Assignment #5: Final Data Report

 Wind Power is leading Canada’s Sustainability Efforts

For Canada to hit their ambitious net-zero emissions goal by 2050, Canada will need to execute on bringing online more and more renewable sources of power generation. Although Canada’s main source of electricity comes from hydro dams, which generates about 56% of the total power per year, the costs have risen enough to be a deterrent to continue building more dams. 

So far, Canada has deployed and captured power using ocean energy, geothermal energy, solar, wind energy and bioenergy. With Wind and Solar being the most dominant producing most of all the new renewable energy. Even though Solar and Wind have both seen a steady decrease in costs year by year from technological advancements, Wind Power has seen a much faster adoption rate. Wind turbines are now designed to last 20-25 years and benefit from the low maintenance costs and are easy to scale. The prairies being the most geographically abundant for gathering wind resources.

In this article: 

Quebec is relaunching a project to use wind to increase the value of existing hydro-dams. 

Wind and Solar’s main “Achilles heel” is that they don’t produce energy consistently. 

Even though Quebec has a power surplus, the fact that wind power has fallen considerably and building hydro-dams has inversely continued to rise has made the project much more valuable. This project will provide a working example for parts of Canada, including BC and Manitoba. 

The activity of pumping water back into the dam’s reservoir will make it act like a battery saving costs by only running “hydro electricity when it’s needed and using lower-cost forms of electricity when they are available” 

In this article: 

The news article by CBC for Saskatoon, covers how non-renewable combustible production of energy is being phased out in favor of renewables to help meet demand and fill the gap in Saskatchewan. The national regulator predicts that Wind power's prominence will increase by 15 times by 2040. 

The article ends with skeptical comments from a veteran member in the Saskatchewan wind power community on the prominence of wind power but acknowledges the importance for the change.  

In this article:

The article published by Canada Energy Regulatory shows key statistics about the capacity of Wind Power and describes the technological advancements and the adoption of Wind power in Canada. Issues of wind power such as intermittency, slowed adoption rate from lack of increasing electricity demand and environmental concerns are described and addressed as well. 

Wind power is rapidly increasing because of how cost-effective and the ease of scalability at generating power. However, even with it’s intermittency issues and the lack of high capacity technology to store the surplus electricity. Utilizing excess wind power to pump water back into the dams reservoir seems to be one of the most effective solutions for the time-being. 

Canada Energy Regulator forecasts expect wind power generation to double by 2040 producing a third of Canada’s power generation.