The Government of Canada has passed laws and issued decrees aimed at stopping climate change. Since many of these have been enunciated by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault, they might be referred to as Guilbeault’s Green Goals. One of these is to have a “clean” or “net zero” electricity system across Canada by 2035, a goal that on December 17, 2024 was unceremoniously extended to 2050. Because achieving this policy will require immense capital investment and pose significant technical and economic risks, two questions immediately come to mind: 1) Can it be done, and 2) Is it worth it?
It is critical that Canada thoroughly evaluate whether a net-zero system is achievable given the country’s current mix of electricity generation, available (or imminent) technology, financial and technical resources, legislated and regulatory approval time-frames and estimated costs. Following this it must be assessed what impact a “net zero” electricity grid would have on stopping climate change.
A comprehensive review of the relevant data indicates that the likelihood of achieving this objective in either the original or revised time-frame is so small as to be effectively zero. This assessment holds even if “net zero” was limited only to replacing Canada’s existing fossil-fuel-generated electricity, and it is valid not only for regions more heavily dependent on such fuels, like Alberta, but for the country as a whole. Once provisions are made to produce electricity required for the millions of battery electric vehicles (EVs) that are to be added and for the conversion of fossil-fuel-heated homes to heat pumps – two more of Guilbeault’s Green Goals for a net-zero country by 2050 – the prospect becomes even more daunting if not laughable.
Even if it were achieved, however, the resulting impact on climate change would be zero. This is because any emissions savings in Canada would be rendered immediately irrelevant by new emissions from China that, already by 2035, will likely be almost two orders of magnitude (100 times) larger than Canada’s entire net-zero grid reductions and will almost certainly continue to grow through 2050.
What Canada’s Electricity System Looks Like Today
Going into any discussion about changing a country’s electricity system it is important to understand two basic aspects of electricity generation. One is the rate at which electricity is used in a given instant and, therefore, needs to be produced right then; the other is the total amount of electrical energy that is used over a given period of time and, therefore, must be generated over that period. These aspects have different impacts on a power grid. A particular technology or fuel may be able to generate electricity at a high rate but, for whatever reason, may be operationally limited to short or uncertain periods of time, restricting the total amount that can be generated over a day, month, season or year.
The basic unit of rate is the familiar Watt, as in a 100-watt lightbulb, and the typical unit of amount is the kilowatt-hour (kWh) which signifies 1,000 watts delivered for one hour (or any combination of usage adding up to that amount) and is the unit used to compute our electric bills. The measurement/reporting unit is often scaled up to millions (megawatt or MW), billions (gigawatt or GW) and trillions (terawatt or TW) (see this website for more information).
Figure 1. Total electricity generated in Canada by energy source. (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 25-10-0015-01 Electric power generation, monthly generation by type of electricity; graph by Jim Mason)
The total amount of electrical energy generated in Canada by the major generation techniques (omitting negligible tidal power and biofuels) in 2016-2023 is shown in Figure 1, with the fractional contributions over the same period shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Relative contribution of each energy source to Canada’s total electricity output. (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 25-10-0015-01 Electric power generation, monthly generation by type of electricity; graph by Jim Mason)
Figure 3 shows the total amount of “installed capacity” – the electricity rate that could be produced in a given instant if every source of generation was running at its maximum rated output – for each type of generation over the same period. It is apparent that, overall, Canada’s power output has remained quite stable. A small upward trend in installed capacity is evident for hydro, wind and solar but their percentage contribution to total generation has remained nearly constant.
Figure 3. Installed generating capacity of Canada’s electricity system. (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 25-10-0022-01 Installed plants, annual generating capacity by type of electricity generation; graph by Jim Mason)
Another important metric, the “capacity factor”, is shown for each generation technique in Figure 4. The capacity factor is the amount of power a facility or generating category actually produced compared to its theoretical maximum if it were operating at full output for the entire measurement period. Expressed as a percentage, this metric accounts for such things as downtime for maintenance, refilling hydroelectric reservoirs after a period of heavy usage or drought, service interruptions, lack of demand or – importantly in the case of “green” power – the fact that most of the time the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow.
Capacity factor is thus a crucial measure of a particular generation source’s overall efficiency. It in turn determines the amount of generating capacity that must be installed in order to provide the amount of power required at any instant in time and the total amount of electricity that is to be delivered over any extended period.
