New kids on the grid power high-voltage crossroads south of Hamilton
The trouble with electricity: It only gets real at bill time and during blackouts
You are suddenly sitting in the dark.
Electricity stopped for 2,600 customers west of downtown Hamilton two Wednesdays ago after an unfortunate meeting of a bird and high voltage electricity.
The outage lasted four minutes, long enough to provoke thoughts about a system upon which we are deeply dependent, but know little about. Where did the bird die?
The Newton High-Voltage Transformer was the incineration site. But, the yard is owned by Hydro One, whose duty is running the high-voltage lines that criss-cross the province on steel towers.
But who produced the power that fried the poor creature?
Ontario Power Generation produces about half of the power in the province at hydroelectric plants in Niagara, nuclear plants near Toronto and Kincardine as well as in smaller ventures such as the Nanticoke Solar project, which opened in early April near the mothballed coal plant on Lake Erie’s shore.
In its first venture into solar energy, OPG partnered with Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corp. and the Mississauga Credit First Nation to put 192,000 photovoltaic panels on 16 hectares near Port Dover.
Nanticoke Solar has a capacity for 44 megawatts of power. It’s a pittance compared with the 4,000MW of electricity the coalplant produced before it ceased in 2014, but it joins a group of other green energy suppliers that have moved into Haldimand and Niagara.
— Niagara Region Wind Farm, owned by Boralex in partnership with Six Nations, produces 230MW from its 77 turbines on a large patch of farmland south of Smithville. It started producing power in 2017.
— Grand Renewable Solar, a partnership between Samsung Renewable, Pattern Energy and Six Nations, arrived in 2015 with 445,392 solar panels. An associated company operates 67 wind turbines on the South Cayuga site. The combined output of 250MW is enough to light up 77,000 homes.
— In 2013, Summerhaven Wind Energy’s 56 turbines began spinning in the Fisherville area, producing 124MW for owner NextEra Energy. That same year, Port Dover and Nanticoke Wind Project’s 58 turbines came to life on the Erie shore, producing 105MW of electricity for Capital Power Corp.
— The oldest and smallest project on the shore is Mohawk Point. Its six wind turbines started producing 10MW for owner International Power Canada in 2008.
With a combined output capable of running 200,000 homes, these new wind and solar projects plug in next to the grandaddies of hydroelectric power in Niagara.
DeCew sparked to life near St. Catharines in 1898 as a project of Hamilton-based Cataract Power. The five entrepreneurs all named John (Dickenson, Gibson, Moodie, Patterson and Sutherland) set out to transmit power to Hamilton with a breakthrough technology proposed by eccentric genius Nikola Tesla.
Power struggles and blackouts
Nineteenth century celebrations of two-phase, alternating current transmission along the 56-kilometre route were shortlived as the consortium faced
mounting complaints from Hamilton customers literally left in the dark by a service that gave priority to steel and other factories.
Disfavour with the private utility and demand for a fairer means of getting power to new communities led to it coming under public control in the opening years of the 20th century as the Hydro-Electric Power Commission, an early version of monolithic Ontario Hydro.
Safeguards put in place by the North American Electric Reliability Council, formed a few months after a massive blackout in 1965, failed on Aug. 14, 2003, when an undetected and overloaded transmission line in Ohio sparked a chain reaction of blackouts affecting 50 million in Ontario and eight U.S. states.
What were voluntary guidelines became mandatory after 2003 with tougher U.S. legislation and million-dollar-a-day penalties that spilled over to Canada for infractions that include poor tree-trimming under transmission lines.
Today, transmission lines on steel towers cut through Hamilton on their way to the GTA along the Beach Strip and converge at a point near Middleport, where
power merges from Bruce nuclear plant on Lake Huron and Niagara’s hydroelectric giants.
At Baptist Church Road and Regional Road 22, where 500kW and 230kW transmission lines meet, two significant developments underway will add more power to an already high-voltage crossroads.
The first is the completion of a high-voltage transmission line near Caledonia that was abandoned following the 2006 Douglas Creek Estates protests. Towers to Niagara have been completed for years, awaiting the final link.
Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation reached a deal with the Ontario Ministry of Energy and Hydro One in 2017 that would complete the final five kilometres of the Niagara Reinforcement Line along the Highway 6 bypass in Caledonia in exchange for ownership and capacity for renewable energy projects.
And work is expected to begin next year on an underwater electrical link between Ontario and Pennsylvania across Lake Erie to allow 1,000MW of power to move between Nanticoke and Erie, Penn.
The two projects will permit Ontario to sell electricity to U.S. customers when surplus power is available and the Nanticoke switch yard will have a hand in stabilizing the system.
New kids on the grid
The mix of energy production and the range of partnerships has greatly evolved over the past 15 years, when coal was responsible for 19 per cent of electrical power; nuclear, 51 per cent; natural gas, eight per cent; hydroelectric, 22 per cent; and solar, wind and biomass, less than one per cent.
Today the mix is natural gas/ oil, 28 per cent; nuclear, 35 per cent; wind, 12 per cent; hydroelectric, 23 per cent; biofuel, one per cent; and solar, one per cent.
The rising reliance on natural gas as a source of power is as noteworthy as the growth in wind. With Pickering nuclear closing down for good in five years and major refits at Darlington and Bruce reactors, power supply is in transition.
Northland Power is one of a diverse number of gas-power producers. At its location next to the Welland Canal, south of St. Catharines, it produces 285MW of power.
Among Canadian producers, none are more powerful than Brookfield. Subsidiary Brookfield Renewables has grown its portfolio in Ontario from approximately 470MW of hydro in 2000 to 1,450MW of hydro, wind and solar today.
Brookfield Infrastructure paid $4.3 billion for Enbridge’s western Canada pipelines and processing plants and $4.3 billion for heating and cooling service firm Enercare. And Brookfield Business Partners bought nuclear leader Westinghouse Electric from Toshiba for US$4.6 billion.
As for SunEdison, which rocketed solar into the mainstream before burning up, Brookfield brought it back from bankruptcy after taking controlling interest in its core renewable energy assets for $1.7 billion a year back.