Western Standard - Go nuclear or freeze

00:00:00.000 Good evening, Western Standard viewers, and welcome to Hannaford, a weekly politics show

00:00:21.360 of the Western Standard. It is Thursday, February the 5th. My guest this week is Catherine Porter,

00:00:28.240 a well-known independent energy consultant on the british electrical grid yes she is from

00:00:34.400 my old home country and she is an expert on that of the power sources built the service grids

00:00:41.840 welcome catherine thank you catherine you um have a very specific expertise in oil and gas

00:00:54.000 and how power is financed in fact you'll call in as an expert witness when things are in dispute

00:01:00.320 and you've been doing this for what more than 25 years and you've just produced this uh this

00:01:05.920 document here on um the uh can electrification can the grid cope and hold this up wherever you

00:01:13.600 see it uh how would a person get a copy of this if you visit my website which is what-logic.com

00:01:22.560 in the blog section there's a link to it. I'm going to give you an opportunity to

00:01:29.440 say that again a little later in the program, but you're also known, probably reviled I would guess,

00:01:37.600 as a standing critic of renewable energy generation and you've had a lot to say about

00:01:43.040 Great Britain's famously unreliable grid and the soaring costs across the country

00:01:47.680 because of the great green delusion of successive UK governments. Well, a lot of us in Western

00:01:54.720 Canada think our own government's priority for renewable energy generation is a bit delusional

00:02:01.600 too. So let's start with this. What's wrong with renewable energy? Green is good, right?

00:02:11.600 Hmm. Okay, so not all renewable energy is equal. Some renewable energy, like hydro and geothermal,

00:02:20.320 is more like conventional energy you can control when it's running or when you use it. But wind

00:02:27.200 and solar, and this is what people tend to mean when they use the term renewable energy,

00:02:31.760 is intermittent and it's also low energy density. And they create two problems. One,

00:02:36.480 the intermittency means that they don't run all the time and you have no control over when they run.

00:02:41.120 there is no solar at night people often forget that um wind typically only works 30 of the time

00:02:49.360 solar it depends where you are in the world how much it will work um so you have this whole

00:02:53.920 additional cost then that has to be incurred to provide generation when wind and solar are not

00:02:58.960 available and then the low energy density means that it covers more land and requires a lot more

00:03:03.600 grid to connect it you need many more wires if i wanted to build a typical gas fired power station

00:03:10.080 that would be 800 megawatts and the units here don't matter um the equivalent wind farm would

00:03:15.200 require 60 turbines each with a wire connecting it but because your gas power station will work

00:03:21.520 around more than 90 percent of the time the wind is only about 30 percent of the time you then need

00:03:26.640 three times that number to give you the same amount of electricity over the course of a year

00:03:31.040 so that's you know 150 to 180 times more wires than you would need for conventional generation

00:03:37.520 the cost of that really adds up of course well we understand that i think what you have just

00:03:45.680 said is a sufficient explanation for any ordinary citizen who's mildly interested in the subject and

00:03:52.560 yet we have governments we have one in ottawa that seems to defy the science on this now i

00:04:02.080 I know that they're going to put out a paper on reorganizing the Canadian grid.

00:04:07.440 We're expecting it in about three weeks' time.

00:04:11.700 And yet, from what we have seen in the past couple of years,

00:04:15.520 all that comes down is this arbitrary instructions

00:04:18.920 that you have to be carbon net neutral by an arbitrarily selected year,

00:04:26.660 which is 2035.

00:04:27.840 uh it takes 10 years to get the permits to build a pipeline or a or a um or a generating station or

00:04:37.380 a electrical transmission line i mean by the time you've got all the um stakeholder buy-in it takes

00:04:44.720 that time so you know we're going to end up at 2035 and we're going to be expected to be carbon

00:04:50.940 neutral but we're not going to be so why do you think governments are first of all so obsessed

00:05:00.460 with the green ideology if the british government is every bit as obsessed as the canadian government

00:05:07.580 and then why do they not understand the simple thing like if you have too much solar and too much

00:05:15.500 wind and you have a still night when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine

00:05:19.900 it's too much. It's going to be a problem for you.

00:05:22.860 They don't want to believe this. I think it's that simple. They've bought into this very

00:05:26.940 naive, very childlike idea that you can have this green fantasy and that a few batteries will sort

00:05:33.580 out all of your intermittency problems, and it's just not real. Britain was one of the first

00:05:41.020 countries to bring in these net zero rules, and there was almost no debate in parliament.

