Michael Higgins
National Post
May 1, 2003

The Ontario government has started the tendering process for companies to provide emergency electricity power generators as an energy watchdog warned yesterday the stations are likely to be costly diesel units that spew black smoke and are located in residential areas.

One of the tender conditions is that the units must be capable of operating for a maximum of four hours a day between the hours of 7 a.m. and 11 p.m.

Likely sites in Toronto are the Kipling/Dundas intersection and the Leslie/Finch area, said Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, who warned of the pollution danger.

His warning comes as the Attorney-General of New York launches a challenge today under the North American Free Trade Agreement to pressure the federal government to rein in pollution from three coal-fired power plants in Southern Ontario.

Eliot Spitzer will formally complain to the Commission for Environmental Co-operation – the environmental body established by NAFTA – that the federal government is failing to enforce the Canadian Environmental Protection Act and the Canadian Fisheries Act by allowing the power plants to expel pollutants into the air.

The three power plants in question – Nanticoke (on the shore of Lake Erie), Lambton (near Sarnia), and Lakeview (near Toronto) – are all owned by the Ontario government through Ontario Power Generation.

Meanwhile, as part of a "worst-case scenario," Ontario wants to set up temporary power stations to ensure the province’s over-worked electricity grid does not suffer blackouts this year.

The province wants temporary generating units to be operating by summer and able to provide 200 to 400 megawatts of power.

Dan Miles, a spokesman for John Baird, the Minister of Energy, said, "Our preference and our priority is clean and green power." He said the reason for the competitive process was to see who would come forward to provide the temporary generators and where.

"I think location is also something that will be determined through the competitive process," Mr. Miles said. "The temporary generators are strictly a backup, a prudent move that we should prepare for in a worst-case scenario."

However, Mr. Adams said, "The generation that they are going to add to the system is going to be very costly, the fuel efficiency will be very low, the fuel is likely to be mostly from diesel-generated resources, and most of it is likely to be located in urban centres."

He said the new power units could be expected to look like an industrial site or a parking lot with a row of big trailers.

"They’ll have these screaming generators on them, diesel-fired machines that will be quite noisy up close. They’ll have low stacks, low exhaust pipes from the generators and there’ll be black smoke pouring out of them," he said.

Ontario faced record high temperatures last summer and the province was forced to import 21% of its electricity during peak periods to prevent blackouts and brownouts.

In March, record cold temperatures sent electricity consumption soaring and forced the Independent Electricity Market Operator, which regulates wholesale electricity, to issue a rare "power warning."

It is expected Ontario will have three nuclear units back on line shortly to add to the power supply, but Mr. Adams expressed doubts about their reliability.

He said Pickering Unit 4 was originally expected back on line in December, 2000. It is now scheduled to open in June.

Bruce Unit 4 was expected back on line in April but is now expected to be operating by the end of this month. Bruce Unit 3 is expected to be operational by June.

"These three reactors when operating last, back in the mid-90s, were very unreliable stations and I think the government is expecting them to be very reliable," Mr. Adams said.