Figure 4. Capacity factor – the fraction of installed capacity effectively used – for each energy source. (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 25-10-0015-01 Electric power generation, monthly generation by type of electricity and Table 25-10-0022-01 Installed plants, annual generating capacity by type of electricity generation; graph by Jim Mason)
The capacity factors shown in Figure 4 are interesting and important. Nuclear power consistently produces the most electricity per unit of installed capacity, hydro the next, fossil fuels the next, with wind and solar producing the least. In large measure, this results from inherent characteristics of the energy source. Nuclear reactors must be run continuously at the “critical point” that just sustains the nuclear reaction or it will stop. Hydro is driven by flowing water, but dams must be maintained and drawn-down reservoirs must be recharged. Fossil fuel generation is highly reliable but, precisely because it is more readily started and stopped, it is often reserved for peak demand periods and to “fill in the gaps” when other facilities are out of service.
A zero-emissions electricity generating sector will require replacing the 127 terawatt-hours currently generated by fossil fuels with some combination of other sources.
Wind and solar – the “great green hopes” – are by far the least efficient and reliable, only producing power when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining, respectively, both of which are severely limited, seasonally variable and randomly weather-dependent. Yet these sources are what Canada’s future is intended to hinge upon.
Last year, a total of 615 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity was generated in Canada of which, as Figure 5 shows, 359 TWh (58.4 percent) was from hydro, 127 TWh (20.6 percent) from fossil fuels, 85 TWh (13.7 percent) from nuclear, 40 TWh (6.4 percent) from wind and 4.7 TWh (0.8 percent) from solar.
Figure 5. Total amount of electricity generated in Canada in 2023, by energy source. (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 25-10-0015-01 Electric power generation, monthly generation by type of electricity; graph by Jim Mason)
What Will it Take to Replace Fossil Fuels?
A zero-emissions electricity generating sector will require replacing the 127 TWh currently generated by fossil fuels with some combination of the other sources. What this would entail mathematically if each of the other existing generating methods was used individually is depicted in Figure 6, and the implications are discussed below. (This discussion does not account for the costs of accommodating overall growth in electricity demand.)
Figure 6. Implications of replacing electricity generated by fossil fuels in Canada by each other energy source individually, shown as the multiple of existing installed capacity or, for hydro, by reference to other well-known dam sites. (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 25-10-0015-01 Electric power generation, monthly generation by type of electricity and Table 25-10-0022-01 Installed plants, annual generating capacity by type of electricity generation; graph by Jim Mason)
For discussion purposes it was assumed that nuclear and hydro can continue to be operated at the average capacity factors of the past eight years, which seems a relatively safe assumption given their long operating records and largely de-risked technical natures. Wind and solar power generation have a shorter operating track record, and additional (individually small) facilities are constantly being added, often in new locations, increasing weather variability, rendering the same assumptions regarding average capacity factors less solid, but there was no ready alternative.
Taking these factors into consideration, the new installed capacity that would be required to generate 127 TWh using each generation technology was calculated using the average capacity factor for that technology over the 2016-2023 period. A discussion concerning each potential replacement method follows.
Hydro
To replace the 127 TWh of fossil-fuel-generated electricity with new hydropower would require installing 27,600 MW of new hydro capacity, equivalent to one-third of Canada’s existing installed hydro capacity.
As a point of reference, the Muskrat Falls facility in Newfoundland and Labrador came online in 2020 after a seven-year development cycle and provides 824 MW of installed capacity that produces 4.5 TWh of electricity per year, for a capacity factor of 62.3 percent. Muskrat Falls cost $12.7 billion (apparently not including the cost for approximately 1,600 km in required new surface and seabed transmission lines), or about $15 million per installed MW.
Another point of reference, the Site C Dam on northeast B.C.’s Peace River, which started development in earnest in 2010, is slated to come online in 2025. It will have 1,000 MW of installed capacity and is to produce 4.6 TWh of electricity per year, a capacity factor of 47.7 percent. Site C is estimated to cost $16 billion by the time it is completed, though including transmission, which is also about $15 million per installed MW.
