Western Standard - HANNAFORD： 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 my old

00:00:34.880 home country, and she is an expert on that of the power sources built-to-service grids. Welcome,

00:00:42.320 Catherine. Thank you. Catherine, you have a very specific expertise in oil and gas and how power

00:00:54.880 is financed. In fact, you'll call in as an expert witness when things are in dispute. You've been

00:01:00.800 doing this for more than 25 years, and you've just produced this document here on electrification,

00:01:10.880 can the grid cope? I'll hold this up where everybody can see it. How would a person get a copy of this?

00:01:17.840 If you visit my website, which is what-logic.com, in the blog section, there's a link to it.

00:01:25.760 I'm going to give you an opportunity to say that again a little later in the program, but

00:01:33.200 you're also known, probably reviled, I would guess, as a standing critic of renewable energy generation,

00:01:41.680 and you've had a lot to say about Great Britain's famously unreliable grid and the soaring costs across

00:01:46.640 the country because of the great green delusion of successive UK governments. Well, a lot of us in

00:01:54.160 Western 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?

00:02:13.840 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 and

00:02:27.360 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.

00:02:41.200 There is no solar at night. People often forget that. 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.

00:02:52.000 So you have this whole additional cost then that has to be incurred to provide generation when wind

00:02:58.320 and solar are not available. And then the low energy density means that it covers more land and

00:03:02.720 requires a lot more grid to connect it. You need many more wires. If I wanted to build a typical gas

00:03:09.040 fired power station, that would be 800 megawatts. And the units here don't matter. The equivalent wind

00:03:14.560 farm would require 60 turbines each with a wire connecting it. But because your gas power station will

00:03:21.200 work around more than 90% of the time, the wind is only about 30% of the time, you then need three

00:03:26.960 times that number to give you the same amount of electricity over the course of a year. So that's, you

00:03:31.760 know, 150 to 180 times more wires than you would need for conventional generation. And the cost of that

00:03:38.240 really adds up.

00:03:38.960 Of course. Well, we understand that. I think what you have just said is a sufficient explanation for

00:03:48.480 any ordinary citizen who's mildly interested in the subject. And yet, we have governments, we have

00:03:56.640 one in Ottawa, that seems to defy the science on this. Now, I know that they're going to put out a paper

00:04:04.080 on reorganizing the Canadian grid, we're expecting it in about three, three weeks time. And yet, from what we

00:04:12.720 have seen in the past couple of years, all that comes down is this arbitrary instructions that you have

00:04:19.520 to be carbon net neutral by an arbitrarily selected year, which is 2035. It takes 10 years to get the

00:04:31.280 permits to build a pipeline or a generating station or an electrical transmission line. I mean, by the time

00:04:41.120 you've got all the stakeholder buy-in, it takes that time. So, you know, we're going to end up at 2035,

00:04:49.040 and we're going to be expected to be carbon neutral, but we're not going to be. So why do you think

00:04:56.160 governments are, first of all, so obsessed with the green ideology? The British government is

00:05:04.400 every bit as obsessed as the Canadian government. And then, why do they not understand the simple

00:05:10.400 thing? Like, if you have too much solar and too much wind, and you have a still night when the wind

00:05:18.080 doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine, there's too much. It's going to be a problem for you.

00:05:22.880 They don't want to believe it. I think it's that simple. They've bought into this very

00:05:26.960 naive, very childlike idea that you can have this green fantasy and that a few batteries will sort

00:05:33.600 out all of your intermittency problems. And it's just not real. Britain was one of the first countries

00:05:41.440 to bring in these net zero rules, and there was almost no debate in parliament. And part of that was

00:05:46.480 because it was all so remote. You know, the target then was 2050. It felt like a long time away.

00:05:51.680 And really, what sort of a psychopath doesn't want to save the planet? And they don't understand that,

00:05:55.840 first of all, this stuff doesn't actually save the planet. The supply chains are highly polluting.

