Wynne making play for more Quebec power?
Soaring electricity rates are sending Liberal support tumbling.
Wind and solar are down and out. Carbon pricing is looming. Nuclear power remains radioactive.
Is there a silver bullet to rescue the Ontario government from its energy morass?
Here’s a hint: Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard is in town Friday with his top ministers for a joint meeting with Kathleen Wynne’s cabinet.
On the agenda: electricity sharing between the two neighbouring provinces.
Quebec comes to the table with a seeming abundance of low-cost, low-carbon hydroelectricity available for export.
Ontario has its back to the wall, weighed down by rising prices and an electricity system that seems out of sync with the times. The wind blows hard when we don’t need it (at night), and doesn’t when we desperately want it. Our gas-fired power plants generate unwanted carbon, and they’re not cheap. Our nuclear reactors cost a bomb — going billions over budget time after time, and imposing radioactive half-life problems for all time.
Why not string a few more wires across the invisible frontier between Quebec and Ontario? Isn’t it time to end decades of de facto electricity separatism here in Ontario that placed a premium on self-sufficiency — in case of Quebec independence — but left us overly dependent on nuclear?
A political rapprochement with Quebec has opened the door to new thinking in Ontario. At a 2014 summit, the two provinces signed an innovative bartering deal to backstop one another during peak periods, allocating a hefty 500-megawatt chunk of capacity as needed (Ontario made it available to Quebec last year for its winter peak, and the roles are reversed for our summer peak).
The two premiers promised to find more synergy on energy in future, and we can expect more progress this week. How much further can they go?
Critics argue that Ontario could easily pull the plug on nuclear power by shifting to long-term imports from Quebec. It sounds like a perfect fit — possibly too perfect to be true.
First, a caveat: One of the biggest complaints about electricity in Ontario is the cost of getting it, not generating it. Transmission costs are skyrocketing as Ontario rebuilds a long-neglected network of infrastructure, forcing the government into a high-wire act to defend itself against charges of incompetence by Hydro One — privatized or preprivatized.
The question of transmission is key if we are to get more Quebec power to where it’s most needed, mostly in the GTA. A 2014 study by the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) for the government concluded that there was “limited opportunity for reliance on significant quantities of long-term firm import arrangements.”
Ontario can’t just flip a switch. Existing connections between Ontario and Quebec were designed for flexible responses to short-term disruptions, leaving “only a portion” available for long-term imports. The alternative is to build new transmission infrastructure, but making that cost-effective requires an attractive export price and enough capacity to displace the 50 to 60 per cent of Ontario’s consumption now supplied by nuclear.
That led the IESO to caution against “paying significantly more for firm imports than could be achieved through addressing supply needs with internal resources.” In other words, not so cheap.
Another problem: Quebec has a handy surplus of power now, but may not have as much excess capacity as demand rises in future.
“Forecasts indicate that there will be insufficient low carbon energy sources in both provinces to meet demand beginning in the mid-2020s,” argues a recent report by Strategic Policy Economics (funded, it must be said, by the pro-nuclear Power Workers Union).
Much of the low-hanging electricity capacity was harvested long ago in Quebec, making the more recent and future hydro projects more expensive than those “heritage” properties. The report concludes that “future imports from Quebec can be expected to be at higher prices.”
Those caveats explain the longstanding disconnect between “environmentalists” on the one hand, and “engineers” on the other: The green camp dreams of “problematic” nuclear being replaced by “perfect” hydroelectricity; the engineering camp counters with a wake-up call that securing a cheap long-term supply is a pipe dream.
It’s a perennial debate, but possibly a sterile one. The Liberal government, like others before it, hews to the Ontario orthodoxy of nuclear as the most reliable and affordable supply of baseload power, despite recurring cost overruns.
It has moved ahead with the Darlington refurbishment and is poised to proceed with Bruce, leaving less room for massive Quebec imports.
Can the two provinces still conjure up future deals that are firm and affordable, allowing Ontario to take a last-minute off-ramp from its nuclear refurbishments down the road?
The only certainty is that electricity complexity always intrudes on interprovincial energy synergy: Not just unpredictability but affordability, proximity and capacity. Martin Regg Cohn’s political column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. mcohn@thestar.ca,