Replacing the 127 TWh of fossil-fuel-generated electricity would thus take the equivalent of 28 Muskrat Falls or Site C hydroelectric facilities. (This number is considerably higher than other recent estimates, which looked only at installed capacity while ignoring capacity factors and, thus, actual annual output.) Such an immense development effort would cost well over $400 billion in current dollars and, even if 28 suitable sites could be found and plans approved by regulators and affected populations, would initially overwhelm Canada’s engineering and construction capacities, thereby likely dragging the process out over 30-40 years if not longer.
What is net zero energy?
Net zero refers to a situation where the amount of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) emitted into the atmosphere in one area, industry or activity is balanced by the amount removed in another. In the context of Canada’s electricity grid, net zero means achieving a system where the totality of electricity generation emits no overall greenhouse gases, either because all power generation is zero-emitting like wind, solar, hydro or nuclear power, or because carbon capture offsets the CO2 emitted from fossil-fuel-generated generation. The article’s analysis indicates that this process faces significant technical, practical and financial challenges.
Nuclear
To replace 127 TWh of fossil-fuel-generated electricity with nuclear power would require installing new nuclear capacity of around 20,300 MW, which is equal to 1.3 times Canada’s existing installed nuclear capacity.
As a point of reference, the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario which, until 2016, was the world’s largest fully operational such facility, has an installed capacity of 6,550 MW and in 2022 generated 42.5 TWh of electricity. It took 17 years from construction start to commissioning of the last of its eight reactor units and cost a total of $7.8 billion in 1970s/1980s dollars.
Replacing the 127 TWh of fossil-fuel-generated electricity would require the equivalent of three Bruce Nuclear Generating Stations. If built concurrently as 24 separate reactors they could, in theory, be completed in 10-12 years, nine years being the minimum period required by Government of Canada regulations. This assumes, however, that Canada has the required surge engineering and construction capacity, which it doesn’t, and that governments have sufficient resources to assess and approve that many concurrent developments, which they don’t. Converting Bruce’s original cost to 2023 dollars and multiplying by three gives a cost estimate of $60 billion. This already-large figure may be on the low side, given that the current refurbishment of Ontario’s existing Darlington Nuclear Generating Station will cost $12.8 billion for a 30-year life extension of the 3,500 MW facility.
Wind
To replace 127 TWh of fossil-fuel-generated electricity with wind power would require installing 49,800 MW of new capacity, equal to 3.1 times the existing installed wind capacity. Over 2016-2023, installed wind capacity across Canada increased by about 575 MW per year. At the average 29 percent capacity factor for wind over this period, this delivered about 1.5 TWh of new electricity per year.
The 166-turbine, 300 megawatt Blackspring Ridge Wind Project in Alberta took one year to install and cost $600 million. Generating 127 TWh of additional wind power would thus require 160 similarly sized farms of comparable efficiency, comprising a total of 26,560 turbines.
At this rate of annual increase, replacing Canada’s fossil-fuel-generated power would take 85 years. What if this pace was accelerated? The biggest annual increase in installed wind capacity ever achieved was 1,871 MW in 2014; if this rate could be sustained, it would reduce the time required to 27 years – or 2053 if we began in January 2025.
As a point of reference, the 166-turbine, 300 MW Blackspring Ridge Wind Project in Alberta took one year to install and cost $600 million. Generating 127 TWh of additional wind power would thus require 160 similarly sized farms of comparable efficiency, comprising a total of 26,560 turbines. Adjusting the 2014 construction cost to 2023 dollars, this yields a cost estimate of $127 billion – $1 billion in capital costs per TWh of electricity to be replaced. All of this assumes not only timely regulatory approvals, available capital and sufficient engineering and construction capacity, but that Canada offers hundreds of optimal sites for new wind farms.
Solar
To replace 127 TWh of fossil-fuel-generated electricity with solar power would require around 103,000 MW of new installed solar capacity, equal to 27.6 times the current nationwide total. Canada’s largest solar “farm” by far is the Travers Solar project in Alberta. It consists of 1.3 million solar panels spread over more than 3,330 acres of farmland. Development began in 2017 and was completed in 2022 at a cost of $700 million. Travers has an installed capacity of 465 MW (about 350 Watts per panel) which, given its five years of development, equates to an installation rate of 100 MW per year.
