Ontario election: The province needs more electric power, cleaner power and cheaper rates. Which party has the answer?
over the next two decades. It’s madness, but popular, so none of the leading parties want to talk about it. Elephant in the room? Where?
The next challenge Ontario faces involves both issues – how to green the grid, without sending electricity costs even higher. Each party has part of an answer, but none is keen to draw too much attention to the difficult choices ahead. The aging Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, source of one-sixth of Ontario’s power, will close in 2025. The Darlington and Bruce stations can run until the 2060s, but refurbishing them means temporary shutdowns, further reducing Ontario’s capacity to generate clean power.
How to fill the gap? The easy option is natural gas, from the relatively new plants built to act as surge power when demand spikes, or when wind and solar are idle because the wind isn’t blowing, or the sun isn’t shining. But a greater reliance on gas means fossil methane replaces zero-emission nuclear – and Ontario’s currently low emissions from electricity could jump fivefold by 2035, according to the Independent Electricity System Operator.
Mr. Ford these days is a lot less ideological about electricity. Why? Business. His April budget praised clean energy and said it was key to drawing global investments, including support for the auto sector to go electric. The budget spoke of letting businesses tap into solar and wind, developing more nuclear power, and spending more than $1-billion on transmission in southwest Ontario to deliver clean power to industry.
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