Dan Wrightman

@BrianFox636998 @ONcleanair Energy developers lease farmland for electricity production, they have no interest in niche farming.

@dwrightman @ONcleanair Unless you do it this way... 🤓 x.com/NXT4EU/status/…

Ontario uses 600,000 acres to grow corn for ethanol. 🌽 100 acres → powers 71 gas cars ☀️ 100 acres of solar → powers 4,330 EVs Less than 2% of ethanol land could power the same vehicles with clean electricity. Time to grow power, not fuel: shorturl.at/rafeE #onpoli

Joe St. Julian, the president of Nuclear at AtkinsRéalis make a big CANDU #Nuclear LCOE claim. He said CANDU has the lowest LCOE of any Nuclear plant. If the 35 year retube could go the way of heat exchange replacements in PWRs, they're on a winner. decouple.media/p/canadas-most…

@BobLasthunt @Dr_Keefer Site C has a capacity factor of only 53% while nuclear should be above 80%, which makes the SMR's at Darlington cheaper than site C.

@Dr_Keefer Except Ontario is hoping to build 300 MW SMRs for $5 billion. Cascade's 900 MW gas turbine generation plant cost $1.5 billion and only took 2 years to build. Additional context Site C dam, 1100 MW, cost $16 billion

The SMR craze reflects a fundamental category error & combined cycle gas turbine envy. It tries to map the attributes of a CCGT plant onto nuclear, where the underlying cost structure & physical infrastructure is fundamentally different. A CCGT plant is essentially a jet engine bolted to a heat recovery steam generator and a smaller steam turbine. The critical point is where the complexity sits. The gas turbine, which is the expensive & technically demanding component, is built in a factory, hot functionally tested & shipped to site as a finished machine. Construction on site is largely installation, foundations, piping, electrical connection, using conventional materials & repeatable processes. That architecture shifts risk into manufacturing & compresses timelines. Rather than building the hardest part on site you are simply installing it in 24-36 months. Nuclear does not behave this way. It can incorporate modular components, but the NSSS is only 25-40% of cost. The dominant cost drivers sit elsewhere. Civil works, excavation, basemat, containment, seismic qualification, remain site specific & labour intensive. Nuclear grade quality assurance, documentation, & inspection add another layer of fixed overhead. Safety systems with redundancy and independence are function driven, not size driven, so they do not shrink proportionally with output. The nuclear steam supply system is not analogous to the gas turbine in a CCGT. It is not a fully integrated, factory proven machine that arrives ready to run. The plant comes together on site, under regulatory oversight, with integration, testing & certification happening during construction & commissioning. This is why economies of scale are so strong in nuclear. Many of the costs do not scale linearly with power. When you reduce reactor size, you reduce output & revenue, while a large share of the cost base remains. Studies show that smaller reactors actually increase the relative share of on site construction because the civil works do not shrink in proportion to capacity. The SMR thesis assumes nuclear can transition from a project to a product, capturing the modular, factory built economics of gas plants. The constraint is that the parts of nuclear that dominate cost remain stubbornly project based. None of this explains why the comparison is made in the first place. CCGTs are extraordinarily compelling. They are marvels of thermally efficiency, capital light, fast to deploy & supported by a global supply chain of standardized components. They are the most successful large scale power plants of the past decades. It is natural that nuclear developers would look at that model & attempt to emulate it but in so doing they are committing a grave category error, an error that sets the western nuclear industry up for decade(s) of disappointment. Some SMRs will get built but they will not replicate the CCGT promise. They will be mini versions of large reactors with mini revenues to pay off the significant inherent costs of nuclear.

@messputt @Ember421 @MikePMoffatt The same downtown TO supply issues existed 2 decades ago & Hydro One's plan than was a 3rd line but "environmental" organizations like the OCAA were against more clean nuclear power and for more dirty gas powered CHP plants theglobeandmail.com/news/national/…

@dwrightman @Ember421 @MikePMoffatt Two decades ago, there was a driving range at Spadina Ave. Liberty Village was a post-industrial wasteland. Why would anyone build a new transmission line into a shrinking downtown?

Availability of electricity, IMO, is by far the most underrated issue when it comes to densification. Add heat pumps, EV chargers, etc. and there's a massive last-mile problem that is mostly ignored.

The incredible undeveloped Chaudiere Falls in Ottawa circa 1870. "Chaudière Falls, Ottawa," 1870, Musée McCord Stewart Museum, William Notman (1826-1891) Ottawa200

@messputt @Ember421 @MikePMoffatt The third transmission line should've been built 2 decades but the Portlands gas plant was built instead. Why would environmental groups and government prefer local dirty gas generation over more clean nuclear/hydro electricity from the grid?

@Ember421 @MikePMoffatt Scheduled to be operational in 2037.

@JC47053522 @ErikLindy @alex_avoigt Sure, 14.9 cents/kWh for new nuclear in Darlington Ontario is expensive but it's alot cheaper than the projected cost of offshore wind in Nova Scotia.

@ErikLindy @alex_avoigt You are 100% correct , for nuclear power plants that were built 50 years ago . Just look at the cost of Nuclear power plants under construction in the west today . They will not be providing cheap electricity any time soon !

