Province Of Ontario Canada Plans To Close All Coal-Fired Plants

The neighboring provinces, mainly Quebec, produces its electricity using hydro power, which is a lot better from an emission stand point than anything else.

No, that is an incorrect assumption.

Yes, hydro is better than coal for the planet. Yet, there is methane pollution (16 times worse than carbon dioxide) associated with hydro, not to mention the GHG cost of the concrete.

Taking into consideration our current knowledge of all factors, my assumption is that solar photo voltaic energy trumps hydro.

The Ontario government has been promising to close the coal plants for some time now. Their original plan was to have coal phased out by 2007, but that date kept getting pushed back. Basically they made the promise to close the plants but made no concrete plans to replace that power supply. They have been talking about nuclear for a while, but with most of our existing reactors reaching decommissioning soon and no new plants underway yet, it is going to be a while before their election promise is fulfilled. I'm not sure that it is going to be too strong of a platform plank for the next election coming this fall because they had 4 years to act on it and really not much has come of it. My thinking is that it may be a better idea to invest in clean coal technology and high-efficiency air scrubbers rather than waste money buying hugely overpriced electricity from neighbouring grids, or by building natural gas plants which release just as much CO2 and is much more valuable for use where air cleaning equipment is infeasible, such as in building heating.

@ jcwinnine

I totally agree with you, but the Quebec hydro dams are already up and running, so let's use them rather than try to replace them by photovoltaic panels, which in the Quebec winter (5-6 months where they get only 6 to 8 jours of sun) are really not that good.

Wait, where does the methane come from with hydro? Is it some form of algae growing in slower water? All I knew about was ecosystems changing because of the sudden change of water speed.
=== author's response follows ====
This is an important question you ask, as something of an urban myth has recently been created regarding methane emanating from hydroelectric facilities. You caught me in a good mood so I'm going to debunk it right now.

I feel that the "scientists" who report C02 emissions from tropical reservoirs as high and have allowed the media to generalize their limited findings to the upsuperset of all reservoirs on earth are either ignorant of basic geology and limnology or have "missed the forest for the trees". This mistake in logic is analogous to those who see a small area of contemporaneous cooling in the western Antarctic and call it proof that global warming is not happening.

Lets bring this home by example. Think Niagara Falls. The water which goes over the Niagara Falls or bypasses it through the hydroelectric turbines comes from the Great Lakes via river. The basic hydrology of this system has been largely been unaltered for a millennium; and; moreover, the "head drop" at the hydro facilities in Buffalo NY area ("head "is the difference in elevation between the water surface above the hydro plant to below it) was not created by a man-made dam. It is a natural head that the power facilities take advantage of. Summary point:- if no change in head is introduced, there is no man made methane source change.

Now think of a relatively smaller man-made reservoir in northern Canada, with a hydro facility discharging water from the dam face. The water in this reservoir is frozen for half the year, and so cold on the bottom for several additional months, that the anaerobic bacteria that make methane from organic material on the bottom of the reservoir are metabolizing at a very slow rate. Hence, logs left on the bottoms of such reservoirs may be harvested for lumber a century after they were sunken or innundated in place when the dam was constructed. Highly organic mud in such reservoirs often gets deeper every year and may accumulate to 5 or 10 meters over a century. Summary point:- deep, cold water reservoirs, regardless of how much organic material was left in as tree stumps or enter from upland erosion, are relatively trivial sources of methane per unit of time , This applies to the entire northern temperate zone; and, hence Canada ,is off the hook so to speak.

Lets look a the other extreme. We're on a mud filled, shallow, warm water reservoir in say the US state of Georgia or in the Amazonian basic of Brazil. It's slow flowing and never, ever freezes. Dead trees protrude from the bottom along the shoreline and rotting vegetation is prominent in winter. Bacteria are going to town on the dead organic matter that was flooded when the reservoir was built. This type of reservoir may be a large source of methane per unit of time. Over the long term, however, this is no worse and probably a lot less damaging than slashing and burning the wood that grew over the inundated area. The result is the same,: what is different because of hydroelectric facility construction is a temporary increase in the rate of C02 emission to the atmosphere in comparison to leaving the forest in place.

Final debunk:- regardless of where a reservoir is located, how deep it is, and how warm or cold it is, a large mass of leaves and woody debris enters the reservoir each year, settling to the bottom where it biodegrades along with organic matter delivered to the reservoir from from eroded soils in the uplands of the reservoir's watershed. These in-lake organic materials, will biodgrade regardless of their position on the landscape or in a lake. If watersheds are abused with clear cutting and poor agricultural practices like slash and burn, more organic matter will be sent on to a downstream reservoir instead of being tied up on the land surface. The rate of degradation, on a watershed hectare basis, of these reservoir deposited organic materials may be accelerated or decelerated as a result of this dislocation, as a function of reservoir depth and temperature, but ....now pay close attention here cause this is the big one...over time the more critical process to climate change is the clearing of the forest or the accelerated erosion of carbon holding soils, and not the existence of the man made reservoir per se.

Conclusion: besides looking at the result of thermal stratification and annual average reservoir temperature on methane emission rates, one must make comparisons from one reservoir to another on a per watershed-acre basis, as all organic material entering reservoirs is yielded from the upland watersheds. A watershed, on average, fixes a certain amount of carbon per hectare per year and emits a certain amount per year. Clear and burn a large portion of a given watershed and the per-hectare emissions of CO2 from it vastly overwhelms the average watershed rate of fixation. All that a new reservoir does is to slow movement of unlocked organic material to the sea or atmosphere: e.g. carbon is being converted to C02 in the reservoir instead of in river sediment or in the sea. The "Dead Zone" in the US Gulf of Mexico is a good illustration of that principle in action.

Re: hydro? coal? solar?

How about conservation? Canadians are the world's number 1 users of energy per capita. We need to address the demand side of the equation.

Reservoirs fill up with mud. The water will spill over the top of the dam and undermine the dam. In addition to not being able to generate power the agricultural practices will be changed drastically and the river will no longer be controllable and all the cities built next to the river on the existing flood plain will disappear. Meanwhile, our potentially most productive farm, the ocean, is being starved of its anadromous fish that feed the ocean and the fertile mud that drives the whole estuaryial food chain. This short term method of water storage and energy production is not only destroying the natural river ecosystem but the ocean's as well. The only sustainable method of farming is that which takes advantage of the natural fertilization of floodplains and estuaries caused by the flooding the dams stop. Interestingly enough this mud filled reservoir disaster scenario is the last story of Chinese mythology.