“You know that it is a tradition in the tunnel boring industry to name the machine after woman,” British Columbia’s Premier, Christy Clark, began. “We are here today to christen this machine Alice, after Alice Wilson who was the very first woman they ever hired in the Geological Survey of Canada.” Once the tunnel it bores is operational, Metro Vancouver will have Canada’s longest transit system.
On February 28, 2014, BC Hydro filed an application to the BC Utilities Commission to increase the nameplate capacity limit under Net Metering from 50 to 100 kW.
There are presently around 250 rooftop solar installations, generating around 2.1 MW, in the province.
There have been 150,000 visits to the Global Forest Watch website since it went online Thursday and for good reason. The interactive map is an an online forest monitoring system, created by the World Resources Institute and more than 40 partners, that allows you to examine changes in the forest cover anywhere in the World. They drew upon many databases, including Google Maps , data from the University of Maryland and satellite imagery. Global Forest Watch has already shown that the World lost 2.3 million kilometres of tree covering between 2000 and 2012. My concerns were more specific, I wanted to know if the forests in Canada and the US are presently emitting, or storing, carbon.
“We don’t have that data yet,” said Forests Communication Officer James Anderson, who then proceeded to show me some of the data the site does have.
Business as usual is no longer a viable option for the fossil fuel industry. At the present rate of consumption, the world is heading towards a 6°C rise in global temperatures. Fossil fuel companies are exposing their investors to financial and climate risk. These were among the many topics discussed as Mark Campanale, of the London-based Carbon Tracker Initiative, explained how we should be preparing for the carbon bubble.
Continue reading Preparing for the Carbon BubbleAccording to Dave Egles’ study, the Potential for Solar Power in British Columbia: 2007 to 2025, BC’s climate is much more amenable to solar than either Germany’s or Japan’s. The average production of a PV solar array in Kamloops, for example, is 1160 kWh/kW of PV installed. Even Vancouver (1009) has much more solar potential than Tokyo (885) or Berlin (only 848). One of our readers has provided more recent data that shows the last two figures are probably too low (see comments, below), but it is obvious BC has a great deal of untapped potential.
