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Mining Power Issues

Ontario’s power policies an example of what not to do – Gwyn Morgan (Globe and Mail – August 19, 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.

The political firestorm raging in Ontario about the cost of cancelling two natural-gas-fired power plants reminds me of a conversation I had with then-premier Dalton McGuinty in 2005. At the time, I was head of Encana Corp. and we were co-chairing a Public Policy Forum event.

As we chatted privately before the dinner, he said: “As a gas producer, you must be happy we’re going to close our coal-fired power plants.” I replied: “Well, it’s not a big deal in the context of our North American gas markets, but you’d better make sure those gas power plants are built before you shut the coal plants.”

Eight years later, Ontario power consumers are stuck paying $585-million for two gas-fired plants that were never built. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Mr. McGuinty’s decision to shutter the coal-fired plants was followed in 2010 by his government’s Green Energy and Economy Act, aimed at replacing some of the coal-fired power with highly subsidized wind and solar energy while, supposedly, turning Ontario into the green power capital of North America.

Ontario offered so-called feed-in rates almost four times the existing system rates for wind, and more than 10 times for solar power. Like bees to honey, wind and solar companies rushed to sign 20-year, rate-guaranteed contracts. 

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Taking the province to task – by Ian Ross (Northern Ontario Business – August 2013)

Established in 1980, Northern Ontario Business provides Canadians and international investors with relevant, current and insightful editorial content and business news information about Ontario’s vibrant and resource-rich North. Ian Ross is the editor of Northern Ontario Business ianross@nob.on.ca.

For northwestern Ontario community leaders, if there’s a physical symbol of the glacial pace of provincial power planning, it’s the dormant Thunder Bay Generating Station.

Last November, Ontario Power Generation stopped work on converting the coal-burning plant to natural gas. The final decision whether to resume or not is expected at the end of summer. “Why are they dragging out this decision on Thunder Bay?” asked Hebert, the former general manager of Thunder Bay Hydro.

Frustrated by the province’s inertia, Larry Hebert, now the chairman of Common Voice Energy Task Force, reminded Ontario’s two leading energy planners last month that the mining boom is coming and they need to hurry up on building power infrastructure.

There’s major concern whether new mines will come into production before an East-West transmission corridor is finished and whether the mothballed Thunder Bay Generating Station will be kept in service.

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Coast to coast, a power grid stretched thin – by Shawn McCarthy and Josh Kerr (Globe and Mail – August 15, 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.

OTTAWA AND TORONTO — Faced with rising demand and aging infrastructure, Toronto Hydro is spending $184-million to install a transformer just south of the CN Tower to keep the lights on and air conditioners humming along the city’s lake shore.

It’s the first new transformer station the utility has built since the 1950s, and part of an ongoing investment plan to ensure North America’s fourth-largest city has a reliable power system that can withstand whatever nature or malicious humans might throw at it.

But observers warn that work under way in North America to improve power reliability isn’t addressing all of the most critical problems. Across Canada, electricity companies are spending billions a year to reinforce aging transmission and distribution systems, with the industry estimating it will need nearly $300-billion over all in the next two decades to meet Canada’s demand for reliable power, according to a 2012 report by the Conference Board of Canada. That sort of spending requires an assured rate of return for utilities and other investors footing the bill, and consumers are increasingly reluctant to stump up.

“What it comes down to is a discussion about what is the value of reliability; what is the value of risk reduction,” said Jim Burpee, president of the Canadian Electricity Association.

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A nuclear reactor that burns its own waste? – by Shawn McCarthy Globe and Mail – August 7, 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.

Bill Gates has invested some of his considerable fortune in a nuclear reactor developer that is promising to deliver cheaper power while operating more safely and dramatically reducing radioactive waste.

The Microsoft founder is looking for an “energy miracle” – or several – that can power a 21st-century economy without emitting greenhouse gases that contribute to catastrophic climate change.

And nuclear energy is high on his list of solutions. Especially if the next generation of reactor technology can reduce electricity costs while addressing the risks from radioactivity that leave many people deeply concerned about any growing dependence on nuclear.

