Western Standard - October 27, 2023


Smith tears down heckler at climate confab

Mentioned
Jonathan Wilkinson Churchill Falls
Trudeau drops carbon tax on heating oil, increases rebate for Atlantic Canadians Alberta leading on economic reconciliation

Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

190.34

Word count

541

Sentence count

30


Summary

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

In this episode, I sit down with Alberta's Energy Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Energy Minister Margaret Micallef to talk about the need for baseload power in the province. We talk about what it means to have a reliable, affordable and clean energy grid.

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 I do think Alberta sometimes justifiably can say that Ottawa has not spent a lot of time or interest making sure things were great for Alberta as much as they could have.
00:00:10.040 And that's, there's a long history of that.
00:00:12.160 When it comes to this, I thought, when we say this is impossible, 12 years seems, that could be four premiers from now.
00:00:20.640 To say that's impossible, that's a pretty strong word to use about our own ability in Alberta to make things happen.
00:00:26.020 You know, look, I mean, we would have to build four hydroelectric dams the size of Churchill Falls by 2035 to be net zero.
00:00:34.060 So does anyone think it would be possible to get all of the siting decisions, the regulatory, the First Nations, the different levels of landowner consultation, the environmental issues?
00:00:44.320 Does anyone think that would be possible to get that built in 12 years starting now?
00:00:49.840 I mean, you go ahead and talk to Jonathan Wilkinson then,
00:00:55.820 because I can tell you, I can tell you Site C began in 1954.
00:01:00.500 Site C began in 1954.
00:01:03.880 Fine.
00:01:04.380 Do you think I can get, do you think I can get an equivalent amount of nuclear rolled out in 12 years?
00:01:10.100 Do you think I could do that in an environment that we've never had nuclear before?
00:01:13.740 I don't want to interrupt the two of you.
00:01:15.680 Do you, do you, what, what, what do you know?
00:01:18.560 And I, I get, and I.
00:01:19.900 What do you know that my industry experts don't know about, about.
00:01:23.080 Well, you know, and what do I do when there's no sun and there's no wind?
00:01:29.240 Batteries.
00:01:29.700 Let's talk about batteries, because I've talked to somebody.
00:01:32.320 I want to, I want to talk about batteries for a minute, because I know that everybody thinks that this economy is going to be operated on wind and solar and battery power.
00:01:39.040 And it cannot, there is no industrialized economy in the world operating that way, because they need baseload.
00:01:45.260 And I'll tell you what I know about batteries, because I talked to somebody who was thinking of investing in it on a 200 megawatt plant.
00:01:50.880 One million dollars to be able to get each megawatt stored.
00:01:55.540 That's 200 million dollars for his plant alone.
00:01:58.080 And he would get one hour of storage.
00:02:00.840 So if you want me to have 12,000 megawatts of storage, that's 12 billion dollars for one hour of storage.
00:02:07.140 24 billion dollars for two hours of storage.
00:02:09.940 36 billion dollars for three hours of storage.
00:02:12.400 And there are long stretches in winter where we can go weeks without wind or solar.
00:02:17.400 That is the reason why we need legitimate, real solutions that rely on baseload power rather than fantasy thinking.
00:02:25.560 And I am not going to engage in fantasy thinking and say something is possible when I know that my principal job...
00:02:31.480 I think we need to stop.
00:02:32.840 My principal job is to have a reliable energy grid.
00:02:35.680 That's what I'm trying to do.
00:02:37.120 I think I understand.
00:02:40.200 That got interesting, didn't it?
00:02:41.460 But it's important, and these are important conversations, and it's not like we're all going to come to some sort of thing in the next three minutes.