Unlike the UK (which mothballed and eventually tore down its coal power stations) there is still a whole bunch of coal power online in Canada.

Lingan Generating Station would be a typical example. Big thermal power station, built to burn local coal, realistically the transition for them is to non-coal thermal power, burning LNG or Oil, or trees or whatever else can be set on fire. If they burned trash (which isn't really a practical conversion, but it's a hypothetical) we could argue that's renewable because it's not like there won't be trash, but otherwise this is just never going to be a renewable power source.

Canada is a huge place, so I don't doubt that none those coal stations are near you (unless, I suppose, you literally live next to Lingan or a similar plant but just aren't very observant) but most of us aren't self-sufficient and so we do need to pay attention to the consequences far from us.

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llm_nerd 6 hours ago | parent [-]

>there is still a whole bunch of coal power online in Canada.

Ontario, Quebec, BC and Alberta, the four largest provinces by population and a heady percentage of the land area, have zero coal power generation facilities.

Ontario is mostly nuclear supported by hydro, with an absolute fallback of natural gas. Quebec is overwhelmingly hydro + wind. BC is mostly hydro. Alberta is mostly non-renewables like natural gas, but phased out its last coal plants.

If someone is in Canada, odds are extremely high that there is no coal plant anywhere in their jurisdiction. I also wouldn't say that there is a whole bunch of coal power online -- they're an extreme exception now.

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tialaramex 5 hours ago | parent [-]

To me "a bunch" is when it'd be tedious to list them. For a few years the UK had few enough that you could list their names, then gradually four, three, two, one, none. Canada as a whole isn't in that place yet, though it doesn't have plans to build more of these plants and they will gradually reach end of life or transition to burning something else.

Coal isn't one of the "convenient" fossil fuels where you might choose to run electrical generation off this fuel rather than figure out how to deliver electricity to a remote site, coal is bulky and annoying. Amundsen Scott (the permanent base at the South Pole, IMO definition of remote) runs on JP-8 (ie basically kerosene, jet fuel), some places use gasoline or LNG. I don't expect hold outs in terms of practicality for coal, it's just about political will.

	▲	llm_nerd 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		"For a few years the UK had few enough that you could list their names, then gradually four, three, two, one, none" Sure, it's embarrassing that we still have any coal plants. But really, there are only eight small units remaining, located in the provinces of Nova Scotia (4), New Brunswick (1), and Saskatchewan (3). Every other jurisdiction abolished them. Maybe small nuclear will be the solution for these holdouts. The fact that Alberta held onto coal for so long, and never built a nuclear plant, was outrageous.