[woob]

Originally Posted by opendoor

Isn't keeping those nuclear plants online insanely expensive? I recall reading that the power generated from them costs about 2-3x what it does from other sources.

Anyway, I'm far from an expert, but wouldn't the following give us pretty clean and reliable power:

• invest in much better inter-provincial transmission
• build out a ton of solar/wind power generation in the regions where you get the best bang for your buck and where fossil fuels are used for electricity (i.e. in places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, etc.).
• use those renewables to supply as much daytime power as possible to those provinces as well as neighboring provinces
• that would theoretically allow dams in places like BC, Manitoba, and Quebec to be run at reduced capacity when solar and wind are covering some of the load, which would allow reservoirs to fill. Then when solar and wind aren't producing, power generated from hydro can cover some of the load in the non-hydro provinces
• use existing gas plants to fill in where required.

I don't know, maybe there isn't enough existing hydro to make that feasible. But while nuclear is good, it's pretty expensive and not very flexible; you can't move output up and down to account for changes in demand very easily like you can with most other sources. I wouldn't be closing down plants, but I also don't know if I'd be investing tens of billions of dollars in a bunch of new ones either unless it looked like the only option.

Your optimism that the provinces would work together for their own greater good is admirable.