Mining Power Issues

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

Liberal Bob Chiarelli, Ontario’s new energy minister, has at least levelled with the public: The government really has no idea how much cancelling the Oakville gas power plant will cost. That’s not much of a statement, but given the evasions and outright denials we’ve heard previously, this actually marks some progress.

Oakville is a lovely city on the western edge of the Greater Toronto Area. It was also slated to be home to a new gas-fired powerplant under a plan developed, and repeatedly and strenuously championed, by former premier Dalton McGuinty. The plant would have provided relatively clean electricity to the Toronto area, which has surged in population in recent decades, with no let up in sight. But it was deeply unpopular with the local population, and threatened the Liberals’ hold on the riding.

Ahead of the 2011 election, when polls showed the Progressive Conservatives had a got shot at winning, the Liberals suddenly announced that they were cancelling plans to build the plant (as well as another in nearby Mississauga, another Toronto suburb where local opposition to the plant was strong, for an estimated $190-million).

It worked. The Liberals held both seats, and secured a minority government. But the whole affair stunk something awful, and since the election, senior Liberals — up to and including Premier Kathleen Wynne — have acknowledged that the decision to scrap the plants was not policy decision, but a political one.

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Among the many unanswered questions about the Liberals’ decision to cancel two natural gas plants leading up to the 2011 Ontario election, a key one involves Premier Kathleen Wynne.

Wynne, has described the Liberals’ decision to cancel the two unpopular projects in Oakville and Mississauga as a “political” one, meaning it was done to save a handful of Liberal seats in that election. Indeed, Wynne has been emphatic on this point.

As she put it last month: “I have never said this wasn’t a political decision. It was a political decision.” Wynne has also said she wasn’t involved in any decisions or meetings to cancel the Oakville plant in 2010, or the Mississauga plant just two weeks before the Oct. 6, 2011 election, in which she served as the Liberals’ campaign co-chair.

“I was part of the campaign team, but I was not in any of those meetings,” Wynne said.

Given all that, our question is, how is it possible that the Liberals’ campaign co-chair wasn’t involved in a political decision two weeks before the 2011 election to cancel the Mississauga plant, in order to save the political hides of some Liberal MPPs?

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TORONTO — Liar, liar. Gas plants on fire. OK, the gas plants aren’t actually ablaze. They’re being “moved.” We discovered Wednesday that the cost of moving the Oakville plant is nowhere near the lowball $40 million estimate the Liberals have suggested.

Energy expert Bruce Sharp told the legislature’s justice committee probing the cancellation of two gas-fired generating plants in Oakville and Mississauga that costs have been grossly under-reported by the government.

“When we talk about Oakville, my current view is that the total cost of moving that plant is $638 million,” he told the committee.

While there’ll be small savings in some areas, Sharp said increased costs of gas delivery and management will be $313 million and there will be additional transmission costs of $359 million.

Sharp concurred with the $190 million the government said it will cost to move the Mississauga plant, but said the government should have negotiated “at least $28 million lower” for the new gas delivery costs, since they’re moving the plant closer to the Sarnia gas storage facility.

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

Ontario has quietly slowed its green juggernaut

As Ontario’s new premier, Kathleen Wynne, zigzags on the province’s electricity future — at once aligning herself with former premier Dalton McGuinty’s green stance and calling for stronger conservation efforts but also promising to backtrack on developer-friendly rules that cut municipalities out of power plant siting decisions — a shift has quietly been underway in the Liberal government’s energy objectives. Since their last electoral victory in 2011, the Liberals have started throttling back their green-at-any-cost energy vision.

Leading up to the 2011 election, McGuinty’s team published its “Long Term Energy Plan.” That plan embodied a radical shift away from a widespread consensus that had prevailed for over a hundred years that the purpose of Ontario’s power system was to serve consumers.

McGuinty’s new purpose for the power system was to deliver a green-at-any-cost social and economic transformation. The plan anticipated steeply escalating electricity rates. The worst increases — compound annual growth of 7.9% for household consumers — were projected over the period 2011 through 2015.

McGuinty’s last energy minister, Chris Bentley, vigorously promoted the government’s green electricity plan. Last April, for example, he gave a speech at a conference in Toronto for wind and solar power developers.

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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.

