Why not?

Two thoughts on the energy crisis.

1. What do we use upper Canada for, anyway? Sure, the Aleuts and Inuits have claimed a chunk of it for seal hunting and such, and I won’t begrudge them the right to continue their native traditions in the way they see most fit. Even after subtracting a generous amount of the northern tundras for the native population, we surely must be left with a large amount of land. Why don’t we put gigantic fields of solar energy collectors up there? Wire the fields up and hook them into a continent-wide power grid. It wouldn’t be very difficult, would provide a light economic boost to the northern provinces in terms of maintaining the solar fields, and would likely be able to power most of the continent in a clean way. Main problems: Ecological.

2. There could be potential ecological consequences that I've not thought of, and I'll admit that I'm not trained in macro-organismal ecology enough to know what would likely happen. But there is one place on the planet where ecological consequences could be minimized: Antarctica. The fields would only have light for half the year, but you have a much vaster field of area to cover with solar panels. Unlike the northern climes, there is virtually no chance of damage to the solar cells from storms or heavy precipitation (Antarctica is classified as a desert, actually). If solar panels can withstand intense cold, then we have a ready location on which to lay out hundreds of thousands of acres of power collection panels. The main problem with this method of power collection is transmitting the power to the mainland where it can be used. Fortunately, scientists think this type of problem will soon be a thing of the past. As it turns out, electricity can be converted into an intense microwave beam which can be shot up from the Earth to a satellite which will gather the energy and re-beam the microwave energy to a large collecter dish somewhere on the mainland where the microwave energy will be turned back into electricity. Main problems: Microwave beam is mis-aimed by computer-controlled satellite and frys a few square miles into glowing nothingness.

Overall, my vote is for Northern Canada, but I think the Antarctic idea would work just as well (it'd just cost more).