With Canada’s meagre average solar capacity factor of just 14.1 percent in 2016-2023, the replacement project would take 220 Travers-sized solar arrays. This would require 286 million solar panels and cover over 730,000 acres (almost 3,000 km2), 3.5 times the area of Calgary. Assuming the ongoing willingness of China to supply Canada with solar panels, the installation cost would be circa $150 billion. Since the current installation rate of 100 MW per year would yield a replacement time of nearly a millennium, construction would need to be accelerated 40-fold and sustained at that level for 25 years to complete the replacement by 2050. This is utterly unrealistic.
Storage
To transform intermittent wind and solar power into something like a continuous supply, a method will be needed for excess energy to be stored when it is generated for use when it is not. Wide dispersal of wind farms to achieve sufficient generation from offsetting locations, avoiding the need for large-scale storage, has proved a bust in Europe, where entire countries have fallen dead-calm during critical times, with both wind and solar producing zero power. With solar power the need for storage is self-evident, since the sun doesn’t shine at night and, even during the day, panels produce less than their rated output during adverse weather and low sun angles.
In addition to one longstanding indirect method of storing electricity – water reservoirs – there are several other direct and indirect methods, all but one of which exists only on the level of curiosity. In Canada these are, in ascending order of relevance: compressed air, accounting for 2 percent of current storage capacity, thermal (3 percent), hydrogen (3 percent), flywheel (11 percent) and lastly, the sole significant method, battery (81 percent).
The amount of electricity currently stored is comically small. According to the Canadian Renewable Energy Association, total Canadian energy storage capacity was just 250 MWh as of January 2021, with maximum output of just 130 MW, an immaterial proportion (on the order of 0.1 percent) of Canada’s peak nighttime electricity demand. And at this rate it is entirely drained within two hours.
The 127 TWh of electrical energy generated using fossil fuels represents an average of 348 GWh per day, meaning that roughly half, or 174 GWh, would need to be stored during daylight hours for discharge at night. This is approximately 700 times the existing storage capacity. Charging/discharging that amount in 12 hours amounts to an average charge/discharge rate of 14.5 GW, which is over 110 times the charge/discharge rate of the currently installed capacity. Using current lithium-ion battery technology to provide this capacity at an average cost of approximately $200 per kWh would require total investment of $35 billion for the battery packs alone at current prices (not including racks, lands and buildings, controls, transformers and transmission lines). This would further raise the already high true costs of wind and solar power.
Feasibility, or Lack Thereof
Table 1 summarizes the pertinent information regarding each of hydro, nuclear, wind and solar if used separately to replace the 127 TWh of electricity generated by fossil fuels in 2023, along with the implications for storage pertaining to solar and using Li-ion battery technology.
The above data alone indicate that most of the methods would be impractical to replace fossil fuels. Once one adds technical obstacles, environmental risks and likely popular opposition, they are all effectively ruled out.
The nuclear approach is the only one that would seem to have a hope of success. Even at the upper end of the cost range it is by far the most economic option, would disturb the least amount of land, could employ proven technology, requires the smallest number of major new facilities and, assuming that work began immediately and governments fast-tracked the regulatory processes, might be operational by 2050. This assumes that all major variables would “go right”, however; accordingly, the probability of this occurring should be considered very low.
Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS)
An alternative to achieving net zero (rather than actual zero) emissions is to capture CO2 emitted by the current fossil-fuel-powered generating stations (or an equal amount being emitted elsewhere) and sequester this underground. The two signature CCS undertakings in Canada are the Boundary Dam project in Saskatchewan and the Quest project in Alberta. A third, the Alberta Carbon Trunk Line (ACTL), recently began operating at a modest scale and is designed to grow significantly.
Canada’s electrical grid emits approximately 47 megatonnes of CO2 per year. Sequestering all of this would require the equivalent of 47 Boundary/Quest-sized projects costing approximately $78 billion to construct and around $4.7 billion annually to operate.
The Boundary Dam project removes CO2 from the exhaust stream of a coal-fired generating station and transports it by pipeline to be pumped into a producing oilfield. It required two years of construction, was completed in 2016 at a cost of $1.4 billion, and was designed to remove 1 megatonne (Mt) of CO2 annually, although it has yet to reach that level.