00:06:01.200 But also, the high costs that this has imposed on consumers in Europe has led to massive

00:06:07.120 deindustrialisation. And so what's happened to that industry is that it's moved into Asia,

00:06:11.840 where the carbon content of energy is higher, and you incur additional emissions from

00:06:15.840 transportation. Now, why Western governments cannot rationalise this and understand these basic facts

00:06:24.080 is completely beyond me. I do not understand why they persist in this false narrative. And you see

00:06:31.520 Ed Miliband, the energy minister in the UK, he will say with huge amounts of passion and conviction that

00:06:37.040 we have to do these things for the climate emergency. And yet, his policies are causing global emissions to

00:06:41.920 rise. So, it's not only that this is bad for consumers, it doesn't do any benefit to the environment either.

00:06:48.640 So, you mentioned that consumers, as you may suppose from my accent, I still have contacts back in Great Britain.

00:06:57.360 And some of my friends who are retired and on a pension are ready to blow their brains out. You know, it's the classic dilemma.

00:07:04.240 Do we pay for the electricity or do we buy the food to cook on the electric stove? You know, it's a tough one. How bad is it?

00:07:13.840 Britain has the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world and the fourth highest domestic prices.

00:07:19.360 It's really bad. Households have been struggling significantly. Obviously, high energy prices are very

00:07:24.640 inflationary, and we're seeing significant job losses as a result of deindustrialisation. We're losing

00:07:29.840 something like a thousand jobs a week in the North Sea. It's horrific. Even the unions are starting

00:07:35.360 to oppose this labour policy. And so, this is hurting everyone. And the fact that the current governments,

00:07:43.120 and what we've seen actually, interestingly, is that the Conservative Party, which was in office until

00:07:48.400 the middle of 2024 and had been in office for many years, left office and really had a sort of

00:07:55.760 Damascene conversion where they realised that this was not the right way to go. And so, they've now

00:07:59.680 rejected the net zero 2050 target. Reform, which is a new political party in Britain, it tends to be

00:08:06.800 labelled as more on the right of the political spectrum. That's not entirely accurate. Some of their

00:08:11.840 policies are quite socialist, but nevertheless, this is how they're characterised. They're very strongly

00:08:16.560 against net zero. In fact, they call it net stupid zero. And so, Labour is starting to be isolated in 0.99

00:08:25.280 this position. And we're seeing across Europe as well, voters are starting to see the light. Arguably,

00:08:32.320 the last German election was triggered when Volkswagen announced its factory closure. So, it's quite

00:08:38.160 interesting. Germany had experienced very high electricity prices for many years and had lost quite

00:08:44.000 a lot of industry. BASF, the big chemicals company, had closed its factories and moved its production to

00:08:49.280 China. And people didn't really notice. But when Volkswagen said it was going to do the same,

00:08:54.080 that really cut through to the public and was a big factor in that early election that they had,

00:09:00.240 bringing down the Schultz government. So, we're starting to see this pushback from voters. It was

00:09:05.680 one of the narratives in the US presidential election the previous year as well. So, voters are

00:09:11.840 starting to rebel. They're starting to see that these high prices are not in their interests. They're

00:09:16.240 starting to see grid instability. We had, obviously, the blackout in Spain. 11 people died. And that

00:09:22.800 was very benign weather conditions. And there's been subsequent research looking at mortality data

00:09:27.920 that says there were probably 165 excess deaths over the two days. So, 11 directly attributable deaths,

00:09:34.560 and then 165 excess deaths that were likely, statistically, as a result of the blackout. So,

00:09:41.040 these are not trivial matters that we should be complacent about.

00:09:44.240 Steve McLaughlin So, you have obviously

00:09:47.680 traced the 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?

00:10:07.280 Steve McLaughlin 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 Europe following

00:10:19.440 this strongly wind and solar-led approach, which requires huge amounts of additional grid infrastructure.

00:10:27.200 We see that also in Australia. We see it in Japan. In the United States, there was a similar strategy.

00:10:32.640 They've dropped the wind aspect, but they still have huge, multi-billion-dollar grid expansion projects.

00:10:39.040 I mean, even just in ERCOT in Texas, it's several billion dollars worth. And that expands across the

00:10:45.520 whole country. 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. And there's going to be an enormous constraint in the

00:11:08.720 copper market. Because on top of all of these plans for renewable generation, and it takes 15 tons

00:11:15.760 of copper per megawatt for offshore rent, it's a hugely intensive, copper intensive thing to do.

