Juno News - July 14, 2024


Trudeau’s net-zero plan leaves Canada reliant on foreign energy

Mentioned
Andrew Lawton Kathleen Wynne Michael Savia Mark Norman
Doug Ford stands firm on alcohol sales expansion Are you glad Trump's attempted assassin is dead？

Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

164.96

Word count

1,475

Sentence count

—


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Philip Cross is a senior fellow at the Macdonald laurier institute and author of a great piece in the Financial Post about the growing need for electricity in Canada. He argues that the lack of investment in new generating capacity is the root cause of the problem, and that the government needs to do much more to address it.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 you're tuned in to the andrew lawton show
00:00:05.920 uh we will move from defense to a different form of territorial independence which is our
00:00:14.580 electricity market now this is a i also i'll warn you it's a bit in the weeds in some ways but i
00:00:19.960 think it's understandable because we see rising electricity rates in many places across the
00:00:25.380 country i mean i'm from ontario which used to have like among the most expensive electricity
00:00:28.700 anywhere in north america except for i think it was like hawaii back when kathleen wynn was in
00:00:33.640 office but we have now seen ourselves become a net importer of electricity as a country for the
00:00:41.700 first time this is quite significant we are now importing more electricity than we are producing
00:00:46.860 and exporting and this is coming because there is a vulnerability that my next guest believes has been
00:00:52.720 created uh in large part due to policy here a decarbonization focused energy strategy has
00:00:59.260 allowed this to happen philip cross is a senior fellow with the mcdonald laurier institute and had
00:01:04.160 a great piece in the financial post about this philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on
00:01:08.340 today my pleasure thanks for having me back so soon andrew so so why does this matter that we are now a
00:01:14.080 net importer why is that relevant it's relevant because we think of ourselves as a country of
00:01:21.020 almost inexhaustible supplies of electricity um particularly you know whole a great part of
00:01:27.920 quebec's self-image is that it's this massive source of hydro uh newfoundland obviously has a huge hydro
00:01:35.360 development ontario has an extensive network of nuclear plants manitoba and british columbia also have
00:01:43.840 large electricity power sources and have been adding to them recently so the fact that you know
00:01:50.500 we have this self-image that we have all its electricity and then suddenly this year we had to import more
00:01:56.000 from the u.s normally we're exporting to the u.s for the first time ever in the at the beginning of this
00:02:02.140 year we were importing electricity on balance from the u.s uh this shows that our supplies of electricity
00:02:09.740 are not keeping up with demand uh you could look at the shortfall this year and blame it on some
00:02:15.620 temporary factors you can say it's drought and it's maintenance at nuclear plants but it risks because of
00:02:21.040 the fact we are not building up our electrical capacity this temporary situation risk becoming
00:02:27.060 becoming permanent if this country doesn't get serious about building out its electricity supplies
00:02:32.400 and why do you believe this has been really a problem created by policy in a lot of ways
00:02:38.220 because uh they've you know it's been openly the goal of policy to electrify
00:02:47.360 our energy demand for example the most extreme example is of course that we're supposed to not drive
00:02:53.380 gasoline powered internal combustion engines in our cars anymore we're supposed to be driving electric vehicles
00:02:59.600 well if we're all going to drive electric vehicles and if we're all going to heat our homes
00:03:05.480 with electricity and not natural gas or in oil and if we're all going to use um all kinds of uh
00:03:13.340 new technologies that are powered by the grid you know it was predictable we were going to need a vast
00:03:20.220 increase in our electricity demand uh you know environmentalists say well we're supposed to cut back
00:03:26.500 our investments in fossil fuels the counterpart of that though is you're supposed to be increasing
00:03:31.880 your investment in electricity sources and we haven't been doing so one of the things that i found
00:03:38.900 interesting in your piece is that the government knows it doesn't have the capacity to create all of
00:03:46.980 this energy through the means they want to i mean that's the thing is that there's this fatwa against energy
00:03:52.260 that we're using without a viable alternative there but we're so we're definitely putting the
