Good News for a Change

I'm a little late getting to this, but I wanted to offer a favourable opinion on the deal struck between Newfoundland and Nova Scotia which will hopefully finally get development started on the Lower Churchill Hydro project. The current deal is only for a portion of the potential power that could be generated at Lower Churchill, but once the undersea cables have been installed to route the power through Newfoundland and into the Maritimes, it seems all that more likely that the remaining potential will be tapped.

In my opinion, if Canada wants to reduce it's greenhouse gas emissions without having to sacrifice anything economically, by far the most obvious choice is to use hydro-electric power (and some wind) to displace our remaining coal plants. It seems as though our neanderthal government has scrubbed the handy list of the worst ghg emitting plants in the county off of the Environment Canada website, but this press release from Pollution Watch has a list of Canada's biggest sources of CO2 in the atmosphere, and it's pretty much a list of the country's biggest coal plants.

So, credit to Danny Williams who's been the driving force behind the development of the Lower Churchill Falls.

Finally, here's a good article in the Globe from Jan Carr that explains how the main thing holding Canada back from fully exploiting it's hydro resources is lines on a map, in particular the lines between provinces.