April Lindgren
Ottawa Citizen
April 17, 2003

NIAGARA FALLS, Ont.: More nuclear power plants are one way to avoid electricity shortages that could douse the lights in Ontario this summer and into the future, Premier Ernie Eves said yesterday at a press conference where he confirmed the province plans to deal with immediate, short-term supply problems through the use of temporary, industrial-sized gas and diesel generators.

"We still have to look at every possible source of increased power generation in the province as we go forward, and that includes everything from wind power and biodiesel fuels to large nuclear projects," Mr. Eves said.

The premier’s remarks signal a potential revival for a sector with a rocky history in Ontario. The plants at Pickering, Darlington and Bruce, which have supplied as much as 55 per cent of Ontario’s electricity needs, have been plagued by construction delays and billion-dollar cost overruns. Since their completion over three decades ending in the early 1990s, they have had reliability and safety problems. More recently, the retrofit of four units at the Pickering A station has fallen years behind schedule and is now slated to cost more than $3 billion, triple the original $800-million estimate.

Ontario Power Generation’s problems with nuclear plants have long been cited by the Tories as one reason for introducing private-sector competition into the province’s electricity generating sector. A key aspect of that plan has been to rid OPG of some of its electricity-generating capacity – a goal that to date has resulted in the long-term lease of the Bruce plant to a private-sector consortium.

Yesterday, Mr. Eves raised the possibility that OPG may get back into the nuclear business through some sort of partnership with the private sector. He also downplayed the technical glitches of the past.

"The technologies of today are a lot different than they were. When Pickering was built, each one of those units was built in a different fashion and it was sort of on the cutting edge at the time of what was being done. Obviously if you were doing that today you probably wouldn’t repeat the experiment." In the short term, the premier said the government plans for emergency back-up generators is "prudent."

"It’s not a last-minute scramble at all," said Mr. Eves, who insisted the cost of the government’s plan for generating as much as 400 additional megawatts of power would be "negligible."

"It’s cautious and prudent planning in case we have a summer like last year, or perhaps even hotter."

Although three mothballed nuclear power units – two at the Bruce nuclear plant on Lake Huron and one at the Pickering plant east of Toronto – are expected to come on-line by the end of June, any last-minute delays in the startups will pose major electricity supply problems. The government has been counting on the restart of the units to pump about 2,500 megawatts of power into Ontario’s faltering electricity grid as the summer heat gets under way.

Mr. Eves’ proposals for solving Ontario’s long-term and short-term power problems received scathing reviews.

NDP leader Howard Hampton accused him of "just making up electricity policy on a day-by-day basis."

He said producing power from temporary generators will be hugely expensive and polluting.

"In the summer of 2001, California had to look at them and the California Air Resources Board showed that a one-megawatt diesel generator running for just 250 hours a year would increase the cancer risk (for the surrounding city block) by 50 per cent," said Mr. Hampton, who insisted an aggressive electricity-conservation program that financially rewards consumers for reducing power use would be a better alternative.

Tom Adams, executive director of the energy watchdog group Energy Probe, said it is absurd for the premier to say the plan’s price tag would be negligible.

While Mr. Hampton suggested the costs could be as high as 22 cents per kilowatt hour, Mr. Adams estimated it will be 10 to 12 cents per kilowatt hour.

Currently, Ontario consumers are paying a fixed price of 4.3 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity.

Mr. Adams was also dismissive of the premier’s proposal for more nuclear plants, noting that the cost and delays associated with Pickering A units has done much to undermine the financial viability of OPG.

"The premier doesn’t understand that nukes are the problem not the solution," Mr. Adams said.