Thomas Adams

During Quebec’s brutal January ice storm, the residents of Kingsey Falls and four neighbouring municipalities suffered only relatively minor power disruptions. Except for two days without power at the start of the storm, the townsfolk remained lit and the main local employer, a forest products company, remained in operation. Kingsey Falls was an island of security and normality in an ocean of cold darkness because of cogeneration, a decentralized technology environmentalists have long promoted. During the crisis, the company’s natural gas-fired power station delivered electricity directly to the local communities while keeping the industry supplied with electricity and heat.

If Canada’s electricity systems had developed competitively instead of being distorted by unaccountable monopolies, they would have been more resilient, and this January’s ice storm would have caused a small fraction of the destruction. To prevent more man-made calamities in future, we need to break up the large centralized monopolies that make us so vulnerable to the elements. Next time, calamity might hit B.C. or Manitoba, whose power systems are just as vulnerable as those that collapsed in the east.

Everywhere in the world where monopolies are broken up, environmentally preferable technologies such as natural gas cogeneration replace nuclear, coal, and monster dams. Once Canadian jurisdictions allow competition, small power plants will spring up in shopping centres, factories, hospitals, apartment buildings, and office complexes. So too will new hydro-electric power at hundreds of small sites, and wind power, which has been largely ignored to date. Instead of a landscape dominated by remote megaprojects supplying distant communities via very few, very fragile transmission corridors, power plants will exist throughout our communities. Both their diversity and their proximity to users will improve resilience.

As if to prove that this economically and environmentally preferable option will never occur as long as the monopolies are in charge, Hydro Québec is responding to the horrific blackout by further centralizing its system, with new transmission corridors carrying more power from more remote generating stations.

Energy Probe’s fight with our power monopolies on reliability, environmental protection, and cost is starting to yield successes:

• During the ice crisis Ontario’s energy minister, whose government has recently adopted as policy many of Energy Probe’s proposals to bring competition to its electricity sector, acknowledged that a decentralized system would have resulted in much less disruption for customers;

   

• NB Power’s official plans are starting to address the issues of competition for the first time; and

  LI>Competitive pressures are playing a key role in forcing nuclear reactors to be shut down in Ontario.

If you support our efforts promoting environmentally responsible, reliable, and decentralized power systems, please send us a generous, tax-deductible donation. With your help, we’ll bring about a sustainable energy future.

Sincerely,

Thomas Adams
Executive Director