00:05:44.860 and part of that was because it was all so remote you know the target then was 2050 it felt like a

00:05:50.740 long time away and really what sort of a psychopath doesn't want to save the planet and they don't

00:05:55.400 understand that first of all this stuff doesn't actually save the planet the supply chains are

00:05:59.740 highly polluting but also the the high costs that this has imposed on consumers in Europe has led

00:06:06.600 to massive de-industrialization and so what's happened to that industry is that it's moved into

00:06:11.240 Asia, where the carbon content of energy is higher and you incur additional emissions from

00:06:15.920 transportation. Now, why Western governments cannot rationalise this and understand these

00:06:22.780 basic facts is completely beyond me. I do not understand why they persist in this false

00:06:30.460 narrative. And you see Ed Miliband, the energy minister in the UK, he will say with huge amounts

00:06:35.660 of passion and conviction that we have to do these things for the climate emergency. And yet his

00:06:40.100 policies are causing global emissions to rise. So it's not only that this is bad for consumers,

00:06:45.620 it doesn't do any benefit to the environment either. So you mentioned that consumers,

00:06:50.940 as you may suppose from my accent, I still have contacts back in Great Britain,

00:06:57.400 and some of my friends who are retired and on a pension are ready to blow their brains out.

00:07:02.920 It's the classic dilemma. Do we pay for the electricity, or do we buy the food to

00:07:08.960 cook on the electric stove. It's a tough one. How bad is it?

00:07:13.940 Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and the fourth

00:07:17.760 highest domestic prices. It's really bad. Households have been struggling significantly.

00:07:22.940 Obviously, high energy prices are very inflationary, and we're seeing significant job losses as a

00:07:27.700 result of deindustrialization. We're losing something like 1,000 jobs a week in the North

00:07:31.960 see. It's horrific. Even the unions are starting to oppose this Labour policy. And so this is

00:07:39.640 hurting everyone. And the fact that the current governments, and what we've seen actually,

00:07:44.660 interestingly, is that the Conservative Party, which was in office until the middle of 2024,

00:07:49.540 and had been in office for many years, left office and really had a sort of damascene

00:07:56.320 conversion where they realised that this was not the right way to go. And so they've now rejected

00:08:00.240 the net zero 2050 target reform which is a new political party in britain it tends to be labeled

00:08:07.220 as more on the right of the political spectrum that's not entirely accurate some of their

00:08:11.940 policies are quite socialist but nevertheless this is how they're characterized they're very

00:08:16.160 strongly against net zero and in fact they call it net stupid zero um and so labor is is starting

00:08:24.180 to be isolated in this position. And we're seeing across Europe as well, voters are starting to see

00:08:30.960 the light. Arguably, the last German election was triggered when Volkswagen announced its factory

00:08:37.360 closures. So it's quite interesting. Germany had experienced very high electricity prices for many

00:08:41.800 years and had lost quite a lot of industry. BASF, the big chemicals company, had closed its factories

00:08:48.120 and moved its production to China. And people didn't really notice. But when Volkswagen said

00:08:52.720 was going to do the same, that really cut through to the public and was a big factor

00:08:57.840 in that early election that they had, bringing down the Schultz government.

00:09:02.160 So we're starting to see this pushback from voters. It was one of the narratives in the US

00:09:07.200 presidential election the previous year as well. So voters are starting to rebel. They're starting

00:09:13.280 to see that these high prices are not in their interests. They're starting to see grid instability.

00:09:18.480 we had obviously the blackout in Spain, 11 people died. And that was very benign weather conditions.

00:09:25.100 And there's been subsequent research looking at mortality data that says there were probably 165

00:09:30.080 excess deaths over the two days. So 11 directly attributable deaths and then 165 excess deaths

00:09:36.940 that were likely statistically as a result of the blackout. So these are not trivial matters

00:09:42.640 that we should be complacent about. So you have obviously traced the

00:09:48.800 progress or the decline of power production in Europe and in Great Britain closely.

00:09:58.080 Where do you see Canada on that scale of horror? How far behind Europe are we?

00:10:08.080 So I think Canada's coming to this party pretty late and that's quite a big problem.

