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Mining Power Issues

Duplicitous Dalton, Inc. – by Rex Murphy (National Post – October 12, 2013)

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

The Auditor-General of Ontario has released her report on the provincial Liberal government’s brazenly political decision to cancel two gas-fired power plants. Her estimate of the ultimate cost: about $1.1-billion, potentially reaching $1.5-billion.

This obscenity of mismanagement and prevarication came out of Duplicitous Dalton, Inc., a.k.a. the McGuinty government, an administration we now know was, politically, so venal as to toss perhaps as much as a billion and a half taxpayer dollars into the devouring — but politically favourable — wind.

D.D., Inc. even had the brass to insist, originally, that the cost to cancel just the Oakville, Ont., plant was only $40-million. The Auditor-General this week, after a cautionary distribution of Gravol tablets to the assembled press, offered a more altitudinous range of $675-million to $810-million — 15 to 20 times as much! And from the very beginning of the noxious affair, to any question the Liberal response was delay, obfuscate, stone-wall, delete emails, deny said deletions, miraculously locate the not-so-deleted emails, and, of course, insult and hector any and all critics.

Let there be no more “used car salesmen” jokes about political leaders. Used car salesmen are pillars of candour and conscience compared to this lot.

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Ontario jobs driven to Quebec – by John R. Hunt (North Bay Nugget – October 12, 2013)

http://www.nugget.ca/

This has been a very badly kept secret. Ontario has been losing thousands of man-hours of work and natural resources worth thousands and probably millions of dollars. Highway 11 is being pounded daily by a flotilla of trucks and in both Latchford and Temagami there have been concerns about pedestrian and traffic safety.

It is known that the trucks are carrying mine concentrates from Sudbury to be refined in Noranda, Que.

There appears to have been a total news blackout. One might have expected the unions to be howling and protesting. But little or nothing has hit the headlines. Perhaps everyone is scared of the big mining companies.

All this may change Thursday evening when the Latchford town council will consider resolutions directed to Ontario government departments. They will point out that Hwy. 11 is the town’s Main Street. The heavy traffic is wearing down the recently renovated pavement and that the trucks often appear to be traveling in convoys of eight to nine vehicles which makes life very difficult for pedestrians and automobile drivers.

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Scrapped reactors ‘a psychological blow’ for Candu – by Richard Blackwell (Globe and Mail – October 11, 2013)

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.

Ontario’s decision not to build new nuclear power plants will keep Canada’s home-grown atomic power company, SNC-Lavalin subsidiary Candu Energy Inc., dependent on maintenance and refurbishment of its existing reactors around the world.

Ontario Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli confirmed Thursday a report in The Globe and Mail that the province scrapped a plan to spend as much as $10-billion new nuclear reactors as part of its long-term energy strategy. Declining demand for electricity in the province, the potentially huge nuclear build-out costs and decreasing prices for natural gas and other power sources undercut the economic justification for nuclear plants. Ontario will, however, continue an ongoing refurbishment of Darlington Nuclear Generating Station’s four reactors.

The Energy Ministry’s decision “is a psychological blow, although not a huge surprise,” said Mark Winfield, an environmental studies professor at York University in Toronto, who follows the nuclear industry. “The writing has been on the wall for several years,” he said, since the provincial government balked at an earlier plan for new reactors back in 2009.

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Ontario backs away from plans to buy new nuclear reactors – by Adam Radwanski (Globe and Mail – October 10, 2013)

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.

Ontario’s government will shelve plans for a major new investment in nuclear power, according to industry and government sources.

Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals have decided against spending upwards of $10-billion to buy two new nuclear reactors as had been planned when Dalton McGuinty was premier, and will commit only to refurbishing existing ones, the sources told The Globe and Mail.

The decision appears to be the latest blow to the nuclear industry, which is already facing a decline in international demand, safety concerns after 2011’s earthquake-induced meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima plant, and the emergence of comparatively cheap natural gas. As the most nuclear-reliant province in Canada and the only one with plans to acquire new reactors, Ontario had been held up as a source of hope for prospective builders, including Candu Energy Inc., the once-mighty division of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited that is now a subsidiary of SNC-Lavalin.

