Energy Probe

Dana Flavelle and Madhavi Acharya-Tom Yew
Toronto Star
August 16, 2003

Inability to store electricity part of complex challenge Rolling blackouts likely to persist over weekend

When electrical power fails as it did Thursday afternoon across a large swath of Ontario and the northeastern United States, it can take days to restore and large cities, like Toronto, are usually among the last to regain service.

"We’re now expecting it to take until Monday (to get power fully restored in the city)," said Karen Evans, a spokesperson for Toronto Hydro, the local utility that supplies 655,000 customers in Canada’s largest and most demanding power market.

By late yesterday afternoon, the city had regained between 80 and 90 per cent of normal service, but isolated pockets remained in the dark, and rolling blackouts meant some areas that had electricity lost it for up to two hours.

The city began receiving limited emergency supplies of electricity on Thursday night around 10 p.m. for use by essential services such as hospitals, police, fire and ambulance stations, and water treatment plants, she said.

Homes and businesses connected to lines serving essential services also got service just because they happened to be on the route, Evans said.

But service was fleeting in cases as some areas that initially got power later lost it, she said.

"As people woke up (yesterday) morning and started turning on their lights, more power was demanded. We couldn’t meet the demand so we had outages," said Evans.

In other cases, Toronto was forced to give up supply to meet demand in other parts of the province, another Toronto Hydro spokesperson, Blair Peberdy, explained late yesterday.

Rolling blackouts, as they’re called, are expected to persist over the weekend as the Independent Electricity Market Operator, which manages the grid across the province, continues to adjust the supply to meet demand. The blackouts shouldn’t last more than about two hours, Peberdy said.

Areas considered essential are less likely to get hit, Peberdy said. They include hospitals and other emergency services such as fire, police and ambulance stations, followed by critical municipal services, such as water pumping stations, then the Toronto Transit Commission, and finally major office towers and shopping centres. Downtown is given priority.

But Toronto Hydro is just one piece of the puzzle. When it comes to restoring power, a huge part of the challenge comes from the nature of electricity itself, experts said.

Think of electricity as a commodity that is manufactured, much like steel or lumber. But unlike other commodities, electricity can’t be stored. It’s produced at the very instant when it’s needed. The lines that transmit power across the province serve as a dedicated point-to-point delivery system. Demand, or load, must be perfectly balanced with supply, or generation, or there’s trouble — quick.

Most electrical systems operate on alternating current, which must be maintained at a constant speed of 60 Hertz, or 60 cycles per second. If demand exceeds supply it’s like flushing a toilet while taking a shower — the flow of electricity slows. If supply exceeds demand, the flow speeds up.

Few electrical appliances can tolerate even small variations, leading to fried computers, fridges and power generating equipment. That’s why most transmission systems are designed to protect electrical equipment by disconnecting generators from the grid when demand and supply get too far apart, said Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe.

"If they don’t, there will be damage to the system and they won’t be able to bring it back even in 24 or 36 hours," said David Drinkwater, energy consultant and former chief economist at Ontario Hydro.

In fact, an imbalance in the system is what caused Thursday night’s blackout in the first place, experts agree, though no one can agree on where or how the upset began. All that’s certain is that once the problem started it "cascaded" through the vast interconnected transmission systems that serve most of Ontario and the northeastern U.S., knocking out service to some 50 million people.

Once a massive failure has occurred, getting power back up from a "black start" is a tricky business, experts said.

First, Ontario has to be isolated from the other states and provinces that share the northeastern grid. Then specific communities are isolated from the rest of the province because power must be restored gradually to keep supply and demand in balance.

It starts with the handful of generating plants that have their own backup power. The rest join the grid after power begins humming along the transmission lines. The last to come on line are the nuclear generating stations since restarting them is a technologically trickier process. Ontario’s nuclear stations account for up to 25 per cent of the province’s supply

Initially, power is added in very small increments, as little as 10 megawatts every 10 minutes, a pace Adams called "glacial" for a system that was running 24,000 megawatts when it shut down.

As supply is increased, it must be matched by demand. At first, that might mean a single row of streetlights is added, then a neighbourhood, then a small community. There’s little room for error and lots of potential for setbacks, experts said.

"I would compare it to being parked beside the 401 and having to go from a dead stop to full highway speed. You’ve got very little tolerance depending on whose fenders you want to bounce off," said Drinkwater.

Toronto is one of the last to get service because it is so large, said Toronto Hydro’s Evans.

"We don’t have priority because of the balancing issues. When you only have so much power available, you tend to target the areas of lower demand because excess demand is what causes failure," Evans said.

The supply of electricity in Ontario involves a number of players, including Ontario Power Generation, which runs most of the generating plants, and Hydro One, which operates most of the transmission lines that run between cities.

Overseeing it all is the Independent Electricity Market Operator, commonly called the IMO, which acts like a broker or middleman. It doesn’t own any facilities but is responsible for matching supply with demand.

