Canada's Green Energy Futre

I found this great article today about the future of energy production and of the country. Written by an economist, it begins with the good & bad about nuclear and then goes on to strongly support sustainable alternatives instead; not because they're better for the environment, but because they will generate more power, for less cost and better the country as a result. It's a good read if you have the time. Here's a snippet:

When asked about the nuclear waste element, one engineer took out a map of Ontario and made a minuscule little dot on it with his sharpened pencil. "You see that?" he said. "That is all the room we need to safely store all of Ontario's nuclear waste for ten generations."

But I'm an economist with a masochistic attraction to complex social conditions. So when I look at a map of Ontario, I don't see the little pencil dot. I see 630,000 MW of wind power (for scale: that's more than 20 times Ontario's current peak consumption) and upwards of 7,500 MW of new hydro, but almost all of it stranded in the northern part of the province, inhabited by First Nations communities living in poverty conditions with few wealth-building prospects. This vast power potential is stranded because there is no transmission grid to get it down to market.

Toby A.A. Heaps, A Green Power Corridor