00:03:57.960 cart before the horse and we're seeing this i think yeah well on the heels of this op-ed i wrote in the
00:04:03.200 post there's an interesting article in the globe today uh wednesday that is uh that highlights in
00:04:10.000 quebec for example uh quebec brought out the trumpets and announced a great fanfare over the last couple
00:04:16.260 months that they were going to substantially build out both their hydro and their wing capacity it
00:04:22.400 turns out even with this vast expansion it's not going to meet even half of the projected increase
00:04:28.320 hydro quebec admitted a couple of years ago that its projections about where electricity demand was
00:04:32.920 going was completely wrong it was very slow to react the former head of hydro quebec said oh well
00:04:39.240 this is a great opportunity to conserve demand and we don't need to build capacity
00:04:43.860 they replaced her with michael savia who was formerly the deputy minister of finance here in ottawa
00:04:49.040 and savia is pursuing a program of aggressive uh aggressively increasing supply but it's not going
00:04:57.460 to be enough uh and that's the frightening thing is uh you know for bc for example to meet its projected
00:05:03.720 hydro uh electricity demand they're not going to have to just build finished site c they're going to
00:05:09.100 have to build at least five more dams the size of site c well imagine all the problems and delays and
00:05:16.080 arguments about c site c multiply that by five and you can see you know this is something that we're
00:05:22.480 going to have to start tackling right now i mean electricity generating plants are built with a horizon
00:05:28.600 of uh 10 years from beginning to end so uh this isn't something you just go out and and throw up in a
00:05:37.020 couple of years uh and i think the concern has to be that um you know we're going to in the short run
00:05:43.660 over the next five ten years we're probably going to run chronically short of electricity and we're
00:05:48.320 going to be reliant on the americans to supply our electricity which is going to be uh quite a role
00:05:54.320 reversal for this country uh it was it didn't intentionally come out this way but you're coming
00:05:59.080 on the heels of my discussion with admiral mark norman in which that's basically defense policy
00:06:03.240 in canada now which is to ride the coattails of america and now we're doing the same thing on
00:06:07.920 electricity too it seems i one of the things i want to ask you about was alberta now they had a
00:06:12.740 i don't know if mini is the right word but they had a relatively short-lived thankfully electricity
00:06:17.620 crisis in the last few months and is there any lesson to be taken from that that is being taken
00:06:24.000 oh there's two i mean we had a couple of near misses uh in texas a couple of years ago and in
00:06:30.820 alberta this year where the electrical grid almost collapsed we just didn't have the the capacity to
00:06:37.100 meet demand people don't seem to realize this isn't going to be a three-hour blackout uh if your
00:06:42.920 electrical grid uh goes down it takes months to to come back on stream imagine if a major state like
00:06:50.440 texas or a province like alberta goes offline from electricity for weeks or months at a time
00:06:57.880 i mean that this this would be catastrophic uh i mean i was aware during my tenure at sissy's canada
00:07:04.260 uh that if you want to shut down our society cut off the juice uh every time there's a major power outage
00:07:11.860 um for example ontario had a major one in 2003 uh economic activity just grinds to a halt
00:07:19.500 uh our society cannot function without electricity and because of the decarbonization move and the
00:07:27.060 the desire to get away from fossil fuels we're more dependent on electricity uh for energy than ever
00:07:33.820 and yet we are not taking adequate steps to ensure both the security of supply in the sense of that it
00:07:42.580 can be counted on that it's reliable and it won't be interrupted and with security comes affordability
00:07:48.140 uh we can't increase the price of electricity by five times we will bankrupt ourselves and especially
00:07:54.240 the poorest members of our society so we need to make sure that adequate cheap sources of supply
00:08:01.040 are coming on stream over the next years 10 years to meet projected demand and it seems to be something
00:08:07.580 that this country is just waking up to and we're we're behind the ball on this one
00:08:13.140 the piece in the financial post which you should take a look at canada's energy blindness must end
00:08:19.640 written by philip cross philip always good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thank you
00:08:24.100 thanks for listening to the andrew lawton show support the program by donating to true north at www.tnc.news
00:08:32.240 www.tnc.atown.ca.fr
00:08:40.180 www.tnc.atown.ca.