60 Replies to “Keystone Kop”

  1. I am sure if you contacted the people in the community, they would say solar power is their #1 priority.

  2. Solar power in a northern community? The only time it makes sense is when it’s cost prohibitive to hook up to the grid. Even then there’s better options. Did someone forget to look at a globe?

  3. “If you are a person looking to start a business in the solar industry or even get your home switched over to solar, the programs are almost non-existent for that,” Cardinal said from her home in Kikino, Alta. “Whereas if you’re looking to start a business in the oil industry, they pretty much hold your hand through the whole process and funding is readily available.”
    These myths need to be challenged.

  6. Solar at 60 degrees North. Talk about stupidity. When you need power in the winter there ain’t no sun. Idiot, idiot, idiot!

  7. Great idea. I wonder how much daylight there is in the winter time, and for the fews hours of sunlight that they do get, do you think the locals are going to bother themselves to shovel the snow off the panels? Look at the snow build up on the roofs in the photo.

  8. I wonder how dear old Tom actually got to Fort Chip? By bike, or canoe? Because I’m sure he did not fly in on his corporate jet!

  9. A boondoggle no doubt; a quick look shows that for about 1/4 to 1/3 of the year there is less than 8 hours of daylight which isn’t exactly a lot, and ignores the 9 months of snow that is going to reduce available daylight and/or heat needed to keep snow off the panels.
    Nothing against Canada, but when it comes to solar, northern Alberta isn’t exactly Arizona.

  10. Steyer can piss away as much of HIS OWN money on this stupidity as he wants, just so long as the Canadian taxpayer doesn’t get sucked into this scheme.
    On the “bright” side, in Summer the sun shines 23 hours a day, so all they need are storage batteries to save the power for six months.
    That should be no problem.
    btw: “Steyer wondered aloud if the store sold beads.” Has there EVER been a more racist statement by any living or dead human being or extraterrestrial..huh?!
    As I’m 1/17th Indian,(or is it “Injun”?) I demand an apology,or better yet,….money.

  12. Couldn’t help notice the LGBT tab at the Climate Progress site. Not to sound like a bigot, but one can only ascertain the “climate” they are working towards has nothing to do with weather and all to do with social change.
    If it only costs Steyer his billions to prove that he also knows how to throw money away, than have at er. Burning trees in the north for energy makes more sense.

  13. how do you get to 1/17, don’t genetics have to be in even numbers at least in the denominator, 1/2,1/4, 1/8 , 1/16 or 1/2 and 1/4 makes 3/8

  14. Not sure if anybody noticed, but the anti-Keystone march in Washington this weekend included Idle No More.

  15. Fine by me, if first nations are opposed to oil and gas I’m sure they would hate to receive anymore money that is produced from it. Traditional native living doesn’t require any oil and gas anyhow.

  16. wonder who paid the freight for that one .?
    why does dirtyoil sands tweet have CBC input.?
    something really wrong with the motherfukcorp

  17. Umm Fort Chipewyan is over 200 km from Fort Mac Murray. The natives can’t fish or hunt because of the tar sands? I call BS on that one. Then again, facts never matter anyway to the overlord wannabees.
    Solar power? As yes, the African model for development – in the Arctic. After all that’s going so well there as long as you don’t mind the lights and the fridge not being on at the same time.

  18. Beadwork is still done by natives. What Steyer, the calculating fool, said, is not racist.

  20. Yes, of course they do.I was merely trolling for the politically correct to be offended at my use of “Injun”, which all my construction friends who were full status Indians used to refer to themselves as,as in,” we Injuns are going for coffee”,etc.
    My family tree includes an Indian person six generations back, so I have no idea what my percentage is.
    Chutz, if the right (wrong) person says it, it’s racist in somebody’s view. Say, for instance,Ezra Levant had made the remark….there’d be “occupiers” all over Sun TV studios.

  21. When I was in Fort Chip a few months ago the biggest environmental concern was the destruction of the delta by the WAC Bennett dam in BC. Not enough silt coming down the mighty Peace. I checked out their new hospital which was built in part with oilsands money and was struck by how busy all the healthcare workers were – at looking busy. Beautiful facility but no patients. Wonderful people though and some great fur coats available via the local trapping industry.

