There's a lot to be said about energy. What is clean energy? What is renewable energy? What is sustainable energy? When we plan for a new energy production facility, how long is that plan for, and what happens after?
The bottom line is most of those questions are not relevant, because most of the time today we are still behind the curve. When the summer heat comes around, some places can't take the energy spikes. And this is with existing (polluting) energy production, so how will the system fare in five or ten years when there are a few hundred thousand more people in the province?
Today, we grow trees over the course of a decade, in order to burn them down as biomass in the course of a day. Obviously, that will not last for long, and there are no real good options in that scenario. There are many different ways of generating energy in Ontario, from water at Niagra Falls to nuclear power generation in Pickering. We also have wind turbines, but let's not dwell on those. All of our existing methods bring their value and their problems into the conversation. One of those problems is scale, in which we can't keep up with the growth of the population and consequent demand. Some strange form of the hotdog problem, in which hotdogs come in packs of 10 but hotdog buns are sold in packs of 8.
But what if we had a smaller scale solution, that can be implemented faster than a 5-year build of nuclear power plants, be safer than nuclear and won't require 5 decades to decommission at the end of its life? We need a solution with a smaller footprint and ecological benefits instead of larger scales, which end up being unprofitable and risky. The Green Power House is a good example of such device. For example, Bloordale Beach is a standing empty lot of around 114,000 sq ft, and is up for redevelopment. Dedicating about 14,000 of that lot to a closed-loop power generation system, to follow the example of the GPH, would allow clean energy and ecological benefits all around.
There are other solutions for energy reclamation, storage, and even transportation, which is a big part of the energy problems of the world today. Storing energy is a conundrum, which part of the reason why oil is such a big deal - it's a very stable and easy way to store energy and move it around. Generating energy from coal, burning biomass, and natural gas boils down to how we move conserved energy to a place we can use it to unleash power into the grid. All of those are old ways of thought, which need to change.
▶️ DTube
▶️ BTFS