Mining Power Issues

The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Jack Gibbons is chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

Their highly radioactive waste will linger forever, but the elderly nuclear reactors that provide half of Ontario’s electricity will soon reach the end of their lives. And the task of rebuilding them, currently in the planning stages, will almost certainly burden the fiscally crippled province with even more debt while electricity prices maintain their steeply upward trajectory for decades to come.

As an alternative, letting the oldest reactors die and replacing their output with clean, renewable water power from Quebec could save Ontario $600 million a year in foregone nuclear costs — beginning as soon as the two neighbours decide to end the electricity separatism that has traditionally stood in the way of such a logical and mutually beneficial hookup.

Quebec is the fourth-largest producer of hydroelectric power in the world and its electricity rates are among the lowest in North America. Its residential rates are 45 per cent lower than ours and its industrial rates are 55 per cent lower. In recent years, the province has produced far more cheap, clean electricity than it can use itself.

Meanwhile, its next-door neighbour, Ontario, is struggling with some of the highest power costs in the country and facing a minimum $13-billion bill to refurbish the Darlington nuclear reactors. There is already enough transmission capacity linking the two provinces to replace 97 per cent of the power currently produced by Darlington — and a tremendous opportunity to strike a deal that would provide huge economic benefits for both provinces.

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The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Given what we now know about the cost of nuclear power, why is Ontario ready to throw good money after bad to refurbish the Darlington Nuclear plant?

I admit I was young and naive back in the late 1970s when I boarded a school bus at Queen’s Park and travelled along with a shaggy group of protesters 70 kilometres east to demonstrate against the construction of the $4-billion Darlington Nuclear Generating Station. Some brought blankets to help scale the barbed-wire fence — and did that — but most of us just milled around for a few hours before leaving on the same yellow buses that had brought us.

If only we had known then the true cost of Ontario’s 20th-century nuclear empire — how after paying $30 billion to finance Darlington and its kin over the next three and a half decades, Ontarians would still owe $4 billion for the job in 2014 — the protest might have been more effective. Given the foresight, no sane citizen would have bought that deal.

But hindsight is a good enough proxy today as the engineers at Ontario Power Generation rush to complete their plans to refurbish the aging, still-not-paid-for nuclear complex — with the estimated costs of that $13-billion project seeming to rise every few months like alarm bells that never stop ringing.

History is repeating itself, but it’s no farce. With the Darlington refurbishment, Ontario risks another half-century or more of crippling debt to produce inherently dangerous, over-expensive electricity with ongoing waste-disposal costs calculated in molecular half-lives. It was a big mistake the first time, but can only be folly the second time around.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Provincial elections have now come and gone in Ontario and Quebec, with majority Liberal governments elected in both. Presumably, that means less political posturing, potentially clearing the way for a new era of electricity co-operation between Canada’s largest provinces.

Don’t hold your breath.

Electricity regulators in Ontario recently asked stakeholders whether the province should import more hydro power from Quebec. Their draft report is due next week. This coincides with a big push by Ontario’s anti-nuclear lobby to scrap the planned multibillion-dollar refurbishment of the Darlington and Bruce power stations in favour of buying “cheaper” electricity from Quebec.

Reorienting electricity policy in Canada, however, is tantamount to turning around an oil tanker. All the forces in the political universe seem to conspire against it, ensuring that past is prologue.

For decades, both provinces have operated in electricity policy silos, with self-sufficiency and economic development trumping consumer interests.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Ontario Hydro may well have been a mess. But it was a mess that produced less expensive electricity

In the summer of 2003, just before Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals gained power in Ontario, 50 million people in the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and Ontario suffered an electricity blackout caused “when a tree branch in Ohio started an outage that cascaded across a broad swath from Michigan to New England and Canada.”

Back in 2003 Ontario’s electricity prices were 4.3 cents a kilowatt hour (kWh) and delivery costs added 1.5 cents per kWh. An additional charge of 0.7 cents — known as the debt retirement charge to pay back Ontario Hydro’s legacy debt of $7.8-billion — brought all-in costs to the average consumer to 6.5 cents per kWh.

The McGuinty Liberals claimed the province’s electricity sector was in a mess when they took over in 2003. The Liberals’ first Energy minister, Dwight Duncan, said then that he rejected the old Ontario Hydro model. “It didn’t work. We’re fixing it. We’re cleaning up the mess.”

Fast forward 11 years. Today, Ontario electricity costs average over 9 cents per kWh, delivery costs 3 cents per kWh or more, the 0.7-cent debt retirement charge is still being charged, plus a new 8% provincial sales tax. Additional regulatory charges take all-in costs to well over 15 cents per kWh.. The increase in the past 10 years averaged over 11% annually. Recently, the Energy Minister forecast the final consumer electricity bill will jump another 33% over the next three years and 42% in the next 5 years.

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The Toronto Star has the largest circulation in Canada. The paper has an enormous impact on federal and Ontario politics as well as shaping public opinion.

Ontario and Quebec have a chance to forge stronger energy links, a panel of experts told a York University forum

It doesn’t make sense to sell gasoline for twice as much in some provinces as others, and it doesn’t make sense to do it for electricity, a Quebec business professor says.

Electricity costs less than 5 cents in Quebec, and more than 10 cents in Ontario, Pierre-Olivier Pineau told a forum organized by York University’s Sustainable Energy Initiative on Friday.

“That wouldn’t be accepted for gasoline,” he said. But Canadian provinces act like energy separatists when it comes to electricity, he said. Pineau said there’s an opportunity today to forge some sensible national policies over energy.

That’s something has hasn’t happened since the early 1980s, when the federal Liberals’ ill-fated National Energy Policy outraged western Canada. But Pineau said many regions of the country now have something to gain from greater energy co-operation:

• Alberta and Saskatchewan want to pipe oil to the east coast through Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick (and expand pipelines through B.C.);

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Liberal MPP and former energy minister Brad Duguid says Tory Leader Tim Hudak is “completely irresponsible and out of his mind” for trying to extricate taxpayers and hydro consumers from the Liberals’ green energy disaster.

In fact, the only people who were completely out of their minds on the green energy file were Dalton McGuinty, Kathleen Wynne, Duguid and the entire Liberal cabinet and caucus.

First, their criticism of Hudak is a straw man. They charge Hudak would be irresponsible to tear up absurdly generous, 20-year contracts the Liberals signed with wind and solar power developers for expensive and unreliable electricity.

Except Hudak didn’t say that. He said he won’t cancel approved projects that are already supplying power to the electricity grid because it would cost even more to walk away from them.

He did say he won’t approve new contracts and will review on a case by case basis contracts awaiting final approval from the energy minister.

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Tim Hudak promises to cut broader civil service jobs by 100,000 positions. Is that all? It’s interesting to note that these are positions — not jobs. There may not actually be people in those positions. This, he says, will simply take the size of the civil service back to 2009 levels.

You only have to look at the size of the Sunshine list — the annual salary disclosure document that lists all public sector workers making more than $100,000 — to see some fat-trimming is long overdue.

Hudak says the public sector has grown by 300,000 over the past decade — just as the manufacturing sector has shrunk by that amount. Where to start? The bloated energy sector is a good place. Remember the old Ontario Hydro? In 1995, it operated power plants, transmission lines — and operated the system.

That was broken down into Hydro One, which operates the wires and Ontario Power Generation — the entity charged with looking after generating plants. The Independent Electricity System Operator runs the system.

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