New gas plants facing renewed scrutiny

Sarnia-area facility asked to supply power to grid just 33 days last year

Seven years after sparking a major scandal that culminated in last week’s criminal conviction of a former top Dalton McGuinty aide, two gas plants are back on the radar as critics question the need for them.

The natural gas-fired power plants abruptly axed in Mississauga and Oakville by the former premier before the 2011 election have since found new life near Sarnia and Napanee at a cost of over $1billion — but as demand for electricity declines.

Now known as the Green Electron power plant, the Sarnia-area facility began operating in March and was called upon to supply power to the grid just 33 days last year, according to official figures from the provincial Independent Electricity System Operator.

Still under construction, the Napa- nee Generating Station isn’t slated to begin providing electricity until late this year. It is located next door to an older power plant, which also doesn’t run often.

“These are just monuments to the Liberals looking after themselves,” New Democrat MPP Peter Tabuns (Toronto-Danforth), his party’s energy critic, says of the two new facilities.

Opposition parties have long accused McGuinty of scrapping the locally unpopular plants to save Liberal seats at public expense in the 2011 vote that reduced his government to a minority. The former premier has stated the sites ended up being too close to residential areas.

Ontario’s auditor general concluded in 2013 that cancelling the plants and moving them to new locations as part of costly legal settlements with their private builders, TransCanada in Napanee and Eastern Power in Sarnia, could cost up to $1.1 billion over 20 years.

Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault maintains the plants are still needed for two reasons: as back-ups to help keep the lights on in the event other plants fail; and when power demand peaks, as in September’s unexpected heat wave following a cool summer. “We do need redundancy but we also need to ensure that we constantly meet the demands … we do have times in the winter and, especially in the summer, there are times, many times, when everything we have is going and we’re pulling in (electricity) from other jurisdictions.”

Progressive Conservative energy critic Todd Smith insists the gas plants court case will serve as a reminder to voters with the June 7 provincial election approaching.

“I think there were a lot of people last Friday when the court ruling came down that went, ‘oh yeah, that was still going on?’”

One-time McGuinty chief of staff David Livingston was found guilty of a “scorched earth” scheme to delete documents in the wake of the gas plants controversy before Premier Kathleen Wynne took power from McGuinty in February 2013.

“It makes people mad, obviously. And as much as there was a guilty verdict in that trial, we’re not getting that $1-plus-billion back. That’s gone,” adds Smith, MPP for Prince Edward-Hastings. “Where does that end up? On your electricity bill.”

The plants are coming on line as demand for electricity has been steadily falling for years, to 132.1terawatt hours last year from 153.4 TWh in 2004. A terawatt hour is equivalent to one trillion watts consumed in one hour.

But Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator, which runs Ontario’s day-to-day power needs, says it is looking ahead because power needs must be planned years in advance to avoid energy shortages.

“We’re always trying to anticipate demand,” spokesperson Jordan Penic said. “The gas facilities are going to be used more over the refurbishment period,” he adds, referring to major upgrades of nuclear reactors at the Darlington and Bruce stations.

“We see needs arising in the electricity system in the early 2020s.”

New locations for the scrapped Mississauga and Oakville plants were chosen because a coal-fired generating station was shutting down near Sarnia, meaning there was room to hook up a new plant to major transmission lines already in the area.

Ditto with the Napanee plant, next door to Ontario Power Generation’s Lennox station near Lake Ontario along a major hydro transmission corridor that can ship the power to the Greater Toronto Area where it’s needed, Penic says.

Conservative MPP Randy Hillier, whose riding of Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington includes the Napanee plants, bristles at that logic.

“They cancel the plant down in Oakville where there’s big demand, and they relocate it to eastern Ontario where there’s no demand, beside an existing generating station that they don’t really use.”

Tabuns notes the costs of operating the plants fall on hydro ratepayers as soon as they begin supplying the grid.