00:10:12.320 If you look at the energy strategies that different countries have, we have much of

00:10:18.480 Europe following this strongly wind and solar led approach, which requires huge amounts of

00:10:25.200 additional grid infrastructure. We see that also in Australia. We see it in Japan. In the United

00:10:30.960 States, there was a similar strategy. They've dropped the wind aspect, but they still have

00:10:35.040 huge multi-billion dollar grid expansion projects. I mean, even just in ERCOT in Texas,

00:10:41.360 it's several billion dollars worth so and you you know that expands across the whole country

00:10:46.480 and china also and china's quite critical here they're building out grid infrastructure

00:10:51.440 they're building out every type of generation and this is creating huge pressure on supply chains

00:10:57.920 if you want to buy important grid equipment transformers you're waiting two or three years

00:11:02.320 a super transformer is more like four years um and there's going to be an enormous constraint

00:11:08.480 in the copper market because on top of all of these plans for renewable generation and it takes

00:11:14.800 15 tons of copper per megawatt for offshore rent it's a hugely intensive copper intensive thing to

00:11:20.800 do and grids are very copper hungry we now have the advent of ai data centers this also requires

00:11:28.480 a huge amount of copper and people are going to have to choose do we want to use this scarce copper

00:11:33.840 for AI data sensors that add significant value or for wind farms that only work a third of the time.

00:11:40.400 And why China matters here is that they dominate the copper supply chain. The midstream section

00:11:46.720 where all the processing is, is primarily in China and they have a lot of trade agreements

00:11:52.080 with the producing countries. So China has built this very strong strategic position in copper

00:11:57.520 and other countries are going to really struggle to get the raw materials they need

00:12:01.840 to develop these strategies. So Canada coming to this so late in the game is a huge disadvantage,

00:12:08.640 and really Canada will be much better served to pivot to a higher energy density solution

00:12:14.640 to minimize that use of copper, and that means nuclear and it means natural gas.

00:12:19.440 Nuclear and natural gas. Okay, now I was surprised to, in our pre-conversation, I was surprised to

00:12:25.840 see that you were aware of the brownout that alberta suffered in 2024 in january

00:12:33.840 we were very aware of it of course but news of that has spread to england and your consultancy and

00:12:41.760 now um since then we have had something like 400 000 people come to alberta

00:12:51.120 a 10% increase in our population. So we were skating along the edge there at the beginning

00:12:58.900 of 2024. Our premier, Danielle Smith, said, well, you know, we're trying to get things

00:13:04.820 built. We need to increase our base load. And she wanted natural gas. Our federal government

00:13:11.940 had a different idea. More solar, more wind wasn't going to work for all the reasons we've

00:13:17.440 doesn't mean talking about but in cold weather you have an even bigger problem with wind and solar

00:13:22.520 so solar panels get covered in snow and then obviously then they don't generate and wind

00:13:27.320 freezes up and in the beginning of 2024 and i'll say this isn't something that was widely known

00:13:33.380 in europe um i try and follow things outside just what's happening in the uk

00:13:38.200 um but it wasn't something that really hit the press in britain but a big part of that problem

00:13:44.100 was lack of weatherproofing in the power system. It was not unlike the issue that Texas experienced

00:13:50.260 in Sturmurie, which is actually quite astonishing when you consider that minus 40 degrees is not

00:13:57.140 uncommon in Alberta. So to not be weatherproofed at minus 20 was, I think, quite a significant

00:14:04.020 regulatory failure and that you need to make sure that infrastructure in cold places can withstand

00:14:10.100 the cold so even before you're looking at uh system adequacy in terms of do we have enough

00:14:15.060 generation is will that generation work in the typical conditions that we have and i think the

00:14:19.980 real surprise is that it hadn't happened sooner rather than this it happened at all interesting

00:14:25.160 picture that came out you referred to texas there there was a picture of a helicopter steam cleaning

00:14:31.520 or trying to blast all the frost off one of these massive wind generators and the irony that texas

00:14:38.220 all the places on cost green earth energy laden as it is should find itself unable to

00:14:43.900 keep the lights on because of this well i'll call it a wrong direction on the reliance upon wind

00:14:51.660 energy well yes but to be fair in texas they also had significant issue with the gas infrastructure

00:14:57.100 freezing up um i think texas can be more easily forgiven for not having weather proofing against

00:15:03.660 very cold weather i don't think alberta can have the same grace cold weather is very much more

00:15:08.860 common here yes well that's yes it is so um the advice to the premier then would be what well the

00:15:17.420 first advice is make sure that the infrastructure you have already will operate in the temperature

00:15:21.820 conditions that you have here um and then the second one is just don't rely on intermittent

00:15:27.500 generation uh you know if somebody wants to put solar panels on their roof and they do it without

00:15:31.660 subsidies, then fine. And no issues with that. I would prefer they didn't buy them from places

00:15:36.540 tainted with slave labour. But your roof, your choice. But no subsidies. Don't subsidise stuff

00:15:43.660 that hardly ever works. And just to put this in context, Britain started subsidising wind in 1990.