  22. Ft Chip is off-grid. Electricity is provided by diesel powered generators. For most off-grid communities, solar is cost competitive with diesel fuel. Solar can provide a substantial amount of power for half the year, thus reducing the amount of diesel fuel used.
    Smart people don’t reject something just because it can’t be used all year. Boats and hockey skates are two examples.

  24. RCAF should have forced his plane down into Yellowknife. Then the Buffalo Air boys could take over and fly him into some lake ‘way back’. After a month go in and see if his attitude has changed. Oh, I forgot, leave some panels for him at the lake.

  25. I also wonder how useful these things are in the middle of December…
    Posted by: Allan S
    How useful is your power boat in December? Why would you own one if you couldn’t use it all year?

  26. The indians will clear the snow off those solar panels, take them down and sell them to global warmists who will love the deal. It won’t be reported by the CBC.

  27. Anybody know what companies this billionaire Tom Steyer owns?
    I’d like to boycott whatever he is invested in….anybody with me on that idea?

  28. I think the folks in Fort Chip have figured out where the money for protesting comes from. I wonder what they were cooking up. Steyer is truly dangerous and I think unscrupulous in pursuing his bizarre agenda.

  29. LAS, I knew you had to weigh in with your stupidity on this one. My power boat will work just fine of the Belize coast in mid December. No, panels do not make good ecomonic sense up there, as you need to keep the storage cells warm in the winter (which lasts about 8 months up there) so the damn things don’t freeze, and if they doo calf you need to “recycle” them, capeach?

  30. You obviously don’t know how off-grid solar in combination with diesel powered generation works, do you… capiche?

  31. I’m in favour. Every “First Nation” that objects to pipelines and resource development should be given the opportunity to sole-source their energy exclusively from the wind and the sun.

  32. And you don’t obviously know that ATCO isn’t going to be shutting down their generating plant simply because someone decided to install 44 solar panels on the roof of a 12 bed 8.6 million dollar seniors centre. In fact their generating capacity is due to almost double by the year 2020. BTW the Dene in Fort Chip do quite well because of the oil sands, at least those who like to work.

  33. LindaL is 100% correct. The main purpose of Steyer’s trip is to sign up the Band to act as his partners for opposing local oil sands development. Solar power in a small northern Canadian community makes no sense except as a symbolic gesture.

  34. he should find out soon what treacherous negotiators these guys are.
    couldn’t wish it on a better person

  35. the peace river empties into the Slave river downstream of the lake . does silt flow backwards up there.
    do you think living on a radioactive lake with a uranium mine and ingesting about 3 times the national average in booze might have anything to do with their situation?

  36. cal2 “the peace river empties into the Slave river downstream of the lake . does silt flow backwards up there.”
    I actually had to look it up some time ago. The Peace overflows and floods to Lake Claire but I don’t think it floods as far as Fort Chip. Because the Indians whined of low water from the first Peace dam, the government built a weir to imitate the annual flood. Then the Indians whined about the flood and they took out the weir. Now they are whining about low water again. Time for a new weir.

  37. Of course they wouldn’t shut down the diesel generators with solar on line. You really don’t understand how remote community generating systems work, do you? Solar and diesel co-gen systems are used in many remote communities, it saves them money. I wouldn’t expect ignorant people to understand that.
    The cost of education is small compared with the demonstrated cost of ignorance.

  39. north of 60
    How does having a second and redundant generating system save money? I must have missed that day at school. I do know that capital cost is the biggest expense in power generation and doubling or tripling that cost isn’t going to save anyone money.

  40. Some people obviously wouldn’t understand how adding solar power means the generators burn less fuel. They know what they feel and don’t want their preconceived notions confused with inconvenient facts. That’s OK if they don’t understand it, since it doesn’t concern them and their opinion is irrelevant to the engineers who make the decisions. ATCO uses diesel plus solar in many of their off-grid communities. They sell power from any source.

  41. LAS, oh I may have an inkling, seeing as I’v helped design 1 or 2 for ppl who wish to stay off line completely down here. Most recently I gave some pointers to a restaurant owner who has some one designing a off line system, and my advise pissed off the engineer this fella had hired and now fired:-))) LAS, you really should quit judging others by your own incompetence!