As a result of the change in plans, nuclear power – which accounted for 56 per cent of Ontario’s total energy supply in 2012 – could end up with a somewhat smaller share of the supply mix. At the same time, the decision reflects stagnant demand due largely to the struggles of the province’s manufacturing sector.

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The true price tag of McGuinty’s green fantasy – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – October 10, 2013)

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.

A year ago, a critic of Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario energy policy speculated that the government’s decision to cancel a couple of unpopular gas plants just before the 2011 election – a transparent ploy to win votes – would wind up costing taxpayers upward of a billion dollars. Mr. McGuinty, who had already announced plans to resign as premier, angrily denied it. “I fully reject that calculation,” he said. “We’re very confident that the costs are in total $230-million. We’ve released all of the documentation.”

On Tuesday, Ontario’s Auditor-General weighed in with her verdict: The gas plants could wind up costing more than $1-billion. Mr. McGuinty was wrong. But so what? It worked. Five crucial ridings went Liberal and the government hung on to power. In my unscientific reckoning, the price of victory was about $90,000 a vote. People are mad as hell, but who are they supposed to draw and quarter? The guilty party has left the room and his successor, Kathleen Wynne, says she’s very, very sorry.

The true price tag of Mr. McGuinty’s energy shenanigans is actually much higher still. The gas plants were just the last chapter in the amazing saga of political manipulation of energy under Mr. McGuinty.

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The banality of billion-dollar boondoggles – by Martin Regg Cohn (Toronto Star – October 9, 2013)

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.

What’s a billion dollars? It’s a bonfire of insanity — big money going up in smoke to cancel two gas-fired power plants.

To read the latest damning report from the independent auditor general’s office is to weep. In clinical, actuarial language, it exposes the costly blunders that brought down Dalton McGuinty and now weigh down his successor as premier, Kathleen Wynne — with taxpayers and ratepayers paying for their mistakes.

By deconstructing those cancellation costs, the auditor general’s office has come up with a bracing figure of $1.1 billion (plus or minus) that raises the political stakes:

Brace yourself for endless “billion-dollar-boondoggle” sound bites from the opposition. But beyond the alliteration, it’s an illustration of a home-grown Greek tragedy — borne of political hubris and human miscalculations.

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Power plant cancellations could cost $1.1B: Auditor general – by Richard J. Brennan and Robert Benzie (Toronto Star – October 9, 2013)

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.

It could cost Ontario taxpayers up to $1.1 billion to scrap two gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga so the Liberals could save five seats in the 2011 election.

Premier Kathleen Wynne admitted it was a “big . . . bad mistake” to scrap power plants in Oakville and Mississauga after a report by Ontario’s financial watchdog found taxpayers are on the hook for up to $1.1 billion.

That number was the startling tally Tuesday from auditor general Bonnie Lysyk in a long-awaited report on the price tag for scuttling the Oakville generating station three years ago — the first of two cancellations to save five Liberal seats in the 2011 election.

Lysyk concluded the tab for cancelling Oakville and relocating the plant to Napanee could skyrocket to $815 million — dramatically more than the $310 million the Ontario Power Authority had estimated and exponentially higher than the $40 million the Grits initially claimed.

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Quebec looks to recharge economy with hydro lure – by Nicolas Van Praet (National Post – October 8, 2013)

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

MONTREAL – In a bid to rescue an economy in danger of slipping into recession, the Parti Québécois government has launched a multibillion dollar job creation effort anchored by a program that will offer Quebec’s surplus hydroelectric power at below-market rates to corporate investors.

With her minority government one-year old, Premier Pauline Marois has presided over a province that has generated barely 0.1% employment growth during that time. Meanwhile, the wider economy is at a near standstill, according to Desjardins Group, pulled down by a sputtering manufacturing sector and weak international trade.