For anyone who still hasn't grasped why nuclear power plants are the stupidest idea imaginable: New nuclear power plants cost up to 49 cents per kilowatt-hour in Europe. Solar power costs between 3 and 6 cents. Thats 16 times more expensive electricity For those now dreaming of small power plants (SMR): SMRs produce five to 30 times more nuclear waste than large reactors, and nuclear waste is a massive cost driver. Professor Dr. Lesch calls the idea of ​​using old nuclear waste as fuel "a wonderful fairy tale that has yet to come true anywhere in the world." For all now claiming storage is no cost driver take a look what Germany had to pay and all other countries with nuclear energy generation must pay for decommissioning and storing nuclear facilities and waste in the future:

The digging is done. Now we build up. 🏗️ At Darlington, we've completed excavation across three shafts supporting our first SMR unit and shared services. Two will support the tunnel boring machine that will build the deep water intake for all four of our planned SMRs. The third will provide the foundation for the Western world's first grid-scale SMR. Milestone by milestone, we're building the new clean energy generation that will power our economy. Learn more: bit.ly/4lBKt7T

@StevenGreenaway @kinsellawarren Expanding MAID to mental illness and youth as is planned within the next year is nihilistic madness.

@kinsellawarren No it’s not. It’s overreach by government advocated by those who regularly object to government overreach. Why can’t people just mind their own business?

This is a good decision.

Investigation underway after blade breaks off Wolfe Island turbine during 'high wind' cbc.ca/news/canada/ot…

Ontario is another jurisdiction that went heavily nuclear (55-60%) of all electricity on top of 20-24% hydro. Canada has its own variation of nuclear reactors using heavy water as a moderator. All of this was developed two generations ago, but Ontario is now reviving nuclear development. After regrettable sidetrack into wind - which is singularly inappropriate for Ontario.

@ONcleanair OCAA can't complain about the Portlands gas plant. They publically pushed the province hard to build it in the first place.

Ford’s waterfront destruction agenda: 🏗️ Mega spa ✈️ Airport expansion 🚗 Parking garages 🔥 More gas burning at Portlands Less public space. More pollution. Toronto can — & must — choose a cleaner path. #Toronto #ONpoli

@Cappy_Nate @CoopTory Despite getting 24% of its supply from hydro most of that hydro in Ontario is run of the river (especially the largest generators at Beck/Niagara Falls and Saunders/St. Lawrence. There is very little existing resevoir/storage in Ontario

@CoopTory Set solar aside. Solar isn't ideal in Canada. Wind is different. LCOE does include all lifetime costs, except storage. But as you mention 60%+ of Canada's grid is already Hydro, so storage is already free. In fact, 1MW of wind keeps 1MW of water in reservoir, solving drought.

We are going to have the same results as Germany if we do not get a handle on this. We need to keep our fossil fuel generation online until it can be replaced by nuclear. Wind and solar are not serious solutions.

@Cappy_Nate @CoopTory 1)New SMR nuclear in ON is forecast to be much cheaper than offshore wind in N.S. 2)the first SMR will be operating long before any offshore wind will in Canada 3)wind doesn't ramp when there's no fuel (wind) so peakers are needed 4)there's very little pumped hydro in Canada

@CoopTory Nuclear is the highest LCOE, wind is the second lowest. Nuclear is the slowest to build, wind is the second fastest. Nuclear doesn't ramp well, so you still need duplicate peakers. And we do have mature storage: Pumped Hydro. And Canada has 200GWh+ of potential.

@pmagn Read the bloody article before posting. Unit 4 was taken offline in July 2023. That's less than 3 years offline not ten.

Been off line 10yrs 👀🙄 don't u just love Nuclear ☢️ fourth unit at Darlington nuclear power plant in Ontario, Canada, has been reconnected to the grid at 100% power, ending the mammoth refurbishment project which began in 2016 world-nuclear-news.org/articles/darli…

Pickering Unit 8 had a good run. Not a surprise. Top 5 Ontario Nuclear Run Days • 1106 - Darlington 1 - 2021 • 894 - Pickering 7 - 1994 • 764 - Pickering 8 - 2026 • 730 - Pickering 4 - 2020 • 694 - Bruce 1 - 2020 #Pickering2075 #CANDU 🍁 #NuclearEnergy 🇨🇦

More millions gone with the wind. #onpoli …tenergyperspectivesblog.wordpress.com/2026/03/18/two…

I'm gonna be honest with you energy twitter - and I've already told the nuke bros - I used to be a big fan of feed in tarrifs for wind power. Back in 2015 when I ran for the NL NDP it was my central energy policy. I was looking at Germany with stars in my eyes. (1/x)

@CanadaGray @QBixbyReturns You can't place hydro & grid scale battery storage in downtown T.O. which means it needs to go elsewhere & any hydro from Quebec needs a way to transmit it downtown. This means a downtown transmission relief line is needed which Environmental Defence doesn't support.

@QBixbyReturns Solar, conservation, wind, Quebec hydro, battery and hydro storage.

The gas plant is the city’s largest single emitter of greenhouse gas emissions, and it is right in the middle of the new Portlands development: nationalobserver.com/2026/03/10/new… #onpoli #pollution