One of the absurdities of lame-duck Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge to have Canada achieve “net zero” industrial greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is that since he won’t be in power then, he can say anything he likes now, regardless of its real-world feasibility.
The PM’s “emissions impossible” pledge — because the target itself has been set impossibly high — will be left to future governments to deal with, a prime example being what it would take to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 in Canada’s electricity sector.
A new study by the fiscally conservative Fraser Institute says the net zero target is impossible to reach in light of the ever-increasing demand for electricity Canada will need because of population and economic growth, the enormous amounts of energy required to power artificial intelligence systems, plus federal mandates requiring all new passenger cars, SUVS and light duty pick-up trucks sold in Canada to be net zero emissions by 2035.
“To meet existing and future electricity demand with low-emitting or zero-emitting sources within the government’s timeline, Canada would need to rapidly build infrastructure on a scale never before seen in the country’s history,” said study author Kenneth Green in “Rapid Decarbonization of Electricity and Future Supply Constraints.”
Drawing on official sources, Green estimates that Canada will need an additional 684 TWh (684 trillion watt hours) of electricity to meet growing demand by 2050.
He then calculates the level of energy needed to meet that demand using existing, non-emitting sources of energy and the numbers, to be blunt, are unattainable.
To meet that demand using nuclear power, Green said, would require the construction of 16 new nuclear power plants, each one equivalent to Ontario’s Bruce Nuclear Generating Station. Given an estimated construction time of seven years per project, this would take 112 construction years to accomplish within 25 years.
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Alternatively, federal and provincial governments could authorize and build 134 hydropower facilities the size of the Site C power station in B.C., at an average estimated construction time of seven years per project for a total of 938 construction years requiring 54,988 hectares of land, or roughly 1.5 times the size of the municipality of Montreal.
Relying solely on wind power to reach the net zero emissions target by 2050 would require Canada to build 575 wind-power installations, each the size of Quebec’s Seigneurie de Beaupre Wind Farm. At an estimated time of two years per project, this would take 1,150 construction years to complete in the next 25 years and require 1 million hectares of land — nearly 14.5 times the size of the municipality of Calgary.
Relying solely on solar power to reach the 2050 target would require the construction of 840 solar-power generating stations the size of Alberta’s Travers Solar Project with a construction time of two years per station, requiring 1,680 construction years to complete by 2050.
These estimates do not include the lengthy regulatory and legal processes often needed to approve such projects.
Technological advancements in carbon storage and inventing batteries capable of storing energy at levels needed to power modern industrialized societies, could reduce the time needed to achieve net zero emissions.
Federal policy also allows some exceptions to meeting the 2050 deadline.
But Canada is already one of the world’s cleanest sources of electricity because we generate only 5% of it from coal, unlike countries like China and India which generate 60% to 70% of their electricity from coal, the most carbon dioxide intensive fuel.