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Why isn’t there more solar power in one of Canada’s sunniest provinces? (thenarwhal.ca)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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[–] 3 points 3 months ago (7 children)

100m² seems substantially higher than what I've looked at before, but even using that estimate you could still power 40 homes with a single acre of solar panels. So, that would be something like 12K acres of solar panels to cover all of Manitoba's homes. It's not like that many people live in Manitoba, and there is a lot of land. How many acres of outdoor parking lots are there in Manitoba? Certainly seems like a meaningful contribution could be pretty easily made even using that high estimate for area required to power a home.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago (3 children)

    I think the article mostly focused on Manitoba because the current leadership of the province is left-leaning, but as mentioned in the article, it isn't the best place in Canada for panels. With hydro already covering like 95% of the need, I can see dealing with grey skies and snow making solar unappealing.

    Saskatchewan on the other hand, is a sunnier province, the snow is way drier here than it is in MB (people in some places in SK use leaf-blowers instead of shovels for all of their snow. You can't do that in MB), it has less population per km^2, and its electricity grid is full expensive expendable resources. And if you don't care about money, and the environment is more your jam, it has the worst pollution to kWh of the provinces, though it does lose to Nunavut if you include the territories.

    https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/zone/CA-NU/all/monthly

    But, SK has a leader who wants to get relected in a province pretty controlled by the oil and gas industry. So even if Moe could take time away from his busy schedule of bullying children using the notwithstanding clause to look into this, I don't think that anyone in his circle would recommend it.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 months ago

    That's a problem not just in SK. We are set to see energy demand skyrocket, and it's a bonanza for whichever industry ends up feeding it. The industry players with the political clout and the capacity to rapidly scale if there's little environmental impact consideration are in O&G. Tim Hodgson was down in Texas not long ago talking about how in order to win the AI race the US needs to catch up to China’s 400MW/year lead in new energy capacity and how that must be achieved using Canadian natural gas. There's an enormous amount of money to be made in filling that demand, consequences be damned for everyone who isn't either in on the bonanza or getting their re-election or post-politics career funded via it.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    (people in some places in SK use leaf-blowers instead of shovels for all of their snow. You can't do that in MB)

    Come on, man. Sask and mb winters are roughly equivalent.

    The principle obstacle in both places is really just capturing enough light throughout the year, even when compensating with a stronger panel tilt in winter.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago (2 children)

    There's something magical about solar power which makes people think "it's only 12 thousand acres of solar panels, sounds easy!" You could probably fit them all in an area the size of Manitoba's second-largest city, no problem. Let's go ahead and start building a city-sized grid of access roads out in the woods to be completely levelled and filled with high-tech electronics, batteries, inverters, transmission lines, switching stations, and more solar panels than currently exist in Canada — how hard can it be?

    I dunno, it's not impossible. It's just... there might be better ways to solve the problem.

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