00:15:51.180 And the premise was that this was an immature technology that required support

00:15:55.340 to reach maturity. After 35 years, if it's still not mature, and now they're signing 20-year

00:16:00.780 contracts. I think we have to accept that this stuff is never going to be economically viable

00:16:05.400 by itself. We will always have to subsidize it. And this is something that if you want to make

00:16:10.720 that choice as an elected leader, you need to make sure that your voters understand it. Because I

00:16:16.280 think most would not buy into that, would not be willing to spend, to indefinitely subsidize

00:16:21.540 something that works at the time. Of course you have to deceive the voters and tell them that

00:16:27.220 Well, tell us the truth and do something different.

00:16:30.460 I know, it's so naive of me.

00:16:32.480 Yes, I can't believe you're saying it.

00:16:34.640 It's why I'm not a politician.

00:16:38.220 No, but in all seriousness,

00:16:40.240 the instructions that came out from the previous government

00:16:45.260 were quite inflexible.

00:16:46.960 We had to do things in a certain way.

00:16:49.240 How are we going to do that?

00:16:51.780 We're even talking about, at one stage,

00:16:54.440 how we would build new natural gas baseload generators.

00:17:03.860 And if we didn't meet the standards developed by the federal government,

00:17:09.760 we're looking for some way to indemnify the corporate executives

00:17:13.680 who would face criminal charges.

00:17:16.800 This is how I've heard much of that talk for the last year or so,

00:17:20.520 and we now have a different prime minister who tends not to talk in those kinds of terms but

00:17:28.360 it is an astonishing thing that we in alberta we have this huge population increasingly don't seem

00:17:34.520 to have a um a plan to get the uh to get to get the natural gas generators going so you are

00:17:43.000 recommending would you recommend that alberta get nuclear fast yes you realize this is the

00:17:51.080 headline moment yeah i mean british expert says alberta government needs nuclear yes everybody

00:17:56.600 needs nuclear nuclear has no emissions in production and it has extremely high energy

00:18:03.560 density and it lasts for a very long time you're now looking at 60 to 80 year lifespans for new

00:18:09.720 large scale reactors. And really large scale is where it's at. And I'll be more specific,

00:18:14.600 I'll say you need to go and build the Korean technology because they have it nailed down.

00:18:20.040 They've done eight of their APR 1400s, four in South Korea, four in UAE, average build time

00:18:25.960 eight and a half years, average cost between four and five billion US dollars. So it's by far and

00:18:31.880 way of the next generation nuclear technologies, the cheapest. It does require enriched uranium.

00:18:37.160 i know that's a topic of discussion here in canada but this is a i'm a genuine solution

00:18:45.800 that can be adopted and works and and i think right now the focus has to be on do what works

00:18:51.800 on what undo what works because everybody needs megawatts like everybody in the world is chasing

00:18:57.000 megawatts and partly because of poor strategy historically and partly because now ai is coming

00:19:04.200 and that's going to require a huge amount of more energy and here in alberta the preference as it is

00:19:09.640 in many places is for the technology companies to bring their own power and this means go off the

00:19:15.960 grid be on the gas grid don't be on the power grid and this is the message time and again but because

00:19:22.200 of supply chain constraints everyone's going for really small generating units they have higher

00:19:26.200 emissions they're less efficient so really think about on the other hand they could be placed

00:19:31.320 closer to the point of need. I was going to come back to you on this. You recommended large

00:19:38.600 scale units. Well, if you're in the middle of a large city, then I guess that's the thing to do.

00:19:45.480 But if you have dispersed population centers, as we tend to do in Canada,

00:19:50.200 is line loss a consideration? It's less of a consideration than it used to be. With nuclear,

00:19:55.960 it's less of a consideration because you get so much energy out of the plant to begin with,

00:20:00.440 and it's so reliable now the trouble with building smaller reactors is that so the very small

00:20:08.920 reactors they don't functionally exist yet now you've got g and hitachi building their

00:20:13.560 300 megawatt units at darlington but they're all on the same site so that's essentially a gigawatt

00:20:18.120 project that's basically a big reactor pretending to be a small small reactors and so that's fine

00:20:24.840 you know, if you can get that going. But you do have some disbenefits from the smaller scale.

