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The future of electricity is wind and solar, new report says. Canada is lagging behind (www.cbc.ca)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/canada@lemmy.ca
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Renewable energy met all new demand for electricity in 2025, according to a new review of global power generation, halting the growth of fossil fuel-powered generation and highlighting the promise of clean sources like wind and solar.

The authoritative Global Electricity Review released annually by Ember, an international energy research organization, says clean sources — especially solar — are growing fast enough and are cheap enough that they are stopping new fossil fuel-powered electricity generation. Electricity from solar and wind increased while there was no change to the amount of electricity produced from burning fossil fuels.

“We're really talking about a large-scale change in how the energy system works. And solar is among the most scalable technologies that can deliver fast change,” said Nicolas Fulghum, senior data analyst at Ember.

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[–] 4 points 5 months ago (22 children)

Why doesn't tidal energy generation come up in the conversation for renewables? Canada has a long coast line, surely there are a lot of great spots to utilise this technology?

I understand it's not viable for interior provinces, but the coasts could use it.

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  • [–] 19 points 5 months ago* (16 children)

    Solar is so stupid cheap to maintain. Just sit and watch to see if a sensor reads bad values. No moving parts. No water boiling. Works best when it's hot too (when lots of AC is being used).

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (3 children)

    Definitely, solar seems to be the best of all options. However, having multiple sources of power as redundancy increases stability, and helps with overlapping coverage. By this I mean, tidal can work regardless of sunshine levels/during night time, so it can cover the off hours of solar production.

    Additionally, the coastal regions tend to be more wet and cloudy than other areas, so solar may not be as effective compared to say the prairies.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Genuinely it isn't a problem on today's grid. Just build solar and the storage methods will come through time. In the meantime existing fossil fuel infrastructure can fill in the gaps.

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  • [–] 2 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Makes sense, thanks!

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    The U.S. and Canada share 2 power grids, so their economics is about the same. Demand for new connections in the U.S. is really high, but regulations slow how many can be built. It limits how expensive electricity has gotten, at least somewhat. So unfortunately all that renewables have done is let us use more electricity.

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    It really is, hard part is sorting through the errors and figuring out just what in the world caused the error. The amount of hardware between the inverter and grid is impressive when you have a 100kw+ system. Over 250kw it gets even better because hydro needs to be able to remotely kill your power.

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  • [–] -1 points 5 months ago (9 children)
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  • [+] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yea this could be prevented by having adequate glass protection on the panels in areas where the risk of hail is worth that investment.

    Its not like traditional power generation fares any better in extreme weather. The renewables were what survived the ice storm outage in Texas while oil and gas plants went down.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Oh no! "Thousands" of panels out of however many that article refused to say?? This is much worse than a nuclear meltdown or natural gas explosion.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    out of however many that article refused to say

    It can be hard to read some text with one's head up one's ass, so I'll highlight:

    • hail claims now average around $58.4 million per claim and account for 54.21% of incurred costs of total solar loss claims attributable to hail. This creates a gap between the insurance requirements for solar projects and what is available in the market, leading to project delays and cancellations.*

    The point was damage claims are so high insurance is pulling out.

    News Report of home solar damage.

    And

    News report validating the videos of damaged solar farms.

    But maybe your versions of reality don't have hail, wind or ice.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago

    I do solar O&M for commercial sites. We have lost 2 panels out of our nearly 20,000 to hail in 16 years of operation. Baseballs and birds dropping turtles have killed far more panels for us.

    Largest killer is squirrel, those little monsters love the flavor of pv cable it seems.

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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago (4 children)

    Probably because it's so uncommon. The only commercially viable tidal generator ever built in Canada (and one of the few in the world) was the one on the Bay of Fundy, and it didn't produce all that much electricity in grid terms (20MW, thank you Wikipedia). You need a lot of tidal water level change to get decent power out of tidal generation, so there are likely fewer sites than you think. Plus, one reason the Bay of Fundy station was shut down was that it was rather hard on the local sea life, although I expect some of the same mitigation strategies used on inland hydro dams could help with that if they wanted to replace it with a new station.

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