Mr. Gates is chairman of TerraPower LLC, a Seattle-area company that is developing a travelling-wave, liquid-sodium reactor (TWR) that, the company says, provides an answer to those problems by essentially burning its own waste.

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Partners look to powerful future – by Kyle Gennings (Timmins Daily Press – August 6, 2013)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

COCHRANE – Tuesday marked a turning point for the Taykwa Tagamou Nation (TTN). The Cochrane-based First Nation signed an agreement with Ontario Power Generation (OPG) with full blessing from Liberal Minister of Energy Bob Chiarelli.

Through its corporation Coral Rapids Power, TTN entered into a partnership with OPG to develop a generating station capable of producing about 25 megawatts of hydroelectric power on New Post Creek as it enters the Abitibi River.

“Here as we announce this facility at New Post Creek and as we make our way to the Lower Mattagami Project, we are reminded of the very important role that Ontario’s First Nations and Metis community play in Ontario’s energy system,” said Chiarelli. “In transmission, in generation and in hydroelectric, and so it is truly exciting to be here today and celebrate this exciting new partnership between Ontario Power Generation and Coral Rapids Power.”

Chiarelli said this is the first of many steps towards creating a network of clean energy creation which will benefit Ontarians for decades to come.

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Ontario Minister gets a charge from hydro project – by Kyle Gennings (Timmins Daily Press – August 6, 2013)

The Daily Press is the city of Timmins broadsheet newspaper.

TIMMINS – Ontario Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli visited the Northeast on Tuesday. He was fully charged over plans for hydro generating improvements. The Ottawa West – Nepean MPP was named to the cabinet in February when newly elected Premier Kathleen Wynne dismantled the array longstanding McGuinty Ministers.

Chiarelli visited both Cochrane and the Lower Mattagami Project in an effort to shed light on the good clean energy projects being developed throughout the Northeast.

“What we are seeing here is capacity building for Northern Ontario,” said Chiarelli, while overlooking the expansion of the Smoky Falls Generating station, roughly 80 kilometres north of Smooth Rock Falls.

“This is 450 megawatts of hydroelectricity generation, 1,500 jobs at maximum, a significant number of which will be made available to First Nations members who have been trained and apprenticing on this particular site.” The energy being generated from the site will be distributed throughout the province. “This energy will be traveling all of the way down south,” said Chiarelli.

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Province still mum on OPG plant’s long-term future – by Carl Clutchey (Thunder Bay Chronicle-Journal – July 30, 2013)

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

Those arguing in favour of keeping Thunder Bay’s power station open say the coal-burning plant got a shot in the arm thanks to an Ontario Energy Board ruling which says it must run at least for the duration of 2013.

But the province is remaining coy about the Ontario Power Generation station’s long-term fate, saying a proposed conversion to natural gas is still undecided.

“We have a responsibility to wait for the full assessment by the Ontario Power Authority before making any final decision on (an) conversion,” Energy Ministry spokeswoman Beckie Codd-Downey said Monday in an email.

The decision by the OEB was applauded by the Common Voice Northwest Energy Task Force, which until recently felt like “a voice in the wilderness.” Northwest co-chairman Iain Angus said the OEB decision reflects what the task force has said all along — that the region’s demand for electricity could be seriously compromised if the Thunder Bay station is taken off line.

“Back in January, during the cold snap, it was running at 150 megawatts,” Angus noted. About 125 people work at the Mission Island station, which has a maximum capacity of just over 30 mw.

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Kathleen Wynne ‘involved all along’ in gas-plant cancellations, opposition says – by Sue-Ann Levy (Toronto Sun – July 25, 2013)

http://www.torontosun.com/home

A little more than six weeks ago at the committee hearing evidence into the gas plant scandal, Premier Kathleen Wynne denied — under oath — all involvement in the decision to cancel the plants or to delete key e-mails related to a move that could cost taxpayers as much as $1-billion.

“Those were decisions that were made by other people in other conversations and I wasn’t part of those conversations, I wasn’t in those rooms,” the premier said at the time.

