil only four percent of canadians use furnace oil almost all of them happen to be in
00:10:05.660 atlantic canada in vote rich cd seats for the liberals so he gave an exception on home heating for
00:10:11.920 three years to those folks but all the rest of us who are using natural gas and propane praying to god
00:10:18.400 the power stays on we're still getting hit by this carbon tax and just one more thing andrew you're
00:10:24.140 going to be hearing a lot about oh rebate checks landed in bank accounts today because there's a
00:10:28.080 huge propaganda push coming out of the trudeau government today saying you know thank you know
00:10:32.500 thank me thank me peasant for giving you a rebate no no no the parliamentary budget officer himself
00:10:38.780 has shown that people pay more than they get back so on average the average alberta family will be out
00:10:46.720 more than nine hundred dollars this year that's net that's with the rebates factored in so yeah
00:10:52.520 you're right this is a huge carbon tax punishment on an essential like home heating yeah that no that's
00:10:59.020 important context here and again my my sympathies to anyone in alberta who had a terrible weekend i mean
00:11:04.140 you're in for a number of a number of horrors with the cold weather in general on a given year but i know
00:11:10.020 this was particularly straining and trying for people uh the good news is uh steven gilbeau is
00:11:15.700 actually fine with having to reduce electricity because he is already a dim bulb so uh it was good
00:11:21.420 he was already energy efficient in that respect has he you've seen him yet did he fly his electric
00:11:25.900 hoverboard over there yet no i haven't seen him just yet even yeah he might have been in the
00:11:29.920 greta thunberg sailboat uh he left last week so he should be making it to davos uh anytime in
00:11:35.480 2026 i believe so uh well after the next election though so uh good for uh contested in his riding
00:11:41.180 perhaps chris sims always good to talk to you we'll see you back on the other side of the atlantic
00:11:45.880 next week thank you have fun andrew thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the
00:11:50.800 program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news