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Originally Posted by vid
What you're missing is the fact that none of the people you're arguing with actually believe that, they're simply arguing back at you because you're arguing at them.
Regardless of what kind of power plant C-Train's energy actually came from, the fact that they're paying a company to produce renewable energy means that somewhere, someone is using renewable energy instead of dirty energy whether they know or care about it, or not. The claim is certainly a half-truth but that doesn't mean the clean energy isn't there, and that's kind of what you're implying. Considering how energy moves it's probably not truthful to say you only use one kind of energy at a time. I've heard rumours from inside that Thunder Bay power plant that it's connected to New York's state grid, which sound implausible (I mean, it's directly connected to a mill across the river) but there have been times when the coal plant was down and the hydro dams were off-line and we had to depend on the GTA's nuclear plants, despite being over 1,000km away from them.
BTW, Calgary, running a transit system on renewable energy isn't a new thing. Thunder Bay's entire transit system was run on hydro-electric power until the 1940s, and the city owned both the transit system and the dam that powered it. (The dam still exists. The streetcars don't.)
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Thunder Bay is definitely connected to New York, along with the rest of Eastern North America (less Quebec and Texas; most of the time). However, how tightly coupled it is with New York will vary with time. The vast majority of the time, Thunder Bay will be so extremely loosely coupled with, say, Orlando that they can be considered practically isolated, but in reality there is some physical connection between them.
One of the primary business models for wind energy in Alberta, which has some of the most valuable wind energy real estate on land, is selling its energy to California where the value of carbon offsets are the highest (within the Western Interconnection). Although Alberta is only loosely coupled with California, they are both part of the same electrical grid and so Albertan utilities can legally sell their carbon offsets in California.
This may seem like a subversion of the system, but ultimately it benefits the addition of new wind energy in that the market for wind energy in the Western Interconnection is predominantly affected by synoptic scale weather, rather than smaller weather structures (which will affect the local spot price of electricity, but not the value of carbon), reducing risk for both buyers and sellers and lowering the barrier of entry.
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