Canadian Politics Today

- Not all types of generators can be 'fired up' when needed. Gas and hydro are very flexible, but Coal doesn't work that way. Coal is good for base-line generation, but its not good at ramping up or down depending on demand. So you can't keep coal plants in reserve. If that's all the grid has, you would need to build new gas plants

Agreed that things like legacy coal lack the flexibility for scaling their output, but remember that all plants have an operational lifetime and we are planning for the future and not suggesting immediate replacement. Ontario for example, is always criticized by the "conservatives" for shutting down coal. The facts they gloss over is that the shut down took a dozen years, and was in fact a creation of the Ernie Eves Progressive Conservative government. The "conservatives" love to blame the Liberals for shutting down the coal plants, but the promise to do so was theirs to begin with and it was the Liberals that delivered on their promise.

This phase out of might have been somewhat accelerated, but remember that all generating plants do come to an end of their operating life when maintaining them becomes far more costly than replacing them. Many of the legacy plants have other emission (mercury, lead, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, particulates, etc.) problems that need to be addressed as well. Maybe not all jurisdictions will be as aggressive as Ontario was (12 years to complete 100% replacement), but that doesn't mean they should ignore the target.