Shutting down Alberta coal plants will save money, lives

[Bar Sinister]

Of course there is. Don't you find it odd that Alberta is closing coal fired plants where we have abundant clean coal while Germany is still building coal plants and burn brown coal but emissions are not a problem there?

This article does not seem to support your claim.

The end of lignite coal for power in Germany | Environment | DW.COM | 27.10.2015

To quote the article"
The end of lignite coal for power in Germany

Germany's economics minister and energy companies have agreed on steps towards taking lignite-fired power plants offline. The plan is to help Germany reach its climate targets, but environmentalists say it's 'weak.'

Economics minister Sigmar Gabriel of the Social Democrats and energy companies RWE, Vattenfall and Mibrag have agreed that starting in October 2016, a capacity of 2.7 gigawatts of power output from lignite coal plants will be shifted into a power reserve in case of emergency.
The plants are to be turned off but maintained in running order in case of power shortages over the next four years. Eventually, the lignite-fired power plants will be taken off the grid entirely.


In return, the three power plant operators will receive around 230 million euros ($253 million) per year over a period of seven years to divide up among themselves.
For consumers, this means they will have to pay 0.05 euro cents more per kilowatt hour.
Meeting Germany's climate targets
The plan is supposed to help Germany reach its climate targets for 2020. These include reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40 percent below the levels of 1990.
"These steps are important ones for us to meet our climate targets and, at the same time, to ensure that there won't be any grave structural changes in the regions concerned," said Gabriel.
Gabriel had to scrap earlier plans facing stiff opposition

Originally, the idea had been to introduce a so-called "climate levy" for lignite plants. This was to achieve a reduction of CO2 emissions by 22 million tons.
But fearing job losses at power plants and mines, the utility companies, trade unions and some politicians from Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative CDU party opposed that idea.
The plan now agreed on will reduce Germany's CO2 emissions by 11 to 12.5 million tons in 2020, according to the environment ministry. Further emissions cuts will have to come from increased energy efficiency as well as combining heat and power.
In 2018, the emission cuts actually achieved will be subject to an evaluation.
Mixed reactions
Environmental activist group Germanwatch lauded the plan as "the first step towards ending lignite-fired power in Germany," but warned at the same time that the 2018 evaluation would be a key event to determine how serious Germany was about meeting its climate target.
Environmental organization Greenpeace said the plan was not good enough and pointed to the fact that it might violate EU regulations.
Infringement of EU guidelines?
The European Commission might share this view: According to a report in the daily 'Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung', the European Commission has concerns that the plans would provide special treatment for lignite power plants and thus violate EU guidelines.
But the German economics ministry said the plans had been discussed intensively with the Commission beforehand and that it was thus "confident" they would be approved by the Commission.
The power companies' respective executive boards have yet to give their assent to the measures. The German government is expected to agree to the draft law in November before it goes to parliament.

 

[Curious Cdn]

I think you misunderstood me. Ontario could have shut down the coal-fired plants and the generating capacity would have been more than sufficient to meet Ontario's current and near to mid-future needs without installing turbines all over the place. We sure don't need nearly as much generation for manufacturing anymore.


The other aspect is you still need backup generation for every MW of wind or solar generation which is most likely going to come from gas-fired plants. And at that rate, you might as well just have the gas plants running 24/7 and forgo the turbines and solar power.

They were able to do that in Ontario because the industrial dmand for electricity feel way off. This is not the recommended way to re-jig your generating capacity.