I was pleasantly surprised to see that, in Ontario, wind power was at about 1/4 the power generated as coal in 2009. That’s according to Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO). According to an IESO release, “Wind output from Ontario’s commercial wind farms was 2.3 terawatt hours (TWh) in 2009, equivalent to the consumption of the City of Oshawa for two full years. At the same time, output from Ontario’s coal-fired plants dropped to 9.8 TWh, down dramatically from 23.2 TWh in 2008, and the lowest output in 45 years.” That’s great news.
I don’t like coal for a bunch of reasons. First, we have to mine it. That means stripping habitats bare and putting people’s lives at risk, whether from the dangers of the immediate job or from long-term exposure to a dirty carcinogen. Second, burning coal releases not only carbon dioxide, a key gas that’s causing climate change, but also a bunch of other harmful substances, including mercury. Those pollutants get into our air and water and severely effect our health.
So, what’s the cost of quadrupling our wind-power generation capacity so we can eliminate coal entirely? Well, what’s the health care cost linked to damage by airborne pollutants? I hope that the province starts to put together the numbers across the big picture.
Here’s how we fueled Ontario’s power usage in 2009:
Nuclear: 55.3 per cent
Hydroelectric: 25.5 per cent
Natural gas: 10.3 per cent
Coal: 6.6 per cent
Wind turbines: 1.6 per cent
Biomass, solar, other: 0.8 per cent
I’d love to see us embrace more local sources of electricity, so that we can use more of what we generate and so that we can rely on a lot of small-scale sources, like solar panels on office buildings. So much power is lost between where it’s generated and where it’s used. Hopefully we’ll get a better power grid so this would be possible. In the meantime, I buy my household power from a renewable energy supplier.
Do you think we can close our coal plants?
