Danielle Smith’s government made false statements about reason for Alberta renewables pause: documents

The government was preparing speaking notes before the date it says the process began

New documents obtained by The Narwhal suggest the Alberta government and Premier Danielle Smith made false statements about why the province introduced a sudden pause on new renewables projects.

The documents, revealed through a freedom of information request, suggest Smith’s plans were in place well before the government’s announcement and were not — as she has said publicly — the result of requests from provincial regulators.

As it turns out, the government was already preparing speaking notes on its decision before provincial regulators weighed in.

Lori Williams, an associate professor of policy studies at Mount Royal University in Calgary, said the revelation the government made false statements is significant.

“There are serious questions about why this rather lengthy pause on renewable energy approvals was instituted in the first place,” she said.

She said the newly revealed documents show the government was justifying a decision that was already made — and the fact the government then made false statements about its motivations is puzzling.

Josh Aldrich, Neudorf’s press secretary, ignored specific questions emailed by The Narwhal for this story and sent a statement which says the decision was the result of multiple briefings and conversations.

Neudorf has admitted he did not consult with anyone from the renewable power industry prior to revealing the government policy and the reaction to the announcement has largely been one of shock and confusion.

The pause on renewables has done considerable harm to Alberta’s reputation, she added, and there are still a lot of questions that need to be answered about why the government made its decision and for whose benefit. |Read more https://www.theenergymix.com/2023/11/10/failed-u-s-nuclear-project-raises-cost-concerns-for-canadian-smr-development/| theenergymix.com/2023/11/10/fa…

#abpoli #environment #cdnpoli #abpoli #ClimateChange #smith #ucp #FossilFuels #renewables

Failed U.S. Nuclear Project Raises Cost Concerns for Canadian SMR Development

The abrupt failure of the leading small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) project in the United States is shining a light on public subsidies that might keep similar technology under development in Canada, even if it’s prone to the same cost overruns that scuttled NuScale Power Corporation’s Carbon Free Power Project (CFPP) in Utah.

NuScale and its customer, Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), announced they were cancelling the project earlier this week, after its anticipated cost increased 53% over earlier estimates, Bloomberg reports. “The decision to terminate the project underscores the hurdles the industry faces to place the first so-called small modular reactor into commercial service in the country.”

“Private investors in Utah forced NuScale to divulge financial information regarding the cost of electricity from its proposed nuclear plant,” and “cost became the deal-breaker,” Edwards told The Energy Mix in an email. “Publicly-owned utilities in Canada are not similarly accountable. The public has little opportunity to ‘hold their feet to the fire’ and determine just how much electricity is going to cost, coming from these first-of-a-kind new nuclear reactors.”

In the U.S., the business case started to fall apart last November, when NuScale blamed higher steel costs and rising interest rates for driving the cost of the project up from US$58 to $90 or $100 per megawatt-hour of electricity. The new cost projection factored in billions of dollars in tax credits the project would receive under the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, amounting to a 30% saving.

In Canada, “the massively expensive SMR projects in Canada will eventually face the same reckoning,” predicted Susan O’Donnell, an adjunct research professor at St. Thomas University and member of the Coalition for Responsible Energy Development in New Brunswick. While the Canadian Energy Regulator’s modelling assumes SMRs could be built at a cost of C$9,262 per kilowatt in 2020, falling to $8,348 per kilowatt by 2030 and $6,519 by 2050, the latest cost estimate from NuScale exceeded $26,000 per kilowatt in Canadian dollars, O’Donnell said—and the technology had been in development since 2007.

“Too bad our leaders have chosen to pursue an energy strategy which is too expensive, too slow, and too costly in comparison with the alternatives of energy efficiency and renewables—the fastest, cheapest, and least speculative strategies,” Edwards wrote. He added that waste disposal and management challenges and costs for SMRs will be very different from what Canadian regulators have had to confront with conventional Candu nuclear reactors. |Read more https://www.theenergymix.com/2023/11/10/failed-u-s-nuclear-project-raises-cost-concerns-for-canadian-smr-development/| theenergymix.com/2023/11/10/fa…

#cdnpoli #smr #efficiency #environment #slow #expensive #nuclear

Earth just had its hottest 12 months in the last 120,000 years

Earth’s last 12 months were the hottest life on the planet has lived through in the past 120,000 years, a new analysis has found.

The report, produced by the U.S.-based Climate Central group, calculated that average global temperatures warmed to 1.32 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, when humans started burning fossil fuels at scale.

“This is the hottest temperature that… humans have experienced for the time where we’ve decided to write down things and build cities and live together in large groups,” said Andrew Pershing, who led the analysis as Climate Central’s vice-president for science.

The study used peer-reviewed methodology the research group has automated to produce a global snapshot of how climate change is influencing daily temperatures. To achieve that, the scientists pulled data from their global Climate Shift Index (CSI), a tool that takes real temperatures to produce models under two scenarios — one that is actually measured and the other a counterfactual world where humanity never burned fossil fuels.

Pershing said that the fact that we are setting a record this year is in some ways not surprising.

“We should expect a set of records because we live on a warming planet,” Pershing said. ” |Read more https://www.albertaprimetimes.com/beyond-local/earth-just-had-its-hottest-12-months-in-the-last-120000-years-7809537| albertaprimetimes.com/beyond-l…

#cdnpoli #politics #McDougallCreekWildfire #HottestYear #GlobalWarming #environment

Tourists’ cars line these Rocky Mountain roads. Soon logging trucks will haul the trees away

Kananaskis Country was initially designated in 1978, envisioned as a backyard for Albertans to hike, ski, camp and vacation. Less than an hour from Calgary, the mountains, forests and rivers were an ideal escape from the city.

It was the culmination of years of increasing interest in protecting the area and was a particular focus of then-premier Peter Lougheed.

The eastern slopes resource management plan, which encompasses Kananaskis, was introduced one year before the area was officially declared, and took a holistic view of how to manage resources and uses.

“The environment of land, water, vegetation and wildlife must be managed totally and not as separate elements. Although the provincial goals and regional objectives are defined individually, the management required to achieve any one objective does consider the many interrelationships with the environment,” it reads.

“Because the demands are so high, there is often a competition for the same land and same resources in the eastern slopes,” it continues. “Thus, not all goals will be achieved to the same degree of success in all areas.”

Lougheed had been pushing since at least 1971 — when his Progressive Conservatives swept the long-governing Social Credit party out of office — to pause resource extraction in the area until conservation decisions could be made.

It was a time when coal was still being pulled from the area around Canmore and south of the current border of Kananaskis near Crowsnest Pass. Logging and oil and gas were also underway in the region and Lougheed didn’t want to designate the area after it was already stripped.

Kananaskis logging roads bring troubles of their own

The logging road that will soon carry trees out of the valley around the Highwood River is rough and muddy. There are no logging trucks or equipment along its route in late September, only rutted wheel tracks and puddles as it cuts from the highway entrance over a controversial new bridge and up a hill into the expanse of green.

Dow, who lives in Calgary, says there were restrictions on fishing this summer, due to low water levels and higher temperatures, but no restrictions on building a bridge that will carry logs out of the clearcut.

“So it’s completely backwards to think that on one level, the government acknowledges and understands this is too much stress on our watersheds, yet then they’re like, ‘Yeah, go ahead. We’ll kick off the construction of this bridge and get prepared for all the logging that’s going to happen.’ ” |Read more https://thenarwhal.ca/alberta-kananaskis-country-logging/| thenarwhal.ca/alberta-kananask…

#abpoli #Kananaskis #CrowsnestPass #water #resources #logging #environment #politics