00:11:20.960 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 centers 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 with the

00:11:52.320 producing countries. So China has built this very strong strategic position in copper. And other

00:11:58.400 countries are going to really struggle to get the raw materials they need to develop these strategies.

00:12:03.520 So Canada coming to this so late in the game is a huge disadvantage. And really, Canada will be much 0.79

00:12:10.480 better served to pivot to a higher energy density solution, to minimize that use of copper. And

00:12:16.800 that means nuclear, and it means natural gas.

00:12:18.960 Nuclear and natural gas. Okay. Now, I was surprised to, in our pre-conversation, I was surprised to see

00:12:26.080 that you were aware of the brownout that Alberta suffered in 2024, in January. We were very aware of it,

00:12:35.520 of course. But news of that has spread to England and your consultancy. And now,

00:12:44.400 since then, we have had something like 400,000 people come to Alberta. It's a 10% increase in our

00:12:54.400 population. So we were skating along the edge there at the beginning of 2024. And our premier,

00:13:01.440 Danielle Smith said, well, you know, we're trying to get things built. We need to increase our base

00:13:07.680 load. And she wanted natural gas. Our federal government had a different idea. More solar, 0.95

00:13:14.560 more wind wasn't going to work for all the reasons we've just been talking about.

00:13:18.800 But in cold weather, you have an even bigger problem with wind and solar. So solar panels get

00:13:24.080 covered in snow. And then obviously then they don't generate and wind freezes up. And in the beginning of

00:13:29.920 2024, this isn't something that was widely known in Europe. I try and follow things outside just

00:13:37.120 what's happening in the UK. But it wasn't something that really hit the press in Britain. But a big

00:13:43.360 part of that problem was lack of weatherproofing in the power system. It was not unlike the issue that

00:13:49.200 Texas experienced in Sturmuri, which is actually quite astonishing when you consider that minus 40 degrees

00:13:56.720 is not uncommon in Alberta. So to not be weatherproofed at minus 20 was, I think,

00:14:02.160 quite a significant regulatory failure. And that, you know, you need to make sure that infrastructure

00:14:08.560 in cold places can withstand the cold. So even before you're looking at system adequacy in terms

00:14:14.320 of do we have enough generation, is will that generation work in the typical conditions that we have?

00:14:18.960 And I think the real surprise is that it hadn't happened sooner rather than that it happened at all.

00:14:24.000 Interesting picture that came out. You referred to Texas there. There was a picture of a helicopter

00:14:30.640 steam cleaning or trying to blast all the frost off one of these massive wind generators.

00:14:36.080 And the irony that Texas and all the places on cross-green Earth, energy laden as it is,

00:14:42.160 should find itself unable to keep the lights on because of this, well, I'll call it a wrong direction,

00:14:49.120 on the reliance upon wind energy. Well, yes, but to be fair in Texas, they also had significant issue

00:14:56.000 with the gas infrastructure freezing up. I think Texas can be more easily forgiven for not having

00:15:02.320 weatherproofing against very cold weather. I don't think Alberta can have the same grace. Cold weather is

00:15:08.320 very much more common here. Yes, well, yes it is. So the advice to the Premier then would be what?

00:15:16.400 Well, the first advice is make sure that the infrastructure you have already will operate

00:15:21.120 in the temperature conditions that you have here. And then the second one is just don't rely on

00:15:26.960 intermittent generation. If somebody wants to put solar panels on their roof and they do it without

00:15:31.600 subsidies, then fine. And no issues with that. I would prefer they didn't buy them from places

00:15:36.560 tainted with slave labor, but your roof, your choice. But no subsidies, don't subsidize stuff that

00:15:43.840 hardly ever works. To put this in context, Britain started subsidizing wind in 1990.

00:15:51.360 The premise was that this was an immature technology that required support to reach maturity. After 35

00:15:58.000 years, if it's still not mature, and now they're signing 20-year contracts, I think we have to accept

00:16:03.040 that this stuff is never going to be economically viable by itself. We will always have to subsidize it.