Surplus wind power could cost Ontario ratepayers millions and compromise power system, says electricity system operator. It says renewable energy market rules must change

Coping with surplus wind power will cost Ontario electricity ratepayers up to $200 million a year if market rules don’t change, says the power system operator.

Moreover, it says, if it can’t control the flow of wind and solar power onto the Ontario grid, then “reliable and economic operation of the power system is, at best, highly compromised and likely not feasible.”

The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) makes the statements in a filing with the Ontario Energy Board.
It is responding to complaints from big wind power companies that the IESO’s proposals to impose new market rules on wind and solar power will cost them millions in lost revenue.

The dispute comes as more and more renewable power is about to flow onto the province’s power grid. About 2,700 megawatts of wind and solar power are currently feeding electricity into Ontario’s system, three-quarters of it wind. That amount is set to more than triple by January, 2016.

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

When Dalton McGuinty’s government announced in the fall of 2010 that it was cancelling a planned power plant in Oakville in response to intense local opposition, a political staffer in the Ministry of Energy sent an email to the deputy minister to provide the highlights.

“It went as well as it could have,” she noted. Near the end was this kicker: “Financially, it’ll be muddy in the papers tomorrow. Province could be on the hook for millions.”

Those sentences, part of a batch of documents released under freedom-of-information laws to energy researcher and writer Tom Adams, provide a tidy summation of the Ontario Liberal approach to the messy business of the Oakville gas-plant shuttering, and the subsequent cancellation of a Mississauga plant during the 2011 election campaign.

For most of two years, the cost of the Oakville decision was unknown to the public. And from the moment a price tag of $40-million was put on it this past fall, skepticism of that number’s accuracy, and the $190-million figure attached to the Mississauga closure, has abounded.

And with good reason. Last week, when Colin Andersen, chief executive of the Ontario Power Authority, presented himself at Queen’s Park to try to explain the spectacular inefficiency of an OPA document search that has led the Liberals to admit twice now, several months apart, that their release of all the documents related to the gas-plant decisions was in fact only a partial release, he was asked flat-out if it the government’s numbers could be trusted. He responded that he would wait for the Auditor-General’s report on the matter.

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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.

Three years after Ontario signed a $7 billion green energy deal with Samsung, the first projects are in sight. Ontario’s controversial $7 billion deal with Samsung Renewable Energy is running late. And delays in the initial stages of the deal are likely to cascade into further deferrals, the company says.

But in a rare interview, Samsung’s top man in Canada defended the company’s agreement with the province, which has become a lightning rod for critics of the Liberal government’s renewable energy policies. Ki-Jung Kim said that Samsung has been surprised at the length of time it has taken to get regulatory clearance for its wind and solar projects.

With the first two phases of the five-phase mega-project already delayed by a year, Samsung is now negotiating with provincial officials to extend deadlines for completing the other three phases beyond the original date of 2016.

Kim, who is executive vice president for Samsung’s Ontario project, said the company hasn’t wavered in its commitment to green energy. “Samsung is a globally responsible company; we are doing the right things in the right way,” he said.
“Renewable energy we believe is the right thing we have to pursue.”

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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.

In the morning of Jan. 5, workers with a fleet of heavy equipment mounted a stealth assault on a bald eagle’s nest near the shore of Lake Erie. Their mission was to remove the nest – one of only a few dozen bald eagle nests in Southern Ontario – to make way for an access road to the site of a new industrial wind turbine. As a pair of eagles looked on from a nearby tree, the workers sawed off the limb with the giant nest and took it away to parts unknown.

Ontario’s environmental regulations would usually make this illegal. But the wind company, NextEra Energy, one of the biggest operators in the province, had obtained special dispensation.

Wind power is supposed to be environmentally friendly. But a lot of environmentalists don’t think so. “People couldn’t believe it happened,” says Scott Petrie, a waterfowl ecologist and executive director of Long Point Waterfowl, a conservation group. “Cutting down bald eagle nests flies in the face of anything you would call green energy.”

Wind turbines have invaded many of Ontario’s most scenic and ecologically rich areas. They’re invading coastal wetlands and spreading along major migratory flyways – up the Bruce Peninsula, west to Lake Huron, south to Lake Erie, and east to Prince Edward County, where environmental groups are fighting a major wind development in Ostrander Point, an important bird area.

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