Per capita energy consumption.

[Brian Ellis]

This table may reveal a few surprises. It consists of some data from selected developed countries, some developing ones and some Eastern Mediterranean ones.

[Tjalfe]

looks like we win.

lots of Energy used to extrand oil from the tar sands in Alberta, that and we have summers hot enough to require air conditioning, and cold enough to use tons of energy heating our houses. China offsets it all by having a billion people to lower the per capita use

[az]

How hot does it get in Canada?

BTW, Brian, .doc is not exactly the most suitable format for such data. Why didn't you just do it in HTML and put it on your website?

[Tjalfe]

How hot does it get in Canada?

In and around Toronto, we often get days in mid 30C.. and the humidity is usually very high at the same time. The latitude is about the same as northern Italy here
Winter temperature here usually sits around -20C, but we get cold spells of -40C at times.. much worse in the rest of canada, as they are much further north than us

[GNEP]

Thanks Brian - interesting. Any chance you could send me (PM if necessary) your sources?

Been looking at security of energy supply today, following the consultation announced last week by Blair et al...

[az]

Tjalfe, it doesn't get that cold here (well, usually not - though we had -27°C here a few years ago), but it does get that hot during the summer. There are a few days I wish we had aircon, but almost no one has (offices do, of course), because they're so very energy hungry.

[agallag]

What also makes a big difference is that Canada is the worlds largest country (in area), while it only has ~30 million people. We have to ship the energy further, but there are a lot fewer people on the other end to receive it. Pipelines and transmission lines aren't 100% efficient. We also have a lot of heavy industry relative to our population.

[Tjalfe]

Tjalfe, it doesn't get that cold here (well, usually not - though we had -27°C here a few years ago), but it does get that hot during the summer. There are a few days I wish we had aircon, but almost no one has (offices do, of course), because they're so very energy hungry.

Do you also have crazy high humidity there?.. it is really the humidity which makes me turn on the AC.
Also, alot of houses here are not terribly well built.. our house for example was build in 1958 and has NO insulation in the walls.. talk about wasting energy. Lots of houses around which are the same. We are slowly redoing the house and have as of now insulated the entire basement + one room upstairs.. if everyone here did the same, we could lower the energy use a fair amount

As Agallag mentioned, everything here is far away.. lots of driving necessary to get anywhere, and public transit is near non existant if you are not downtown Toronto

[az]

I don't know about humidity, so I assume it's not that bad here. Houses are very well built though.

[Tjalfe]

We have the great lakes surrounding us here, so there is lots of water which evaporate and create the humidity.. it most often feels like walking into a sauna in the summer.

I think it was not until sometime in the 1960's that wall insulation was put into the building code here .. now all new houses going up are much better insulated, they also use higher efficiency furnaces now, ours is 78%, the new ones are as high as 96%. Even then, the houses are not terribly well build by european standards.

[Dr Mordrid]

Here the temperatures run as high as 105F (40.6C) in the summer and as low as -15F (-26C) in the winter, though I've seen wind chills as low as -75F (-59.4C). We too can get high humidity, also because of the Great Lakes. High humidity plus strong wintertime winds is what drives those wind chills.

This high humidity + cold means that we can get snow storms with accumulations to a 24" - 36" (.73m - .9m) deep isn't that unusual, especially if the temperature is between 25F and 32F (-3.9C - 0C).

[az]

Berlin is also near one of the largest european lake err... accumulations. There are about 3000 lakes in and around Berlin, IIRC. At my parents' house, we even have mosquitos all year round (though very few in the winter - but one is enough to rob me of my sleep).

[agallag]

Ontario has 3,899 lakes over 3 km^2 in size, and 16 of them are over 400 km^2. No one really knows how many lakes of any size there are, but estimates go as high as 3 million lakes in the entire country. That's about 10 people per lake.

To put it in perspective though, Lake Ontario holds approximately 1,638 km^3 of water. That's 1,638,000,000,000,000 liters, or 432,739,038,000,000 US gallons! And that's the smallest of the great lakes.

[az]

Ontario is probably about as large as Germany as well, isn't it?

[Tjalfe]

Ontario:
Total 1,076,395 km²
- Land 917,741 km²
- Water 158,654 km²
Germany:
- Total 357,050 km² (63rd)
- Water (%) 2.416

not really the same scale as Germany .. told ya it was big here