00:20:30.760 You have to build a significant security perimeter around nuclear facilities. So if you're going to

00:20:36.120 have small ones dotted around the place, you have to think about the cost of that security. And then

00:20:40.760 when you line that up against something like line losses, at the transmission level, line losses are

00:20:45.160 not that significant. The biggest losses are at the lower voltage level. So they're only looking

00:20:49.080 it's about 2-2.5% at the high voltage level. But of course, you don't build your entire grid on

00:20:55.980 just a single solution. Your data centers shouldn't go and build a big nuclear power

00:21:00.320 station because it doesn't suit the load variation that they have. You get big variations in energy

00:21:06.600 consumption from data centers over time, and that can change very quickly, faster than a gas power

00:21:11.560 station can respond to, and definitely faster than a nuclear power station can respond to.

00:21:15.900 So smaller units there make sense, but not for the whole load.

00:21:20.080 You don't want to be doing three megawatts.

00:21:22.220 And I was in Texas a couple of weeks ago, and I was told, yes, football fields full of three megawatt units for a 1,000 megawatt load requirement.

00:21:32.660 And these are not efficient engines.

00:21:36.400 They give you a lot of flexibility, but they're not efficient in terms of energy consumption.

00:21:40.680 we're almost out of time katherine but one last thing is that we have spent 20 minutes talking

00:21:49.400 about how to generate power in a situation where there are artificial constraints we are only

00:21:58.200 constraining power producers because we think that the carbon dioxide pushed into the atmosphere by

00:22:04.680 a coal plant to some degree by a gas plant is somehow going to bring the earth to a fiery end

00:22:12.340 and it's always 20 years further than where we are they've been saying this for 50 years

00:22:16.400 you don't agree with that do you so i typically try and avoid the debate about climate science

00:22:23.340 um i'm interested in the policy implications of it what i don't see a cost benefit analysis comparing

00:22:30.480 attempts at preventing climate change with attempts at mitigating the impact of climate

00:22:37.520 change? Would it be cheaper to adapt to climate change than to try and prevent it? Because there's

00:22:44.660 no evidence that prevention will work. I mean, that's the other crazy thing here is that we're

00:22:49.400 doing all these things on the assumption that if we halt the increase in temperature, that will

00:22:53.760 make some difference. But we don't know that. We don't know it's possible to halt. There are

00:22:59.320 natural drivers here as well, or it might be too late. We just don't know. So we should be looking

00:23:04.700 more at cost-benefit analyses. But also we should keep in mind that these are not neutral choices,

00:23:10.720 that expensive energy also kills people. A lot of the climate concern is that climate change harms

00:23:17.180 lives and livelihoods, but expensive energy harms lives and livelihoods. Unreliable energy for sure

00:23:22.680 harms lives and livelihoods. You look at the Spanish blackout, 11 people died, but there was

00:23:27.140 enormous economic cost there as well. We had a half a day in London where I think it was 60,000

00:23:34.740 homes plus Heathrow Airport lost power. That probably cost 50, 60 million pounds just the

00:23:42.020 impact on Heathrow Airport. Did they keep the tubes going during that?

00:23:45.940 Well, they get their power from different solicits. So probably just in that

00:23:49.620 specific area, there was a difficulty, but across London as a whole, I don't think so.

00:23:54.420 So the very things that you're trying to prevent, harm to lives and livelihoods, can be caused by ill-thought-through energy policy.

00:24:03.940 And that is not something that we really see policymakers addressing, and they need to.

00:24:09.920 I don't think voters will be forgiving if large numbers of people, and it's very much more serious here given the extremes of temperature that you experience in Alberta.

00:24:19.100 So if you start having blackouts in the middle of the winter, I don't think voters will forgive that.

00:24:23.880 Well, I think we'll have to draw a line there on the discussion,

00:24:27.000 much as I'd like to take it longer. What are you in town for?

00:24:31.480 Just meetings, developing my business here in North America. I think it's well known that

00:24:36.840 things are not going well in Europe, so trying to spread my wings a little bit.

00:24:41.800 Don't blame him. Catherine, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for making

00:24:46.520 20 minutes for us. Appreciate it a lot. My pleasure.

00:24:49.160 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - February 06, 2026

Go nuclear or freeze

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