Joe Schneider
Bloomberg.com
June 15, 2005

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty pushed back plans to close the last of the province’s coal-fired power plants until 2009, breaking a campaign pledge that helped get him elected two years ago.

Keeping the Nanticoke plant running two years longer than promised is necessary to ensure the province doesn’t run out of power while it develops alternative energy sources, Energy Minister Dwight Duncan said today at a Toronto news conference.

"Maintaining reliability is the first principle of our plan," he said.

The delay marks another broken promise for McGuinty, 49, who failed to honor vows made during the 2003 election campaign to balance the budget and keep taxes in check. Coal-fired plants produce about a quarter of the electricity consumed each day in Ontario, Canada’s most populous province.

The Nanticoke station, located near Toronto, can produce as much as 3,920 megawatts of electricity, or enough to power 3.1 million average homes. Demand during normal weather in July and August demand is forecast to peak at 24,500 megawatts and at 26,143 megawatts on hotter-than-usual days, the Independent Electricity System Operator has forecast.

The province probably won’t even meet the new deadline, said Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, a Toronto researcher that advocates energy conservation. Aging nuclear power plants will have to be taken out of service for refurbishment and the province will need the energy from the coal-fired plant to meet demand, he said. Nuclear plants account for about a third of capacity.

Other Generators

The government also said today that it plans to replace two generators at the 310-megawatt Thunder Bay coal-fired plant with natural gas in 2007. The Atikokan coal-fired station, which can generate 215 megawatts, will close in 2007. Both plants are in northwestern Ontario. The Lambton generating station, south of Sarnia, Ontario, will also close in 2007, Duncan said. The plant can generate 1,975 megawatts.

Ontario plants can produce as much as 29,663 megawatts, which includes 6,416 megawatts from four coal-fired plants.

Duncan also ordered the government-run Ontario Power Authority to start talks with power producers about purchasing additional electricity to replace the energy from the coal-fired plants.

TransAlta Corp., the country’s biggest publicly owned power generator, said today that it’s interested in selling electricity from its gas-fired plant near Sarnia, Ontario.

The two-year-old C$490 million, plant produces about 216 megawatts of electricity, less than half its 575-megawatt capacity. TransAlta sells energy from the plant to industrial plants in the region.