Rob Ferguson
Toronto Star
February 27, 2002

The payback for installing costly pollution-eating scrubbers at Ontario’s coal-fired electricity plants is "not very good" given their limited life span, the head of Ontario Power Generation says.

It would take "three or four years" to get scrubbers running and cost between $500 million and $1.5 billion at a time when the plants are expected to close within seven years, chief executive Jim Hankinson said.

The math doesn’t add up, Hankinson said after testifying before a legislative committee yesterday, acknowledging the decision is up to the provincial government and "not my call."

"If you assume that they close down in 2014 . . . obviously the payback would not be very good from an economic point of view," he told reporters.

Energy Minister Dwight Duncan is waiting for a recommendation from the Ontario Power Authority on whether to install more scrubbers on the coal-fired electricity plants at Lambton, near Sarnia, and Nanticoke, south of Hamilton.

That recommendation is expected this spring.

Duncan and the governing Liberals have come under fire from the opposition parties and environmental groups for breaking their promises to close the coal-fired plants, first in 2007 and then in 2009.

There are now scrubbers on two of the four smokestacks at Lambton and on two of eight stacks at the Nanticoke station.

The power authority has already recommended the coal-fired plants close in 2011 but be kept available for use until 2014 as a contingency plan in case increased nuclear, wind, natural gas and other power sources fall short of demand.

But Tom Adams of Energy Probe called those dates into question, saying he doubts they are realistic given that natural gas is now five times more expensive than coal.

That increases the likelihood coal plants will remain as a source of reasonably priced power and makes it "highly questionable" to operate coal-fired plants without more scrubbers.

"Not installing them just exposes us to more pollution that we don’t need," he said after appearing before the committee.

Hankinson told MPPs on the committee that more scrubbers on two coal-fired plants could "very significantly" reduce toxic emissions.

However, scrubbers do not limit the amount of carbon dioxide – a greenhouse gas blamed for global warming – that the coal plants produce, he noted.

And Hankinson suggested putting more scrubbers on the plants at Lambton and Nanticoke might not have a huge impact on air quality in Ontario.

"You have to bear in mind that 50 per cent of the smog in our air shed comes from the United States, 23 per cent comes from transportation, 7 per cent comes from OPG’s power production."

But if Duncan wants scrubbers on the remaining stacks, the government had better be prepared to help out financially because Crown-owned Ontario Power Generation, which had a profit of $490 million last year, can’t afford them on its own, Hankinson said.

"We would want to be compensated," he told the committee, noting that revenues from coal plants have been shrinking as the utility uses them less to produce power with more nuclear and other forms of power available.

The scrubbers on two stacks at the Lambton plant make them among the cleanest of the 475 coal-fired electricity plants in North America, but Ontario will lose that edge in the next five years or so as more U.S. coal-fired plants install and update scrubbers, Hankinson said.

"There’s a huge effort being made in the U.S. to clean up their coal plants," he told reporters.

"They get something like 50 per cent or more of their generation from coal and they intend that to be the way of the future, so they are moving aggressively to clean up their plants."

Ontario gets just over 25 per cent of its power from coal, down from 31 per cent in 2005.