I received an e-mail today from a guy in Waterloo, Ontario, who is on a hunger strike until the opposition federal Liberals or Conservative government publicly commit to passing Bill C-311, the Climate Change Accountability Act, which would commit Canada by law to meeting its international climate-change obligations. Dante Ryel says he has been fasting since March 3, and it may still be a few weeks before legislators vote on the private-member’s bill, which was introduced by NDPer Bruce Hyer.

Ryel told me he’s had trouble getting the media to pay attention to his hunger strike. So I’m posting this here to help him spread the word. He’s got a Facebook page where he’s trying to build up members — so far he’s at 855. He’s calling his activist group Starving for Change. You can see some of the YouTube videos he has posted here.

Hi, just a note: Tonight on TVOntario I take part in a panel that discusses the media’s role in telling the climate-change story and whether we’re getting it right or wrong. The five others on the panel are Climate blogger Joe Romm of Climate Progress, Quentin Chiotti of Pollution Probe, Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, Nature Magazine writer Nicola Jones, and Curtis Brainard of the Columbia Review of Journalism.

The one-hour discussion appears at 8 p.m. and again at 11 p.m. EST.

Tyler

I got my start in mainstream journalism as a technology and telecommunications reporter for the Globe and Mail, a beat I later took on at the Toronto Star and covered for six years before switching to energy. When I first started we were still using the term “information highway” to describe the coming convergence between the telephone and cable companies. Cable companies in Canada had their own networks, their own turfs, and their own regulated monopolies, while the phone companies had the same. The turfs overlapped, but the products and services stayed largely separate. You got cable from the cable guys, and phone service from the phone guys. The information highway threatened to change that, allowing the phone and cable guys to invade each other’s turf and bust through their respective monopolies.

The commercial Internet was still in its infancy and was considered part of the information highway. It was only in the mid-1990s that the Internet emerged as the dominant disruptive force in this technological vision. Internet Protocol, the communications standard underpinning the Internet, allowed all sorts of information — text, audio, video — to be treated as packets of data that could be shipped at high speed across cable and phone networks, which were privately operated networks that had on-ramps and off-ramps to the public Internet. As networks became faster, as compression of data got better, as computing power and memory grew exponentially, it became technologically possible and economical to deliver phone, broadcast, e-commerce, Web surfing and e-mail over both the cable and phone networks. The result: network convergence. Suddenly technology was creating competition in these regulated monopolies, forcing regulators to adapt and establish rules that permitted regulatory forbearance when competition in a market was deemed acceptable. For the phone and cable companies, the gloves were off. It was game on. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I’m seeing the same thing happening in the energy sector. (more…)

Here’s a neat little statistic. Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator said that electricity use in the province jumped by 300 megawatts during the Canada-U.S. final on Sunday night, largely because of the number of TV sets that were turned on. Additional 300-megawatt spikes were measured during game intermissions, likely because viewers went to the washroom (after all, flushing the toilet consumes electricity) or opened the fridge to get a beer or threw a bag of popcorn in the microwave. Shortly after Canadian player Sidney Crosby scored the game-winning goal in sudden-death overtime, the province’s demand profile return to that of a typical Sunday evening.

It’s a perfect example of what managers of the electricity system need to be aware of when trying to balance supply and demand on the grid. It ranges from the weather to what’s on your TV on a given evening.