Coal plants will pay carbon price during phase-out

OTTAWA Coal-fired power plants in Canada will pay to keep polluting once the federal government imposes a carbon price but, like other heavy emitters in Canada, they won’t pay for every tonne of greenhouse gas they produce.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna says the final regulations for the emissionpricing system for big industry are still in development but insists coal plants will pay a carbon price until national regulations force the plants out of existence by 2030.

“We’re absolutely committed to phasing out coal,” McKenna said Friday. “We’ve said that. We’re taking practical measures to do that.”

The government’s aim is by 2030 to ensure all of Canada’s 17 existing coal plants will either stop operating entirely, be converted to natural gas, or use technologies like carbon capture and storage to make their net greenhouse gas emissions virtually zero. However, Ottawa is still negotiating with provinces that have coal plants on how they will be phased out and whether they will be allowed to keep operating any of them by reducing equivalent emissions elsewhere.

In 2016, Canada had 16 coal generating stations, which operated 36 generators in five provinces. At least 20 of those generators are scheduled be taken offline by 2030.

Alberta, which has 18 generators and accounts for almost half of the emissions from coal plants, is building new solar and wind generators to replace about two-thirds of its coal plants. The others will be converted to natural gas, which produces about half the carbon dioxide produced by burning coal.

Under the carbon price system for big emitters, plants will not pay the $20-pertonne carbon price on all of the coal they burn to generate electricity. Rather, they will be affected by the carbon pricing system for big emitters, which applies the price only to a portion of the emissions they produce.

Conservative Finance Critic Pierre Poilievre says this plan exempts the biggest polluters from paying their fair share of the carbon price, and instead saddles soccer moms and grandmothers on fixed incomes with a far bigger burden.

In question period this week, he demanded the government explain why they are “charging more to grandmothers driving to get groceries but almost nothing to coal-fired plants.”

“If the carbon tax really was about saving the world, we would presume the largest industrial emitters of carbon would have to pay it,” Poilievre said.

The big emitters’ pricing system will see an emissions cap set for every industry based on the average emissions produced by that sector, with industry paying the carbon tax on emissions over that cap.

For most industries, including coal plants, the cap will be 80 per cent of the average. For industries that are more exposed to foreign competition, like cement, steel, nitrogen fertilizer and lime, the cap will be 90 per cent. Additional industries, like oil and gas, are lobbying to be included in the 90 per cent group and final decisions on that are to come early in 2019.