Brahm Neufeld is a process engineer at Cameco and a self-described “passionate energy geek” who created a custom website to scrape data from SaskPower and generate long-term graphs and data analysis of exactly how power (electricity) is generated and distributed around the province.
His website, skelectricity.info, was built using many of the same skills he developed for his professional career. However, he is careful to distance himself from any implication that he speaks for Cameco or that his job gives him any special insight.
“I do work for a uranium company because I’m passionate about clean energy,” Neufeld explained to Discover Moose Jaw News, but “I would be wary of the implication that the fact I work for Cameco gives me any insight into the province's power future — any insights I have are due to reading dozens of books, listening to hundreds of hours of energy podcasts, and coming to my own conclusions by analyzing Saskatchewan's power data.”
That being said, he does apply some of the same data analysis/jack-of-all-trades skills that his interests have caused him to develop.
“I’ve made a career out of supporting Saskatchewan mining industry companies with their time-series process data, right? So, I like to say, tongue-in-cheek, that I look at squiggly lines all day. Temperatures and pressures and flows and analyzing that data and helping other folks in the company analyze that data, and developing the infrastructure to collect and visualize that data.”
Neufeld said his deep dive into analyzing Saskatchewan’s power grid has convinced him of a few things. Firstly? It is what engineers call a ‘multivariable problem.’
“It’s probably the most complicated machine that operates in our society,” he said. “I look at this data every day, and my biggest takeaway is, this is a very, very complex machine.”
Wind and solar have extreme variability, while hydro power must contend with the fact that water is used is many other ways and has to be rationed for local ecosystems, too.
Neufeld’s second big takeaway is that the reliability and availability of fossil fuels is still too good to overlook.
“This professor from the UK, named David MacKay, he wrote a great book called Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air, and he has a quote in that book where he said, ‘We can’t be anti-everything. We need an energy plan that adds up,’ and when I read that, I really took it to heart, right?”
For Neufeld, that means acknowledging that fossil fuels will have a place in energy generation for a long time. Nuclear can and should be part of that, and cheap renewables like wind and solar will obviously have a hugely expanded role going forward. However, there’s no getting away from, for example, the grid-stabilizing role of natural gas power generation.
“We know that renewables are going to go up, wind and solar. SaskPower has said they’re adding, like, 3,000 megawatts (MW) of wind and solar by 2030, I think. That’s a huge, huge addition to the grid, but the variability of wind and solar, and how they swing up and down on a day-over-day, or hour-over-hour basis — we’re going to need something that swings in response, and I think that’s natural gas.”
Nuclear is the best option, while coal is the least attractive, Neufeld noted. But nuclear is so highly regulated that even at ‘full speed ahead’, the nearest possibility of a 300-MW Small Modular Reactor (SMR) being built and operating and contributing to the grid, is 2034. SaskPower will not even be allowed to make a final decision on the subject before 2029, when feasibility studies and policy requirements have been completed.
Despite that, Neufeld is strongly pro-nuclear because of the following comparison: Currently, the amount of coal burned in Saskatchewan is equivalent to, at the lower end of the estimate, at least 30,000 (Neufeld’s estimate is 40,000) rail cars full — each year. A single SMR, on the other hand, would generate enough waste to fill a double-car garage — over the course of a 60-year lifespan.
“I see nuclear energy playing a really key stabilizing role in our future grid,” he explained. “When you compare the energy density of coal to the energy density of nuclear, that’s the amount of energy contained in nuclear fuel, it’s multiple orders of magnitude higher.
“You compare 40,000 train cars’ worth of raw energy inputs, just to keep our coal fleet going for one year, vs one SMR generating one garage’s worth of spent fuel over its entire lifetime... I think that’s a really interesting comparison.”