00:16:08.320 And this is something that if you want to make that choice as an elected leader, you need to make sure

00:16:14.000 that your voters understand it. Because I think most would not buy into that, would not be willing to

00:16:19.280 spend, to indefinitely subsidize something that works at the time.

00:16:23.280 Of course you have to deceive the voters and tell them that there's a perfect...

00:16:27.840 Well, tell them the truth and do something different. It would be, I know, so naive of me.

00:16:32.160 Yes, I can't believe you're saying it. That's why I'm not a politician.

00:16:38.080 No, but in all seriousness, the instructions that came out from the previous government were

00:16:45.760 quite inflexible. We had to do things a certain way. How are we going to do that? We're even talking

00:16:52.960 about, at one stage, how we would build new natural gas baseload generators. And if we didn't meet the

00:17:06.880 standards developed by the federal government, we're looking for some way to indemnify the

00:17:12.720 corporate executives who would face criminal charges. This is how... I've heard much of that

00:17:18.960 talk for the last year or so, and we now have a different prime minister who tends not to talk in

00:17:24.160 those kinds of terms. But it is an astonishing thing that we, in Alberta, we have this huge

00:17:32.640 population increase and we don't seem to have a plan to get the natural gas generators going. So,

00:17:42.640 you are recommending, would you recommend that Alberta get nuclear fast?

00:17:48.400 Yes.

00:17:50.080 Do you realize this is the headline moment?

00:17:52.160 Yeah, I mean...

00:17:52.880 British expert says, Alberta government needs nuclear.

00:17:55.760 Yes, everybody needs nuclear. Nuclear has no emissions in production and it has extremely high

00:18:03.200 energy density and it lasts for a very long time. You're now looking at 60 to 80 year lifespans for new

00:18:09.680 large scale reactors. And really large scale is where it's at. And I'll be more specific,

00:18:14.560 I'll say you need to go and build the Korean technology because they have it nailed down. 1.00

00:18:20.000 They've done eight of their APR 1400s, four in South Korea, four in UAE. Average build time,

00:18:25.920 eight and a half years, average cost between four and five billion US dollars.

00:18:30.240 So it's by far and away of the next generation nuclear technologies, the cheapest. It does require

00:18:36.160 enriched uranium. I know that's a topic of discussion here in Canada, but this is a genuine solution

00:18:45.840 that can be adopted and works. And I think right now the focus has to be on do what works.

00:18:51.840 On what?

00:18:52.480 On do what works because everybody needs megawatts. Everybody in the world is chasing megawatts.

00:18:59.040 Partly because of poor strategy historically, and partly because now AI is coming and that's going to

00:19:04.880 require a huge amount of more energy. And here in Alberta, the preference, as it is in many places,

00:19:10.960 is for the technology companies to bring their own power. And this means go off the grid. Be on

00:19:17.200 the gas grid, don't be on the power grid. And this is the message time and again. But because of supply

00:19:22.640 chain constraints, everyone's going for really small generating units. They have higher emissions,

00:19:26.640 they're less efficient. So really think about...

00:19:29.200 On the other hand, they can be placed closer to the point of need. I was going to come back to you

00:19:36.080 on this. You recommended large-scale units. Well, if you're in the middle of a large city,

00:19:43.440 then I guess that's the thing to do. But if you have dispersed population centers, as we tend to do

00:19:48.720 in Canada, is line loss a consideration?

00:19:52.240 It's less of a consideration than it used to be. With nuclear, it's less of a consideration because you get

00:19:58.240 so much energy out of the plant to begin with, and it's so reliable. Now, the trouble with building

00:20:04.880 smaller reactors is that... So the very small reactors, they don't functionally exist yet.

