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Old Posted Sep 30, 2021, 6:29 PM
Innsertnamehere's Avatar
Innsertnamehere Innsertnamehere is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: Hamilton
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Ontario is basically entirely renewable as Isaidso has already posted, notably with a huge amount coming from nuclear. The last coal plant closed in 2014, marking an end to basically the vast majority of "dirty" power.

Natural Gas is still used to deal with peak loads, but it's a small percentage of the grid overall.

Ontario spent a ton of money at the time to drop coal plants as my understanding is that it used to be a decent amount of the power grid, causing hydro rates to increase significantly. The controversy involving a few replacement natural gas plants caused a long time premier to lose his job over it, and even now a lot of people are sour about how much hydro costs went up to pay for it.

It's been great since they closed though, Smog days used to be a regular thing in the summer months in the GTA and they have almost disappeared now, basically in tandem with the closure of the coal plants.

Unfortunately some times the wind blows the pollution up from the plants in Ohio still leading to a handful of smog days a year.

Ontario has 3 major nuclear plants, including what was the largest plant in the world until fairly recently. They are all at end of life now and are also undergoing some very, very expensive rebuilds, but the province has decided to keep the plants instead of replacing them with alternate sources.

Given Ontario's strong baseload power sources, battery technology could be a good option to phase out the last of the natural gas plants. Hell, just doing water-based energy storage on a large scale would probably help immensely.
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