The $1.3 billion Quest project was built in conjunction with an oil sands upgrader, took six years, was completed in 2015 and was designed to remove 1 Mt of CO2 annually, a rate it has achieved. Operating costs amount to approximately $100 per net tonne of CO2 not emitted into the atmosphere.
Canada’s electrical grid emits approximately 47 Mt of CO2 per year. Sequestering all of this would require the equivalent of 47 Boundary/Quest-sized projects costing approximately $78 billion (in today’s dollars) to construct and around $4.7 billion annually to operate (raising the costs of fossil-fuel-generated electricity). Assuming a completion schedule of two to six years per project, these could be accomplished in the time available, given the Canadian oil and natural gas industry’s long track record in executing multiple capital-intensive projects at once, involving capital investment on the order of $40 billion per year.
This approach would be almost four times the minimum/optimal cost of the nuclear option but considerably less expensive than any of the others. In addition to the normal challenges associated with significant scaling, finding a sufficient number of technically suitable injection sites could pose a significant obstacle. It also assumes that everyone accepts this approach as validly “net zero”, which some environmental groups have indicated they would not.
How does net zero work?
Achieving net zero for an electricity grid involves replacing fossil-fuel-based electricity generation with energy sources deemed to be zero-emitting like wind, solar, hydro or nuclear, while overcoming the intermittent nature of renewable energy with storage technologies like battery arrays. The article points out that this will require a massive scale-up in construction activities, infrastructure investments and technological advancements, many of which are either prohibitively expensive or unfeasible.
What Happens when Canada’s Electricity Demand Grows?
The above analysis addresses the requirement to replace existing fossil-fuel-generated electricity. It does not address the need for additional capacity for the millions of soon-to-appear EVs and heat pumps mandated by Guilbeault’s other Green Goals. (Nor does it address how to meet organic growth in national electricity demand, nor what all of this might do to the price of electricity for consumers – which the Government of Ontario recently warned would be severe, adding hundreds of dollars to the average residential ratepayer’s power bill; these two issues remain outside the scope of this article.) The impact of EVs and heat pumps is analyzed below.
The EV Edict
The Justin Trudeau government has set explicit targets for automakers mandating that 20 percent of passenger vehicles sold be electric or plug-in-hybrid by 2026, 60 percent by 2030 and 100 percent by 2035. (This time-frame has not yet been altered by the Trudeau government.)
There are currently about 24 million light-duty vehicles registered in Canada, a total that typically increases by approximately 340,000 per year, with more details provided in Figure 7 and Figure 8. Canada can thus be expected to have approximately 28.5 million passenger vehicles by 2035. About 1.6 million vehicles are taken off the road (scrapped) annually. This means that to maintain the current trajectory in total passenger vehicles, approximately 2 million new vehicles must be sold annually.
Figure 7. Total number of light-duty vehicles in Canada, 2017-2022 actual (blue), with linear projection (green) from 2022 using slope of best fit from 2021-2022. (Sources: Statistics Canada Number of light-duty vehicles, by type, Canada, 2017 to 2022; graph by Jim Mason)
As can be seen in Figure 8, in order to maintain the historic trend in total passenger vehicles, EV sales will have to increase dramatically over what has been experienced to date. EV sales increased at an average of about 23,600 units per year in 2017-2023. Merely maintaining this level of annual sales growth will leave total EV sales at just 435,000 units in 2035, a yawning shortfall of 78 percent or nearly 1.6 million units below the federal mandate. This scenario would result in a total of just 3.7 million EVs on the roads by 2035.
Figure 8. Annual new EV sales required by Government of Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard to achieve 100 percent EV sales by 2035 but maintain the historic total vehicle trend of Figure 7 and maintain vehicle ownership by 80 percent of Canada’s driving-age population. Green: Projected EV sales using best-fit straight line of actual sales 2017-2021. Grey: EV sales required to replace conventional vehicle sales and maintain vehicle ownership by 80 percent of the driving age population (with selected years indicated by black dots and linear interpolation between these years in orange). (Sources: Statistics Canada Table 20-10-0024-01 New motor vehicle registrations, quarterly, Canada’s Electric Vehicle Availability Standard; graph by Jim Mason)
Achieving the mandate would require EV sales to jump immediately to an average annual increase of about 74,000 units in 2025 and 2026 – over three times the current rate of increase – then to an average increase of 200,000 units annually through 2030 before levelling to an annual increase of 160,000 per year through 2035, in order to achieve annual passenger vehicle sales that year of 2 million, all of them EVs. This scenario would result in approximately 13 million passenger EVs on Canada’s roads by that year.
