aka. Seshpenguin
title: A breakdown of Ontario’s Energy Generation, and why we haven’t had a smog alert since 2014. author: Seshan Ravikumar type: post date: 2019-09-22T14:03:47+00:00 url: /2019/09/22/a-breakdown-of-ontarios-energy-generation-and-why-we-havent-had-a-smog-alert-since-2014/ classic-editor-remember:
Considering that I was born in (and still live in) Ontario, I’ve always been interested in the various services, infrastructure, etc, that keep our province ticking. In particular, Ontario’s energy generation is actually quite nice.
If you take a look at the page I embedded above, you’ll be able to see a live breakdown of where Ontario’s energy is being produced from.
If you want an alternate website, with graphs of each individual generating station, see this web page: http://webroots.ca/static/ontarioelectricity/ontarioelectricity.html
If you take a look at the percentages, you’ll notice that it’ll be anywhere from 85-90% clean energy! Now, it’s important to note that I say clean energy, not renewable, since the largest percentage is Nuclear. Thankfully though, Nuclear is a great option with the ongoing climate crisis. It’s not renewable, but doesn’t produce any greenhouse gases, and so it’s a good backbone power supply while we migrate towards a truly renewable grid.
One nice statistic I heard recently on Newstalk 1010 recently was that since 2014, Toronto hasn’t had a smog warning. This was compared to sometime in 2004/2005 where there was a smog warning for over 40 consecutive days. Unsurprisingly, 2014 was also the year the last coal-fired power plant closed.
So there you go, Ontario has some pretty good energy generation (though we may not be nearly at British Columbia levels, they have close to 95% renewable!). We are seeing real tangible benefits to investing in the electrical grid, which is always exciting.