Jesse

Rest of the world PoV:
Don't care. It didnt change it, and unless you make constitutional changes that would actually mitigate the risk of it happening again, it doesn't matter.

Instead you showed that you cannot be trusted to not do this all again...

From the rest of the world PoV, the first time could have been a mistake. If you had impeached and removed him then, trust would have been fine.
If he ran again and lost, the loss would have been minor but still real.

Deviation from this will take extraordinary, sustained political will to retire non-depreciated assets, etc.

The challenges with these sorts of conversions along with the big industrials (even if the tech is ready the turnover is slow) leads me to my default assumption of a symmetric decarbonisation.
That is the GHG emmisions X years post peak will be about the same as X years pre-peak.

This is where I would like to see way more effort on building nuclear/geothermal in those same communities, especially where there is the grid access.
Getting them close to ready to start before closing the old facility would also help a lot with the disruption locally.

I would expect if someone was able to build that one the same site, there would be limited resistance to shutting down the coal plant as the capacity would be maintained (asside from a limited self destructive aspect)...

If you can get the gas turbines, the capex to do the retrofit, and the deliverability and storage for the fuel, yes this is better than coal.

Which is why it should happen even w/o policy if the firm capacity catches up. (Or the projected need drops).

Wouldn't they still need yet anouther 2.6GW for the datacenters then?
That's the hard part when behind the 8ball on capacity expansion already is it's really hard to get ahead enough to replace the problematic, but existing stuff.

Agreed that backfilling for that capacity and removing them should be the top priority.

The challenge is replacing the firm capacity in a timely manner before doing that...

It takes a *lot* less storage to map a NPP output to a diurnal and profile. Especially with a fleet and timed maintenance for shoulder season.
Then 'peaking' is really only needed for the excess needed on the most extreme demand days...

Even at 2x that, a ~8500 hr battery that doesn't need to be recharged is quite compelling.

And cycling as many times as physically possible, regardless of the reality...

That's the big issue. If the TIC is $50/MWh it's $5k/MW installed capacity, and that starts looking really ugly.

The problem here is that it's not $20/kWh for diurnal use, you need the whole system, and that would be $2000/kW, with 50% RTE...
The low utlization part goes along for the ride most of the time, maybe cycled a few times per year.

Module cost or TIC? It looks like $90k target per TEU module? That seems hard to include install as well...

This is very much a version of the 'default plan', just with coal instead of gas...

Actual drawdown on Dawn hub was 21TWh in two weeks... or ~63GW average.

Central forced air or hydronic systems, or gas fireplaces...

Replicating the functionality of Dawn hub would require more like 10MWht / household...
Or about 3/4 of a tonne of propane equivalent...

1MWht / house is probably a minimum safe amount to try to store our way out of peak heating.

So just that event, and a baseline that can cover ~0C w/o depleting storage (10C baseline is more realistic, but *greatly* increases storage requirments), would be ~300kWht per capita, or ~500kWht per home plus a similair total for non-residential.
But it also got cold again so maybe 2X that?

Something like 10 days of 20 GWt over baseline heating demand? That would be ~5TWh of heat storage needed...
Noting Dawn hub has ~80TWh of storage, but the baseline for withdraws is a lot lower, as it's meant to seasonally adjsut.

This peak works out pretty close if you assume 40 heating degrees (-22C) as an average pop weighted min.
The next part of that is what is the baseline heating capability before you need to draw into storage?
This event had a long, sustained cold (like a week+!). Not at that max, but elevated.

My model is ~100W/heating degree C/per capita, roughly evenly split residential and commercial. Industrial has a much smaller amount of weather responsiveness. Thats based on regressing gas data vs climate data and validating against any metrics I can find.

In Ontario? A tiny fraction as resistance heating...
Less than 10%, and probably more like 5% looking at power vs temp variation.

With a cold climate rating lower than the ASHRAE 50 year min...

Think also generation, collection, transport, sorting and contamination of aluminium hydroxide powders...