Big stack attack in the Portlands

A third stack arose at the Portlands Energy Centre, bigger than the first two, and a base for the fourth has already been constructed. While the above ground structure is impressive, the amount of underground construction shown in photos on the Ontario Power Authority website is equally impressive.

Putting on my Made In Canada hat though, I wonder why the stacks had to be brought in from Thailand. Is our manufacturing technology that inefficient, or that incapable that we could not produce this in-house? Sad

Still not turning

Drove by the CNE windmill twice today. Still not turning out windpower. Oh, wait, it does look like one of the blades moved a bit.

How Many Lightbulbs Does It Take To Turn A Streetcar?

Every day, nearly empty (1 - 3 passenger in all) streetcars rumble down Queen Street East, obviously wasting huge amounts of energy. Lets assume that these light loads make up 8 hours each and every day, not unreasonable at all considering there are only the two rush hours periods where the cars are full. 8 hours, at an average of a car every 12 minutes, is 40 runs. Huge cars with nobody in them. Each articulated streetcar weighs about 40 tons. It takes a lot of power to move those behemoths along, with starting and stopping every few hundred metres. These Articulated Light Rail Vehicles have 4 65 kilowatt motors in them, 250 kilowatts in all. Running for an hour, that is 250 kilowatt hours. Since it takes about 15 minutes to travel from the Victoria Park Loop to Kingston Road where the cars start getting fuller, that part of their trip uses up 60 kilowatt hour of electricity. 40 runs consume a whopping 2400 kilowatt hours a day. Times 365 days in a year, a total of 880 megawatts hours.

We are constantly being told that "Every Kilowatt Counts". The Ontario Power Authority claims that it's much ballyhooed Compact Fluorescent Lights program saved 250 megawatt hours per year throughout the whole province. Meanwhile, the TTC manages to piddle away more than that running empty streetcars on Queen East. Add in the rest of Queen, St Clair, Duffer in and the rest, it takes a staggering amount of coal generated electricity to move a handful of people a few kilometres. Yet our million dollar salaried state run electricity monopoly keeps on raving about compact fluorescents. What part of that makes sense.?

Fine print: These calculations are based on information from the TTC, transit related and OPA websites. More accurate information might change a few decimal places in these calculations. Someone correct me if I am calculator or fact checking challenged.

Toronto Sun agrees on Power To The People

Rob Granatstein of the Sun seems to agree on the need for a power plant in our back yard, despite, as he quotes, Councillor Paula Fletcher "detesting" it. As he points out, the massive new condos bring massive air conditioning demads, and the few power lines into the city are already highly loaded.

Rob said it better, but I said Power To The People first.

Turn turn turn turn

It was a great song, but obviosuly not one appreciated by the CNE windmill. Wasn't turning yesterday, wasn't turning when I drove by twice today.

If a tree falls

Yesterday a huge-ish oak tree fell in ravine nearby, on top of a child's play house, narrowly missing a house and a car. Given the history of building in the area, it was probably about 60 years old. The remaining stump was rotten half way through. This tree's time was simply up. Soon another one will spring up from one of the acorns that the squirrels missed. The circle of life continues.

But in 2007 if a tree falls it is a BIG THING. The Toronto Tree Police are probably combing through their files. Who can be blamed for this tree's demise? Who authorized it to fall down? Can we prove it fell because of climate change? Can we fine someone to prop up the city's finances? Can we use this to justify hiring more Tree Police? How much carbon will be released when the tree decomposes? Where did Tarzan take the wood? If it gets recycled into firewood how much CO2 will be released? Who will pay for the carbon credits? Did Al Gore and David Suzuki feel the change in the Force and wince in pain?

Its just a tree. Probably should have been cut down years ago.

Climate on a clothesline

The Toronto papers have in recent weeks carried a number of letters and articles decrying the lack of clotheslines to reduce our collective carbon footprint. Writers want bylaws and covenants against clotheslines eliminated so that the "little woman" can hang her clothes up to dry rather than load the hydro grid, or turn gas into CO2. My mother hung her clothes on a line because we were too poor to afford the few alternatives that there were. We have come a long way baby. Most families, and singles for that matter spend, their days at "real" work, not with time to spend hanging clothes in the sunshine. And things don't dry that well in the dark of the night. Our 25 foot city lots don't have room for the double lines of old. And one wonders how the thousands moving into the condos that line the waterfront will hang their clothes? Many places don't have opening windows for Pete's sake. Maybe we can just ban high density urban living so that all will have room for clotheslines!

Clothes on a line weren't that unsightly, but then neither were a few rusty cars on the front lawn. Most of us would rather just not live this way any more.

Portlands Phoenix

The new 550 megawatt gas fired power plant in the Toronto Portlands is rising like a Phoenix from the ashes of the old coal fired Hearn Generating station. Generating approximately 750 times as much power as the flaky CNE windmill in a hurricane, it will power the rapidly rising wall of condos along the waterfront, the condoification of the lower Don area and then some. Despite opposition from the Breath Much? folk, which according to Now Magazine includes another Phoenix, former Mayor June Rowlands in the form of her daughter, Joyce Rowlands running as a Provincial Liberal candidate, the new power plant is getting taller by the day. The newer technology will still be dwarfed by the 215 metre high carcass of the Hearn station which pumped out 1200 megawatts in the 1960s.

The arguments against the plant seem spurious. Westerly winds will carry any exhaust out over the lake to dissipate. The growing city needs power. What better place to do that than this long time industrial site?

Low DefinitionTelevision

Obviously the cost of large scale outdoor pixel board LED displays has come down as more and more of the wall of billboards lining the Gardiner Expressway are sporting live video. Have the producers and their clients ever driven there? We see what appear to be made for television spots being played on low resolution screens, that are supposed to be absorbed by motorists whizzing by at 120 kph. Are they actually supposed to be able to read these ads? Even in rush hour, when traffic is at a standstill, these screens are a tiny portion of a person's field of view compared to the 42 inch plasma experience at home. And what is with the light blue text on beige backgrounds? Coming next to a highway near you - YouTube.

Windpowerless - again

Has anyone ever seen the wind turbine at the CNE actually working, in living memory? Driving by tonight, as probably every night for the last 2 months, the thing was again not turning, not lighting up the 200 homes it was touted to power. The flag on the Medieval Times building was blowing fairly straight out, so wind speed was about 10 - 15 knots. If you can't make power at that speed, then when can you? If that marvel of technology is supposed to be a portend of how wind power will change our lives, then freezing / sweltering and eating cold food in the dark looks like the best we can hope for. But wait, the coal fired plants are still burning, the nukes are still nuking, so those 200 homes can still cook, still heat and air-condition, still read the paper and most importantly, surf the web.

Canadian web hosting wilderness

I just cancelled an account at a Canadian web hosting company who shall be nameless, but rhymes with Microsoft's old SQL tool. I moved it to GoDaddy. One quarter the cost, GoDaddy measures their disk space in gigabytes, not megabytes, and trying to get dot net nuke going at the Canadian ISP was like waiting for climate change. Lost a potential client when they wondered why a demo was so slooooooooooooow. Moved another website to GoDaddy from another Canadian ISP whose on line financial out look looks scary. Been trying for 2 years to get proper support for DotNet 2.0 from these guys. If GoDaddy can run code behind securely, it surely cannot be that hard. But they are another whole sad story of a pioneering Canadian internet company that lost its way.

I would really love to keep my clients' website here - local providers pay local taxes, local ISPs will refer local developers, latency can be lower, DNS faster, support for .ca domains but there comes a limit. Just look where this blog is hosted.