At the time I was highly skeptical that she sat on the sidelines blissfully unaware of this evolving scandal considering she was co-chair of the 2011 Liberal election campaign.

But when a letter surfaced Wednesday — in response to a request from the gas plant committee to dig deeper for the supposedly deleted gas plant e-mails — it pointed to far more involvement by Ontario’s unelected premier than she’d care to admit.

In that letter, deputy minister of government services Kevin Costante confirms to the Standing Committee on Justice Policy that — poof! — as if by magic some 3,226 backup tapes have been suddenly been found for 13 Liberal politicians and staffers that could contain “potentially responsive” e-mails related to the cancellation of the two gas plants in Oakville and Mississauga, a.k.a Project Vapour Lock.

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Newfoundland, Quebec heading for a showdown over Muskrat Falls power plant – by Steven Chase (Globe and Mail – July 24, 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.

Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Kathy Dunderdale will find herself face to face with Quebec counterpart Pauline Marois on Wednesday as the Atlantic Canadian leader pushes for greater control in a bitter, decades-old feud over the sale of electricity generated by hydro power in Labrador.

On the eve of an annual premiers meeting in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., Ms. Dunderdale went public with a sharp attack on the Quebec government’s power utility, accusing it of making a “desperate move” to thwart Newfoundland and Labrador’s power business plans.

The Atlantic province, which believes it got a raw deal in a long-term supply agreement with Quebec, says it expects to gain a greater say over power deliveries to its neighbour in 2016 when the energy contract is automatically renewed for 25 years.

Newfoundland and Labrador, which owns two-thirds of the existing Churchill Falls generating station through a Crown corporation, says it believes that as of the renewal date, it will be able to revise its delivery schedule for Quebec-bound electricity so that it can operate the facility in tandem with the $7.7-billion Muskrat Falls hydro power development planned for downstream.

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Muskrat madness: Quebec motion puts Newfoundland’s multi-billion dollar magaproject at risk – by Tom Adams (National Post – July 23, 2013)

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

Notwithstanding the construction crews now swarming Labrador’s Muskrat Falls power dam site, sunk costs in excess of $1 billion and a federal loan guarantee standing behind the project, the future of the Newfoundland & Labrador (NFLD) government’s pet megaproject suffered two blows Monday so grave that they threaten the entire project.

Muskrat Fall is seen as a Newfoundland’s new destiny project. The project involves building a new 824 MW power dam on the Lower Churchill River near the town of Goose Bay. The power would be transmitted to the island of Newfoundland by means of a transmission line tunnelled under the Strait of Belisle. Another submarine transmission line would link the island of Newfoundland to Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton.

The project’s cost is usually reported as $7.7 billion, a price tag that includes almost no contingency and no interest expense during construction, which could add another $1 billion. The provincial government’s plan is to sell a large portion of the production from Muskrat Falls to Nova Scotia.

But Hydro Quebec on Monday filed a motion with the Quebec Superior Court seeking clarification of its rights under the Quebec’s existing 1969 Churchill Falls Contract.

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Wynne’s green power blues – by Lorrie Goldstein (Toronto Sun – July 21, 2013)

 http://www.torontosun.com/

Liberals have gone too far to admit the obvious — their renewable energy program is a disaster

Considering the albatross it has become around their necks, Premier Kathleen Wynne and the Liberals must be wondering exactly when their green energy program turned into a political disaster.

No doubt they long for the good old days — specifically, Nov. 24, 2009 — when global warming guru Al Gore, speaking in Toronto at a gala dinner, bestowed his blessing on their former leader, Dalton McGuinty.

With McGuinty and his Canadian cheerleader, David Suzuki, looking on, Gore declared the premier’s Green Energy Act (GEA) was “widely recognized now as the single best green energy program on the North American continent.” But that was then and this is now. Today, McGuinty is long gone and the GEA sits like a dead weight on the Liberals.

Last week angry demonstrators — furious the GEA took away their right to any say in the location of huge, industrial wind turbines in their communities — showed up to protest while Wynne was trying to jump-start the by-election campaign of London West Liberal candidate Ken Coran.