Meeting either scenario is highly improbable. Rather than accelerating, new EV sales have been tapering off and automobile manufacturers have been downsizing production. Among the reasons for this are saturation in the market for “early adopters” of new technology and growing popular awareness of a number of concerns including range (especially in cold weather), charging station availability, charging times, costs, safety, repair and resale value. Concerns are also growing that the typical federal subsidy of $5,000 per EV is unsustainable and that governments will replace declining fuel tax revenues with new annual fees on EVs, as Saskatchewan and Alberta are already doing.
As 2035 approaches, the Government of Canada will be faced with the choice of abandoning the EV mandate, greatly extending the timeline to full adoption, or forcing millions of Canadians to go without personal vehicles.
Charging Canada’s Growing Fleet of EVs
The typical EV requires about 19.2 kWh to travel 100 km. Canadian drivers typically drive 16,000-24,000 km per year (so 20,000 km will be used in this analysis). Assuming half of this is driven in summer (average 10 °C), at which battery range is 100 percent of rated value, and half in winter (average -10 °C), with range reduced to 60 percent of rated value, an EV would average 25.6 kWh per 100 km over one year, thus consuming 5.1 MWh of electrical energy. Thus the new EVs on Canada’s roads in 2035 will require anywhere from 19 TWh to 67 TWh of electrical energy, based on the two scenarios discussed above and shown in Figure 9. This represents an increase of 15-53 percent over the 127 TWh required to make the existing grid net zero. That would require another up to 15 Muskrat Falls dams or 1.5 Bruce nuclear facilities.
Heat Pumps – A New and Terrible Way to Heat Your Home
The government has been encouraging people to change their home heating method from fossil fuel sources (natural gas, propane, oil) to electricity (air-source heat pumps, geothermal systems, electric furnaces). This will generate additional demand for electricity. Figure 9 shows the number of homes heated directly using fossil fuels in 2013-2020, with the number projected at 7.9 million such homes in 2023. (This includes single-family detached, single-family attached (row housing) and apartments, the latter two of which would be expected to have a lesser demand for heating/cooling because of the adjacent units; allowing for this results in the equivalent energy usage of 5.5 million single-family detached houses.)
Figure 9. Number of homes heated by fossil fuels, 2013-2020 actual (blue), with linear projection to 2023 (green). (Sources: Natural Resources Canada, Residential Sector, Canada, Table 27 Heating System Stock by Building Type and Heating System Type; graph by Jim Mason)
Heat pumps being a newer technology and home heating being subject to many variables, it is difficult to precisely estimate the typical amount of energy consumed annually by a heat pump. For example, one heat pump installer recommends that a 2,000-square-foot house in Barrie, Ontario use a 3-3.5 ton (36,000-42,000 Btu/hr) unit. For this analysis, a size of 4 tons (48,000 Btu/hr) was used to allow for the fact that most parts of Canada have colder winters than Barrie, that many houses may have poor insulation/windows, and that the average house may be larger than the example used.
A ‘typical’ heat pump would consume 19.2 megawatt-hours of electricity per year. Canada’s estimated 2023 complement of 5.5 million single-family-equivalent homes heated by fossil fuels would thus consume an additional 100 terawatt-hours of electricity if converted to electric heat pumps.
The heat pump’s heating and cooling efficiency also determines its energy consumption. Natural Resources Canada notes that a heating efficiency range (HSPF) of 7.1-13.2 would be typical for the populated areas of Canada, so a value of 10 was used in this analysis, and that the minimum cooling efficiency (SEER) rating in Canada is 14, with available products ranging to 42, so a value of 20 was used in this analysis.
The final parameter required to estimate the energy consumption of a typical heat pump is its number of operating hours during the heating and cooling seasons. For this analysis, the heating season was taken to be the 182 days spanning October-March while the cooling season was taken to be the 122 days spanning June-September, with April and May assumed to require neither heating nor cooling. The system was assumed to operate 75 percent of the time during heating season and 50 percent of the time during cooling season.
