Pickering picks pocketbooks

Queen’s Park has been busy looking for ways to lower hydro bills for irate ratepayers, but it has missed the elephant in the room — the Pickering nuclear plant.

Pickering was initially planned to close in 2020, but Ontario Power Generation (OPG) — the provincially owned generation company — is now proposing to spend more than $300 million to keep four of the plant’s units running until 2024 and two until 2022. While OPG and the province’s energy planning agency say that keeping the reactors running for four more years will be a net benefit to ratepayers, those “benefits” are built on sand. Feeding this white elephant could easily cost ratepayers more than half a billion dollars.

First, there’s the simple fact that, according to OPG’s own study comparing the performance of its nuclear reactors to others in North America, Pickering is a worst-in-class generator. When benchmarked against other nuclear facilities, Pickering’s six reactors consistently come in dead last or near the bottom of the pack in terms of reliability and cost.

Two of Pickering’s six reactors rank dead last on a key performance measure known as the “unit capability factor,” which measures the amount of power a generator produces compared to its nameplate generation. None of Pickering’s other four reactors land in the top half of the table. OPG even admits that, given Pickering’s design, it will never be anything more than a laggard in terms of performance when compared to other nuclear plants.

Pickering also rarely meets its generation targets. In OPG’s recently released 2016 annual report, Pickering’s time spent offline was higher than originally forecast.

Not only do Pickering’s nuclear reactors perform units open for longer.

The main justification to do so is largely based on a cost-benefit analysis done by the province’s energy planning agency, the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO). IESO’s analysis is larded with a number of assumptions that, just a year and a half later, look optimistic and tilted in Pickering’s favour.

For example, the analysis compares the cost of power from Pickering to natural gas generators based on a gas price that — using current market expectations