Guilbeault claims—and appears to believe—that a net-zero grid is critical to stopping climate change. But just because Guilbeault thinks things does not make them true.
Canada’s electrical grid currently emits an estimated 47 megatonnes of CO2 annually. To eliminate these emissions, “all” we need to do is replace the electricity currently generated using fossil fuels with one or more of the other significant available sources—hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar.
Last year Canada produced 127 terrawatt-hours (equal to 127 million megawatt-hours) of electricity using fossil fuels, about 20 percent of Canada’s overall power output. That much electricity could theoretically be replaced by a source with the capacity to produce 14,500 megawatts of electricity continuously, 100 percent of the time, all year.
That’s not how electrical generation works, of course; all power sources produce some fraction of their rated output (the “capacity factor”). Maintenance has to be done, hydro reservoirs needs to be refilled, the wind only blows part of the time, etc. Based on actual performance in 2016–2023, capacity factors were: hydro 53.2 percent, nuclear 73.2 percent, wind 28.9 percent, and solar 14.1 percent. This let’s us determine the new capacity required for each source to replace the 127 terrawatt-hours generated from fossil fuels.
For hydro, it would require 28 projects comparable to B.C.’s new Site C dam or Newfoundland’s recent Muskrat Falls facility. That’s a vast undertaking costing around $400 billion and taking at least 45 years—even if Canada could muster the capacity and will to work on nearly 10 dams at a time.
For nuclear, it would require three facilities the size of Ontario’s enormous Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, totalling 24 individual reactors, costing perhaps $60 billion, and taking at least 35 years if, again, Canada could somehow build batches of eight large reactors at a time.
For wind, it would require 167 projects the size of Alberta’s Blackspring Ridge Wind Project, totalling a mind-boggling 26,500 turbines, costing $127 billion, and requiring 85 years based on Canada’s recent average increase in installed capacity.
And for solar, it would require 220 projects the size of Alberta’s Travers Solar Project, the country’s largest, entailing 290 million solar panels covering an area of 3,000 square kilometres. This would cost $150 billion and could not come close to being finished by 2050. (Wind and solar power being severely intermittent and unpredictable, vast amounts of expensive battery storage would also need to be built.)
What we have, in short, is a costly and virtually unachievable boondoggle—regardless of whether the target year is 2035, 2050, or even 2075.
Space prevents me from going over my data and calculations here, but getting Canada to 100 percent EV sales by 2035 would require another 15 percent–53 percent of the electricity currently generated by fossil fuels, while heating those 8 million homes would demand 85 percent of the power now generated by fossil fuels (and this does not account for the heating needs of new homes built during this time).
Together, EVs and heat pumps will demand additional electricity at least equal to that currently supplied by fossil fuels in Canada. Meaning, you can double all of the above numbers. (And I’m still leaving out increases in electricity demand due to growth in Canada’s population or power-hungry industries like AI data centres.)
All of this shifts my previous assessment of “costly and virtually unachievable boondoggle” to “ruinous and utterly unachievable madness.”
Much of this demand growth, the government document notes, will come from meeting climate-change mandates like switching to all-EVs. Note also the term “present value,” which indicates the cost estimate has been discounted to today’s dollars. The nominal amounts that will be spent over this time thus probably total $1 trillion or even more. That’s “real money”—even to a Liberal!