With these assumptions and estimates, a “typical” heat pump would consume 19.2 MWh of electricity per year. Canada’s estimated 2023 complement of 5.5 million single-family-equivalent homes heated by fossil fuels would thus consume an additional 100 TWh of electricity if converted to electric heat pumps, which is 84 percent of all the electricity currently being generated by fossil fuels! That would require another 135 or so Blackspring-sized wind power projects or 185 Travers-sized solar farms.
So between heat pumps and EVs, in addition to replacing all the electricity currently generated using fossil fuels by 2050, we will need to add the same amount again, or even more (as much as 170 TWh), meaning that all the required capacity numbers and costs in Table 1 need to be doubled!
What is “net zero emissions by 2050”?
Canada’s government-mandated commitment to net-zero emissions by 2050 includes transitioning all sectors, including electricity, transportation and home heating, to energy sources deemed to be zero-emitting or whose residual emissions are balanced by carbon offsets. The article focuses on the Government of Canada’s goal to achieve a net zero electricity grid by 2035, highlighting that even if this target could be met, the impact on global climate change would be negligible due to increasing emissions from other countries, particularly China.
The Climate-Change Impact if Canada Achieved Net-Zero Electricity
The likelihood of the country’s entire electricity system being net zero by 2050 is almost certainly zero. Still, contrary to the evidence and logic, let us assume that Canada could get there. What would be the impact on the Trudeau government’s stated objective of stopping climate change?
The premise underlying this objective is, of course, that CO2 is the cause of climate change, so reducing Canada’s emissions can contribute materially to stopping the change. The impact of achieving a net-zero electricity grid, then, will depend on how much doing so reduces CO2 emissions and what fraction this reduction represents of total global emissions.
It has been said that ideologues – like idealists – are people who have an unwavering faith in an imaginary world. But as Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos recently wrote in a different context, ‘Reality is an undefeated champion.’
Figure 10. China’s reported and projected annual CO2 emissions in megatonnes (Mt). Blue dots are the reported data, green line is the linear best-fit to these data, and grey area is total CO2 likely to be emitted by China over 2023-2035. (Sources: GHG emissions of all world countries, 2024 report, by EDGAR; author’s calculations; graph by Jim Mason)
Canada’s electrical grid, as stated above, emits about 47 Mt per year. By 2035, China will have increased its annual emissions by 4,215 Mt – 90 times the amount by which a net-zero Canada will have reduced its emissions from electricity generation. By that year, China will have emitted enough CO2 all by itself – over 181,000 Mt in total, about 30 times as much as Canada – to raise the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by about 23 parts per million. All of these gaps will only continue to widen over the following 15 years.
Clearly, making Canada’s electrical grid net zero will have no discernible impact on climate change, even if CO2 is the causative factor in climate change, which as discussed here, it may not be.
Guilbeault’s Green Goal of a net-zero electrical grid by 2050 is on a collision course with a number of hard realities, most of them centred on the concept of limits, including:
- Natural resources to provide the necessary energy source (especially pertaining to hydroelectricity but also to wind and solar);
- Manufacturing resources to provide the required equipment, afflicting every potential replacement source for fossil fuels;
- Technology, especially to provide practical energy storage at vastly larger scale;
- Canadian construction, engineering and manufacturing skills and capacities;
- Financial capital;
- Human resources at all levels, including expertise needed to staff and manage government regulatory processes without bogging down;
- Suitable underground geological reservoirs for sequestered CO2;
- Public tolerance; and
- Time to execute.
It has been said that ideologues – like idealists – are people who have an unwavering faith in an imaginary world. But as Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos recently wrote in a different context, “Reality is an undefeated champion.” Guilbeault, the ideologue, may wish to continue inhabiting the first of these worlds, but it strongly appears that he is about to be schooled in the second.
Jim Mason holds a BSc in engineering physics and a PhD in experimental nuclear physics. His doctoral research and much of his career involved extensive analysis of “noisy” data to extract useful information, which was then further analyzed to identify meaningful relationships indicative of underlying causes. He is currently retired and living near Lakefield, Ontario.
Source of main image: Shutterstock.
