Federal Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault recently amended his edict that Canada’s electricity generation and distribution system achieve “net-zero” CO2 emissions by 2035, likely because Alberta Premier Danielle Smith finally made Guilbeault’s Liberal government colleagues realize this goal was impossible (as well as politically toxic). The question now is: does Guilbeault shoving the net-zero goalposts out to 2050 make the impossible possible?
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 (Mt) 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% 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% 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%, nuclear 73.2%, wind 28.9% and solar 14.1%. 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 rectors, 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 Farm, 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 km2. 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.
And this is before we consider that Guilbeault has also mandated that by 2035 only electric vehicles (EVs) will be sold and by 2050 Canada as a country must be net-zero, so that among other things the approximately 8 million homes currently heated with fossil fuels will have to be converted to electric heat.
Space prevents me from going over my data and calculations here, but getting Canada to 100% EV sales by 2035 would require another 15%-53% of the electricity currently generated by fossil fuels, while heating those 8 million homes would demand 85% 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.”
But don’t take my word for it: let’s look at Guilbeault’s own figures. As Blacklock’s Reporter first reported, a Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement quietly issued by Guilbeault’s office just before Christmas concluded that, “The required costs to build and maintain Canada’s electricity system to meet expected growth in demand is estimated to be approximately $690 billion between 2024 and 2050 in present value terms.”
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!
Still, let’s say that by some miracle Guilbeault’s fever dreams could be made a reality. Would a net-zero Canadian electricity grid that eliminated the aforementioned 47 Mt of annual CO2 emissions have any effect on climate change?
By 2035 China (if its emissions continue growing as they have since 1990) will have increased its annual emissions by 4,215 Mt – 90 times the amount by which Canada will have reduced its emissions. Between now and 2035 China will have emitted enough total CO2 all by itself—over 181,500 Mt—to raise the atmospheric concentration of CO2 by over 23 parts per million. This enormous gap between Canada’s puny and China’s vast emissions will more than double by 2050.
The likelihood of achieving even Guilbeault’s revised 2050 edict is sufficiently small as to be (as they say in engineering) for all practical purposes zero. Moreover, it is a fool’s errand under any likely variation of the scheme, since it will have no discernible impact on climate change. Guilbeault—or his bosses—should scrap the net-zero power grid edict entirely and, while they’re at it, the EV mandate and the national net-zero plan.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Jim Mason holds a BSc in engineering physics and a PhD in experimental nuclear physics, specializing through much of his career in analyzing complex data. He is retired and lives near Lakefield, Ontario.