Excerpt:
Not long ago Prime Minister Harper was in Estevan, Saskatchewan touring the Boundary Dam Power Plant. This is the facility that will be the recipient of Federal funding to refurbish a 100 MW unit to sequester carbon dioxide. The cost of doing this will be 1.4 billion dollars. The finished unit will be reduced in useable output to 60 MW. Presumably the other 40 MW will be used to extract the carbon dioxide.
This raises some troubling questions. We still need all 100 MW, not just the 60 MW that will be left. If this formula holds in the construction of new power plants and all the information I have says it will, this means for every 100 units of electricity we need in the future, we will need to build 166 units of production. This means an increase of capital costs of 66%. It will also mean that our fuel consumption (and by extrapolation, our operating and maintenance costs) will increase by 66% too.
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