Microgrids! Canada Did It! Why Not Anderson?

 I suggested this for Anderson way back in Cutting Carbon - Modest Proposals. No one has read that post.  Crazy idea, right? Unworkable? 

Then the other day I was reading Ten Years after Disaster, Lac-Mégantic Is a Model for a Greener Future. Someone has been viewing the blog from Lac-Mégantic, so I started reading, and this is waht I found:

On July 5, 2013, a train hauling seventy-two tankers of crude oil from North Dakota to New Brunswick stopped for the night in Nantes, Quebec. The engineer followed standard practice by parking downhill—twelve kilometres from Lac-Mégantic, a town in the southeastern part of the province—and activating the hand brakes and air brakes, before calling the rail traffic controller to discuss a mechanical issue that had come up throughout the trip: the lead locomotive’s smokestack was giving out excessive smoke. They expected the issue to settle and planned to check in the next morning, but after the engineer left, a 911 call reported a fire on board. Firefighters on the scene turned off the train’s electrical breakers, cutting the air supply from the compressor to the air brakes, even after the fire was out. Just before 1 a.m., the train started rolling downhill, speeding up to over 100 kilometres per hour and heading straight for Lac-Mégantic. At 1:15, the train derailed and detonated. The blast vaporized most of the town’s centre, killing forty-seven people.

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There are twenty-two communities in Quebec—mainly Indigenous ones in the northern region of the province—that can’t be connected to the main hydro-powered grid and instead use diesel generators. These communities produce greenhouse gas emissions disproportionate to their populations, putting pressure on Hydro-Québec to provide wind- and solar-powered alternatives. “Solutions need to be slightly different in the North. We often think, okay, if we have twenty-four hours of sunshine a day for six months and can significantly reduce diesel consumption during that time, those are savings for Hydro that also reduce GHGs,” says Patrick Martineau, one of Hydro-Québec’s engineers. “But then there are periods without much sun at all.” Martineau has spent the past five years working with Lac-Mégantic to build the town a microgrid independent of the wider provincial network, one that can also be used as a prototype elsewhere. “The project was a real-life validation of the technology developed in our research lab,” he says. “Now we are seeing what works and can be deployed more easily into more isolated communities.”

Inaugurated on July 6, 2021, eight years after the railway accident, the microgrid is the first of its kind in the province. It includes 2,200 solar panels installed on the roofs of downtown buildings and connected to thirty residential, commercial, and municipal buildings—with enough battery storage to power one average Canadian household for about three weeks.

So, not impractical, or unheard of, but will Indian try to go forward or stay living in the past?

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