John Spears
Toronto Star
September 15, 2000

Ontario will have a new privately owned, gas- fired electricity generating plant up and running near Sarnia two years from now.

TransAlta Corp. announced yesterday it is going ahead with the $400 million project, which will serve three big local industries but will also feed into the provincial power grid.

The news was welcomed by those who are looking forward to a competitive electricity market in Ontario.

“The more plants we have like this, the better,” said David McFadden, who heads the Stakeholders’ Alliance for Electricity Competition and Customer Choice.

“I’m delighted to see it, and I wish we had more of these things,” agreed Tom Adams of Energy Probe.

Gas-fired plants don’t pour nearly the pollutants into the air that coal-fired plants do; nor do they have the technical and environmental problems besetting nuclear plants.

But Adams noted that originally several big Sarnia-area oil firms had been interested in the project, and was disappointed that they’d dropped out.

TransAlta chief executive Steve Snyder would say only that “plans were discussed with a number of people . . . . Each of them had to make their own economic decision.”

The TransAlta facility will incorporate an existing 210-megawatt generator; TransAlta will add a plant that churns out another 440 megawatts of power for a total of 650 megawatts.

Three Sarnia companies – Bayer, Dow Chemical Canada Inc. and Nova Chemicals (Canada) Ltd. – will buy 150 to 200 megawatts, with the rest going into the Ontario electricity grid.

The plant will be a co-generation facility, producing both electricity and steam. Some of the steam will be used directly by the three main customers, while some will be recycled to produce electricity.

Snyder said in a phone interview that he expects the new plant to be a relatively low-cost electricity producer, despite the rising cost of natural gas.

TransAlta’s experience running other co- generation plants in the province and the fact that it is recycling waste steam will help keep costs low, he said. He added that the firm seeks more Ontario opportunities.

The provincial government has been trying to encourage more firms to produce electricity now that Ontario Hydro has been broken up. Its generating successor, Ontario Power Generation, still produces more than 80 per cent of the province’s requirements.

The TransAlta plant’s 650 megawatts compares with Toronto Hydro’s daily demand of about 4,500 megawatts.

Sithe Inc., a unit of French utility Vivendi SA, is also building two Ontario 800-megawatt gas- fired plants, one in Brampton and one in Mississauga.

Ontario Power Generation said yesterday it will spend $250 million over the next three years to cut nitrogen oxide emissions from three coal- fired plants, including Lakeview Generating Station in Mississauga.