00:20:10.720 Now, you've got G and Hitachi building their 300 megawatt units at Darlington, but they're all on the

00:20:16.400 same site. So that's essentially a gigawatt project. That's basically a big reactor pretending to be

00:20:21.920 small reactors. And so that's fine, you know, if you can get that going. But you do have some

00:20:28.480 disbenefits from the smaller scale. You have to build a significant security perimeter around

00:20:34.800 nuclear facilities. So if you're going to have small ones dotted around the place, you have to

00:20:38.320 think about the cost of that security. And then when you line that up against something like line

00:20:42.640 losses, at the transmission level, line losses are not that significant. The biggest losses are at the

00:20:47.280 lower voltage level. So they're only looking to about two, two and a half percent at the high voltage

00:20:51.840 level. But of course, you don't build your entire grid on just a single solution. Your data centers

00:20:58.640 shouldn't go and build a big nuclear power station because it doesn't suit the load variation that

00:21:02.800 they have. You get big variations in energy consumption from data centers over time, and that

00:21:08.720 can change very quickly, faster than a gas power station can respond to, and definitely faster than

00:21:13.520 a nuclear power station can respond to. 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. I was in Texas a couple of weeks ago, and I was told,

00:21:25.760 yes, football fields full of three megawatt units for a thousand megawatt load requirement.

00:21:33.200 These are not efficient engines. They give you a lot of flexibility, but they're not efficient in

00:21:39.440 terms of energy consumption. We're almost out of time, Catherine, but one last thing is that we have

00:21:47.840 spent 20 minutes talking about how to generate power in a situation where there are artificial constraints.

00:21:57.360 We are only constraining power producers because we think that the carbon dioxide pushed into the

00:22:03.840 atmosphere by a coal plant, to some degree by a gas plant, is somehow going to bring the earth to

00:22:11.280 a fiery end, and it's always 20 years further than where we are. They've been saying this for 50 years.

00:22:16.320 So I typically try and avoid the debate about climate science. I'm interested in the policy

00:22:25.760 implications of it. What I don't see a cost-benefit analysis comparing attempts at preventing climate

00:22:34.640 change with attempts at mitigating the impact of climate change. Would it be cheaper to adapt to

00:22:42.080 climate change than to try and prevent it? Because there's no evidence that prevention will work.

00:22:46.640 I mean, that's the other crazy thing here is that we're doing all these things on the assumption that

00:22:51.200 if we halt the increase in temperature, that will make some difference. But we don't know it's possible

00:22:57.920 to halt. There are natural drivers here as well, or it might be too late. We just don't know.

00:23:03.520 So we should be looking more at cost-benefit analyses. But also, we should keep in mind that

00:23:09.040 these are not neutral choices, that expensive energy also kills people. A lot of the climate

00:23:15.120 concern is that climate change harms lives and livelihoods, but expensive energy harms lives

00:23:20.320 and livelihoods. Unreliable energy for sure harms lives and livelihoods. You look at the Spanish blackout,

00:23:25.520 11 people died, but there was an enormous economic cost there as well. We had a half a day in London

00:23:32.560 where I think it was 60,000 homes plus Heathrow Airport lost power. That probably cost 50,

00:23:39.280 60 million pounds, just the impact on Heathrow Airport.

00:23:43.280 Did they keep the tubes going during that?

00:23:45.120 Well, they get their power from different solicits. So probably just in that specific

00:23:50.240 area, there was a difficulty, but across London as a whole, I don't think so.

00:23:54.400 But so, so the very things that you're trying to prevent, harm to lives and livelihoods,

00:24:00.080 can be caused by ill thought through energy policy. And that is, that is not something

00:24:07.120 that we really see policymakers addressing, and they need to. I don't think voters will be forgiving

00:24:13.120 if large numbers of people, and it's very much more serious here, given the extremes of temperature

00:24:17.520 that you experience in Alberta. So if you start having blackouts in the middle of the winter,

00:24:21.600 I don't think voters will forgive that.

00:24:23.200 Well, I think we'll have to draw a line there on the discussion,

00:24:26.960 much as I'd like to take it longer. What are you in town for?

00:24:30.240 Just meetings, developing my business here in North America. I think it's well known that things are

00:24:37.200 not going well in Europe, so trying to spread my wings a little bit.

00:24:40.800 Don't blame him. Catherine, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for making 20 minutes for us.

00:24:47.440 Appreciate it a lot. My pleasure.

00:24:49.120 For the Western Standard, I'm Nigel Hannaford.

Western Standard - February 10, 2026

HANNAFORD： Go nuclear or freeze

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