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Staying cool? Thank nuclear power – by Margaret Wente (Globe and Mail – July 18, 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.

Hot out, isn’t it? At least for some of us, anyway. Southern Ontario is sweltering in temperatures that have soared into the 30s. Toronto has declared an extreme heat alert, and the air conditioners are running at full blast.

Thank god for air conditioning. Or rather, thank nuclear power – that’s what’s keeping us cool. Wednesday morning at 7 a.m., Ontario’s nuclear plants were generating more than half of the province’s electricity: 11,148 megawatts. Gas, hydro and coal accounted for another 8,608 MW. Wind power, at 97 MW, barely moved the dial. Those mighty turbines (for which we will be paying dearly for many years to come) contributed less than half of 1 per cent of the total power output.

Of course, wind energy is green. But so is nuclear. Unlike coal and natural gas, nuclear power creates zero greenhouse gas emissions.

“Nuclear energy is the most powerful weapon in the war on global warming,” Steve Aplin, an Ottawa-based consultant in energy and the environment, told me in a phone interview. He points out that if Ontario’s environmental lobby had succeeded in having nuclear power replaced by natural gas, the province’s carbon dioxide emissions would have soared.

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Innovation’s vastly cheaper than green subsidies – by BJØRN LOMBORG (Globe and Mail – July 16, 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.

 Bjørn Lomborg is author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration recently published a report that estimates global shale gas resources. These findings may have a significant impact on energy policy in the future: Shale gas increases global resources of natural gas by a whopping 47 per cent. And this may be the tip of the iceberg. For example, at the end of June, the British Geological Survey released shale gas estimates for just one field in mid-England that increased the global estimate by more than 18 per cent.

Canada’s shale gas resources – the world’s fifth highest in terms of technically recoverable gas, estimated at 573 trillion cubic feet – are nothing to balk at. The economic benefits from fracking are manifold: Whereas natural gas prices in the European Union have doubled since the year 2000, U.S. prices have declined about 75 per cent in the past few years. This has saved U.S. consumers $125-billion a year. So the shale gas revolution promises to be great news for the Canadian economy, but – perhaps surprisingly, it is also good news for our climate.

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[Mining Documentary] Pandora’s Promise rethinks nuclear power: review – by Linda Barnard (Toronto Star – July 12, 2013)

(Above) Pandora’s Promise – Official Clip #1 (HD) Documentary

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.

Pandora’s Promise makes some compelling points about how a global acceptance of nuclear power could save the environment.

The “beginning of a movement,” heralded at the end of director Robert Stone’s Pandora’s Promise, won’t be one to make some environmentalists smile, but it will certainly spark a lively debate on both sides of the nuclear power issue.

In that regard, Oscar-nominee Stone (for 1988’s Radio Bikini, about nuclear bomb tests at Bikini Atoll) has achieved a documentarian’s aims. But there’s not much in the way of balance in this often bone-dry documentary about the bum rap nuclear power has gotten thanks to misinformed, if well-meaning, environmentalists and energy experts.

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The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2013 – by Mycle Schneider and Antony Froggatt (July 2013)

(Above) Pandora’s Promise – Official Clip #1 (HD) Documentary

For the full report, click here: http://www.worldnuclearreport.org/IMG/pdf/20130712msc-worldnuclearreport2013-lr-v2.pdf

Foreword by Peter A. Bradford, Adjunct Professor, Vermont Law School, teaching “Nuclear Power and Public Policy”, former commissioner U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Co.

Nuclear power requires obedience, not transparency. The gap between nuclear rhetoric and nuclear reality has been a fundamental impediment to wise energy policy decisions for half a century now. For various reasons in many nations, the nuclear industry cannot tell the truth about its progress, its promise or its perils. Its backers in government and in academia do no better.

Rhetorical excess from opponents of nuclear power contributes to the fog, but proponents have by far the heavier artillery. During the rise and fall of the bubble formerly known as “the nuclear renaissance” in the U.S. many of their tools have been on full display.

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