“The recovery is slow to materialize,” Ms. Marois told an audience in the foyer of pension giant Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec’s headquarters Monday. “It’s important to act with every means at our disposal.”

Ms. Marois is now betting that she can stoke job growth and private sector investment by using Quebec’s vast hydroelectric resources as a lure. While the PQ has used the tool before — for example, to snare a $1.2-billion investment by Swedish communications technology firm Ericsson AB this year — the party is now enshrining it formally in policy and commanding a specific block of electricity totalling 50 TeraWatt-hours for that purpose.

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Germany’s Effort at Clean Energy Proves Complex – by Melissa Eddy and Stanley Reed (New York Times – September 18, 2013)

http://www.nytimes.com/

BERLIN — It is an audacious undertaking with wide and deep support in Germany: shut down the nation’s nuclear power plants, wean the country from coal and promote a wholesale shift to renewable energy sources.

But the plan, backed by Chancellor Angela Merkel and opposition parties alike, is running into problems in execution that are forcing Germans to come face to face with the costs and complexities of sticking to their principles.

German families are being hit by rapidly increasing electricity rates, to the point where growing numbers of them can no longer afford to pay the bill. Businesses are more and more worried that their energy costs will put them at a disadvantage to competitors in nations with lower energy costs, and some energy-intensive industries have begun to shun the country because they fear steeper costs ahead.

Newly constructed offshore wind farms churn unconnected to an energy grid still in need of expansion. And despite all the costs, carbon emissions actually rose last year as reserve coal-burning plants were fired up to close gaps in energy supplies.

A new phrase, “energy poverty,” has entered the lexicon. “Often, I don’t go into my living room in order to save electricity,” said Olaf Taeuber, 55, who manages a fleet of vehicles for a social services provider in Berlin. “You feel the pain in your pocketbook.”

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Make up your minds [Thunder Bay generating station] – Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal Editorial (September 25, 2013)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

WITH the fate of the Thunder Bay Generating Station occupying so much public and political attention these days, the ongoing crisis situation at the Regional hospital is unfortunately being shunted aside on the political agenda. The issue of hospital crowding is much worse because it is potentially life-threatening whereas a decision on the generating plant, though needed now, can take time to carry out.

Both crises demonstrate government indecisiveness on multiple pressing issues.

Queen’s Park twice reversed itself on converting the Mission Island generating station from coal to gas and currently has the matter on hold again while it awaits an analysis by the Ontario Power Authority on how best to serve the electricity needs of the Northwest. The region will need significantly more power when a pending mining boom occurs and it takes time to build transmission capacity.

Here, too, the province is dawdling on the central theme of how to get ore out of the Far North to processing plants. A legal tussle over whether it should be a road or a railroad needs provincial intervention on behalf of the entire region which stands to receive a major economic jolt once mining begins. Instead, the province is waiting and seeing while the lead company warns it is running out of time.

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Ontario’s power disaster – by Terence Corcoran (National Post – September 20, 2013)

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

New study highlights desperate need for reform the province’s vast dysfunctional and costly electricity regime

For almost five years FP Comment has inveighed against the Ontario government’s profoundly uneconomic and costly electricity regime, a dictatorial and monopolist system that uses taxes and subsidies to greenify the power system of the largest provincial economy in Canada.

As I wrote in 2009: “In the midst of a major economic meltdown, and with looming budget deficits totaling more than $18-billion, now might not be the best time for the government of Ontario to be embarking on a crushing new green energy policy that could add billions to the province’s electricity costs. But Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty is nothing if not immune to the folly of his own righteous policies and the fiscal crisis he faces as a result.”

Since then, via former Canadian banker Parker Gallant’s ongoing series — Ontario’s Power Trip — along with reports from consultant Tom Adams and many others, the growing absurdity of the regime has been detailed and documented on this page: Rising costs, market distorting feed-in-tariffs, subsidies to wind and solar, exports of power to New York at below cost — not to mention the $1-billion scandal over cancelled gas plants.