  42. IF that was true, then you would know the difference between isolated off-grid PV systems with battery storage, and PV systems that are tied to a local community distribution system, and therefore wouldn’t be demonstrating so much ignorance. I live and work in isolated northern communities in Alaska and Canada, out here the opinions of southern ‘experts’ are ignored as amusing and insignificant.
    you have a nice day now.

  43. Tom Steyer is using Ft. Chipeweyan residents as props for his latest scam to add to his already vast fortune. He is as disgusting as Warren Buffett and all the other mega rich liars who pretend to agree with the liberal agenda, when they are actually not even a dime’s worth of different from George Soros. They are interested in nothing but the acquisition of even greater wealth for themselves, regardless of the cost to the societies they prey upon.

  44. Actually cal2 cancer rates were not higher by any statistically significant amount at Fort Chip. Thats why the chief wants the study repeated.

  45. Most northern people live off southern tax money. Either directly, or indirectly. I doubt if saving money is a primary concern.

  46. The communities in Canada’s territories exist at taxpayer expense primarily to maintain Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. It’s been that way since the beginning.

  47. Fort Chip is also the gateway to Wood Buffalo National Park and in that park (Fort Chip is on the fringe) lies the largest inland delta in the world. I was referring to the delta not Fort Chip when I said that the silt from the Peace River was missing. When you are up there you can read all kinds of park signs about the shrinking delta because of the dam in BC.

  48. Carcinogenic substances have been continually leached into the Athabasca river for tens of thousands of years, long before the first immigrants. The amount added by the oilsands mining is insignificant.
    There are uranium deposits and abandoned uranium mines on Lake Athabaska. When the mines were active the people of Ft Chip worked there.
    Residents of Ft Chip have always been sick; for as long as people can remember. Both federal and provincial governments have offered to move them to a better location, but they refuse to move.
    There’s only so much that the governments can be expected to do.

  50. So why was Mr. Steyer there? Certainly not for the reasons suggested by CBC News.
    I think the technical concerns raised above about solar energy are persuasive and demonstrative.
    As it happens, I have a bit of experience (in the nineties; and in a basically capitalistic environment) with radically experimental solar/load-shifted electric (16-hour daily load control) domestic hot water heating design here in deepest southwestern Ontario. The solar resource is insufficient even in these parts to make such configurations viably commercially competitive (versus conventional natural gas alternatives), even if the systems involved were reliable in terms of cost and performance, even in warm years and even under the lower (centrally-generated) electricity rates and higher natural gas rates prevailing at the time.
    So, it seems highly doubtful to me that combined solar-electric/highly-distributed small-scale diesel generation has any chance in Fort Chipewyan. It’s true, of course, that solar applications might well reduce the need for diesel generation (which, on the basis of my experience here in Ontario, is heavily subsidized by the provincial generating authority’s ratepayers in favour of First Nations), but the present value of such net future savings would need to be evaluated against the installed cost of such solar applications today. Such an evaluation doesn’t seem very likely to me to end well, and I’m guessing that Mr. Steyer wasn’t there to say that he was prepared to make up the difference himself, despite his reward of the beaded mocassins…
    Given the above, of the two possible remaining reasons that he was there, a “victory lap” re: Keystone XL was belied by his reported commentary in the article (which generally trended strongly toward “finding out more”). It’s impossible to read these things at all, but I’m guessing he feels he’s got a few, you know, “strategic problems”, to wit:
    – Mr. Steyer is feeling his back, considering that he had made, er, no previous effort to actually familiarize himself with “the situation”, whatever that is, given his penchant for shooting his mouth off on the subject;
    – the Neil Young tour back in January, which included the Chief of Fort Chipewyan, wasn’t, er, the resounding success, in terms of public opinion in either country (particularly the USA) that Mr. Steyer had hoped; and
    – the Washington Post editorial board endorsed Keystone XL last week, if in a somewhat clumsily-worded (IMO), if no less Obama-critical editorial, which basically said that the opponents of KXL should put up or shut up on climate change, which I’m guessing Mr. Steyer won’t do, even for a pair of beaded mocassins…
    IMHOO, I don’t think it helped him much, really, to show up in Fort Chip looking like Warren Buffett, or to do a fly-by on the supposed environmental issues…

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