Deny Sullivan
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denysullivan.bsky.social
Deny Sullivan
@denysullivan.bsky.social
240 followers 230 following 340 posts
I make charts. Blogs @ deny.substack.com Halifax
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I know so harsh right off the bat. I do think the rail station area gives off the worst impression of the city
Reposted by Deny Sullivan
Reposted by Deny Sullivan
Of all the housing charts not made by MMI, this one is my favourite. It shows how, despite rhetoric, housing shortages aren't a global phenomenon, but they do seem to be an Anglo-American one.
So much of local politics is council and staff sanewashing very antisocial behaviour
Like before the HAF much of the peninsula was zoned for a maximum of a duplex, which couldn’t touch its neighbor, had to leave 2/3 of the lot empty and had to be set back from the street. What part of that was Halifax heritage?
Good piece. I would like to hear Frank Palermo’s take on what parts of Halifax’s heritage were protected by ER-1 zoning (which he defended during HAF)
God I hate to be that guy but the grid needs to run all the 8760 hours of the year, and for many of those we might not get enough wind and sun. This is why natural gas is a good fit with renewables. It’s less bad than coal and you can still turn it on and off
Building gas plants purely for peak today seems dubious. Unluckily for us we have coal plants that can be replaced by gas plants, and maybe in a couple decades those plants become peakers
And gas plants today would repalce coal plants, and run regularly. In the future they could be peakers, but by then as you say the infra building and depreciation would make them very cheap to simply turn on. That's my take
Right - a few things. LCOE (this measure) doesnt account for when you need the energy. Renewables definitely the cheapest option, but they are intermittent - not on demand (that's why I pointed to the + Storage option).
"But provided that methane emissions are well managed, it’s not as problematic in terms of planetary warming as coal or oil." It's telling that folks dont seem interested in figuring out how to prevent leaks, they rather the blanket statement
It’s way beyond my depth, but my understanding is that renewables + batteries — while way cheaper than before, might not be cheapest option (look at offshore wind range which exclude storage). Rarely used gas plants could still be useful decades from now for resiliency
Latest I see on the website is August?
I am - as I'm sure you are - shocked at our ability to ignore impending crises of all types
We have barely transitioned at all. We are a laggard, even in Canada. I look at the hate directed to NS Power and doubt that we could stomach the cost of going straight to Wind+Batteries, what's your route to zero?
Because it means we dont need to build as many grid scale batteries. You'll both get chances to write about NS Power, and I'll appreciate the same conviction in explaining why climate action is worth paying for
*Could* doing a lot of work here. Take a guess: is it better than coal or not? Is it exactly the same? What are the odds of that? What about the other harms of coal?

It's a complicated issue, but I'm convinced gas is better than coal - and in a crisis I'll take better than coal - would you?
Equivocating too soft, this is pure opposition to a 40% emissions reduction on a non intermittent electricity.
Always disappointing to see urgent calls for climate action - and then equivocating on natural gas, even as it has clearly cut emissions in other places and can work very well in a renewable buildout. We still burn COAL. Smells to me like the ideological crusade trumps the climate concern
One year since Mayor Andy Fillmore’s election. What has been accomplished?

-Useless debates about bike lanes 🚲
-Grovelling for Strong mayor powers ✊
-Nothing on enabling more housing 🏡