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Northeast eyed for future hydro electric projects – by By Ron Grech – (Timmins Daily Press – September 16, 2013)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – The groundwork is being laid for future waterpower generation projects in Northeastern Ontario. This would include providing power to serve mining operations within the Ring of Fire region as well improving infrastructure for First Nation communities currently dependent on diesel-powered generators.

Ontario Waterpower Association announced last week it has teamed up with the provincial government and the Ontario Power Authority to develop a study that will provide the basis for the province’s energy plan over the next 15 to 20 years.

“Northeastern Ontario has been a pretty critical part of serving the provincial energy needs for decades,” said OWA president Paul Norris. “It is a pretty strategic resource you have in Northeastern Ontario in terms of the overall reliability of our provincial system.

“The question going forward is what other hydro can be built?”

Norris said the announced study, which also involves the ministries of energy and natural resources, will identify opportunities and outline the cost and feasibility for expanding hydroelectric power generation throughout the North.

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In Ontario, electricity bills are reason to weep – by Konrad Yakauski (Globe and Mail – September 12, 2013)

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.

If you live in Ontario, deciphering your electricity bill is like trying to crack the encryption on a BlackBerry. It might tax even the professional snoopers at the U.S. National Security Agency.

It’s not as simple as multiplying the amount of power you use each month by the market price per kilowatt-hour. Beyond your “electricity” charge, there’s a “delivery” charge, a “regulatory” charge, a “debt retirement” charge and an Orwellian-sounding “clean energy benefit.”

And there’s a twisted political saga behind each one of them. If you manage to unbundle it all, you’ll discover that the market value of the power you consume accounts for only a tiny portion of your bill. Most of the rest of what you fork out goes to pay for decades of bungled energy policy-making. And pay you will, for years to come.

Indeed, the most important charge is the one that doesn’t directly appear on most people’s monthly statements. It’s called the “global adjustment” fee and it’s tacked on to your electricity charge to cover the government’s cost of buying above-market-priced wind, solar, nuclear and gas-fired power from private operators.

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Renewable energy key for First Nations, towns – by Robert Daniel (Bob) Nault – Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal Editorial (September 7, 2013)

Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal is the daily newspaper of Northwestern Ontario.

THERE are over 630 First Nations governments across Canada serving a population of over 700,000 people. A good number of these communities, which are located in northern and remote locations, are off the grid and rely on environmentally-unfriendly diesel generators for their electrical needs which are a source of air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to smog formation which can affect community health.

Not only is diesel power bad for the environment, it is also expensive and unreliable. These communities pay, both directly and indirectly, more for their power than anywhere else in North America, even with government subsidies and programs.

As former Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, I saw firsthand how First Nations communities sought to reduce greenhouse gases and understood the importance of sustainable development. Some First Nations communities have initiated solar and wind power and mini hydroelectric initiatives but more needs to be done to ensure that all remote communities have access to clean and affordable energy.

It’ s time for private enterprise and government to collaborate with First Nations and other remote communities to make clean affordable renewable energy available.

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[Thunder Bay generating station] Up in the air – by Leith Dunick (tbnewswatch.com – September 3, 2013)

http://www.tbnewswatch.com/

Premier Kathleen Wynne says the future of the Thunder Bay Generating Station is still up in the air.

The Ontario leader, in the city for a series of events this week, including Minister of Northern Development and Mines Michael Gravelle’s nomination Tuesday night, said the conversation about the plant is ongoing, but no decisions have been made.

Last year the province decided to halt the conversion from coal to natural gas, stating it would save $400 million.

The Ontario Power Authority also said the power it creates won’t be needed down the road, though the region’s energy task forced begged to differ, presenting a much different – and more prosperous – outlook for Northwestern Ontario’s mining sector.

“It’s one of those fundamentals of infrastructure and conditions that has to be in place for job creation to happen and economic development to happen and economic growth to happen,” Wynne said in a brief media availability on Tuesday morning.

“So we’re committed to making sure that power supply is there and the specifics on that conversion are ongoing,” she said.

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