Where I’m at (Saskatchewan) everything is very flat. We have some hydro but all of the “economically viable” hydro resources have been tapped. I worked out the math once on doing pumped hydro storage and the best siting I came up with involved building a massive reservoir in the middle of one of the most beautiful provincial parks we have and putting the downstream low point 80km away.
There’s a really interesting nomenclature thing in Canada with respect to electricity. Every province (except Alberta) has a government-owned power company. If you want to tell whether or not a given province has good water resources for generating electricity you just need to look at the name of their power company: BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro… all good places for hydroelectricity. SaskPower? Not so much.
We have recently bought into the SMR idea and one of the questions I used to have was “why the hell didn’t we build nuclear 20 years ago here”. The problem, I understand now, is overall grid sizing. You don’t want to have a single power plant that provides more than about 10% of your grid capacity. In SK, our total generation capacity is around 3500MW; a conventional 1+GW reactor would have dramatically exceeded the 10% cutoff. Smaller 300MW reactors provide a much better fit for our grid.
There’s a really interesting nomenclature thing in Canada with respect to electricity. Every province (except Alberta) has a government-owned power company. If you want to tell whether or not a given province has good water resources for generating electricity you just need to look at the name of their power company: BC Hydro, Manitoba Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro… all good places for hydroelectricity. SaskPower? Not so much.
We have recently bought into the SMR idea and one of the questions I used to have was “why the hell didn’t we build nuclear 20 years ago here”. The problem, I understand now, is overall grid sizing. You don’t want to have a single power plant that provides more than about 10% of your grid capacity. In SK, our total generation capacity is around 3500MW; a conventional 1+GW reactor would have dramatically exceeded the 10% cutoff. Smaller 300MW reactors provide a much better fit for our grid.