Updated on 10 September 2026

 

​Welcome to this New Home Page:

Energy Futures for Large Cities

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This page presents my ongoing work on the energy challenges facing large cities, with a particular focus on the debate between advocates of continued nuclear expansion and advocates of renewable energy, which increasingly appears to be the more viable long-term solution.

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Rapidly growing urban centers require ever-larger energy resources, even as the broader trend moves away from fossil fuels to ease the mounting environmental stress caused by pollution and climate change. Building new nuclear plants remains exceedingly expensive and slow, and while newer nuclear technologies show real promise, they remain largely unproven at commercial scale. Renewable energy, by contrast, has fallen sharply in cost and is now often cheaper to build and operate than nuclear power. New renewable energy projects are proliferating worldwide, particularly across Europe and China, both of which are increasingly charting their own course apart from current U.S. energy policy.

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Ontario continues to treat nuclear power as its preferred path forward, even as other Canadian provinces pursue significant expansions of wind and solar capacity. At the same time, entirely new approaches to nuclear power are emerging, including designs intended to be built once and deployed wherever they are needed most.

This page will track these developments as they unfold, across both nuclear and renewable energy, in Ontario and around the world.