The non-profit organization decides when and how much power each part of the province, including Toronto, will receive. In an emergency, supply is distributed based on need, said Toronto Hydro’s Evans. Carefully worked-out protocols determine who’s first in line, Evans said. The IMO has so far refused to make this information public.

However, when Toronto Hydro officials realized Thursday night that the city was too far down the priority list to maintain its essential services, it appealed to the IMO for help.

"The IMO recognized we have essential services in the city, so we got power earlier than we expected," Evans said.

Nancy Gibbs
Nancy Gibbs
August 17, 2003

First the good news: the biggest blackout ever in North America brought out the best in millions of citizens. Now the bad: it exposed a woefully fragile electrical system. How did it happen? And how vulnerable are we to another shutdown?

We learn most about power when we lose it and are left eating cereal by candlelight on the front stoop. Or helping the waiter and the hairdresser and the deaf man direct traffic at the intersection. Or meeting an elderly neighbor for the first time when we stop to deliver some water. One woman who had lived in Manhattan for 40 years saw the Big Dipper for the first time. You could see Mars hanging over midtown. Outside a Tribeca bar, a patrol car cruising by turned on the bullhorn: "Attention! Make sure you drink your beer before it gets warm." There turn out to be some things you can see only when the lights go out.

Some cities still carry scars from past blackouts that turned into festivals of looting and despair. But it was clear that we are living in new times, when at 4:09 Thursday afternoon the power flickered and died in the largest black-out in North American history, and instead of exploding, the cities fell quiet. Horns didn’t honk. Though there were nasty exceptions here and there, shopkeepers didn’t gouge, and windows didn’t shatter, and most of the fires were coming off grills. Ottawa saw more looting than Detroit or Toledo. The latest test of people’s nerve and grace found them equipped with both.

In Toronto, delis and store owners sold bottles of water for less than the usual price; people shared cabs in the city and cell phones at the airport, and one theater company moved its performance out onto the street by the light of a pair of parked cars with their high beams on. In Ohio the Akron Beacon Journal printed a special edition of its rival, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, whose editors typed up reporters’ notes by flashlight. Modell’s sporting-goods company parked two trucks stocked with 2,000 pairs of shoes in Times Square and handed them out to stranded people walking home. In Harlem a group of church ladies in large hats outside a small Pentecostal church set up a card table with cups and plastic pitchers of iced tea and lemonade; they were giving drinks away.

Maybe people didn’t panic because word went out so quickly from every public official from President Bush on down that there was no evidence of any kind of attack. There was no sign of a bomb or a break-in, and for anyone concerned that it might have been a more subtle, cyberterrorist assault, Michehl Gent, president and CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), offered soothing words. "It’s virtually impossible to get into a system without leaving some tracks," he said.

Though officials were quick to say what hadn’t happened, they were at a loss to explain what had. How can the power demands of a not unusually hot day somehow bring a huge chunk of the northeastern electrical grid crashing down? The blame cascaded as fast as the blackout. On the ground some Americans blamed Canada for its origin; Canadians returned the favor. Ottawa officials first suggested that it was a lightning strike at a plant in upstate New York, except that it was a lovely sunny day in Niagara Falls, and there were no reports of lightning anywhere. In the end, the two governments announced a joint task force to investigate, and President Bush said he would look into "why the cascade was so significant, why it was able to ripple so significantly throughout our system." But finding answers may mean reviewing yet again the lessons learned from four historic power failures going back to the 1960s, looking at the weird rules that govern how power companies invest their money, and confronting the evidence that an antique grid of twigs and twine cannot meet the demands of 21st century consumers, much less protect itself from anyone who might actually set out to bring it down.

Experts will have to wade through 10,000 pages of of log data before they can say exactly how the disaster started, but they had a pretty good idea why: the electrical system in the Northeast and Midwest consists of a lot of capacity to generate power and too few means of moving it around smoothly. Over the past 10 years, electricity demand has jumped 30%, but transmission capacity has increased only half that much. Because everything is tied together, too much strain in one place can cause the whole system to snap. Officials learned that lesson in the blackouts of 1965, and 38 years later, they learned that all the safeguards put in place ever since may no longer be adequate for the job.

In the olden days – say, the 1930s – electricity was generated by coal-burning or hydroelectric plants located a short distance from the people who would use it. That meant when problems hit, the lights went out locally, even if locally meant a large city. But in the 1970s new federal utility laws threw transmission lines open to all comers. Now utilities could get their power wherever it was cheapest, even if that meant it had to travel farther: power generated in Alabama is sold to Vermont. The nation’s power grid – the vast system of lines, transformers and switching stations – was never designed to move electricity long distances, let alone "from Maine to Miami," points out Terry Boston of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

That said, even the experts were surprised by the speed and breadth of last week’s failure. It began, according to Gent, with an immense buckle in the system, when a still mysterious event – three transmission lines near Cleveland failing – began pulling down parts of the grid. A broken alarm at First Energy, a northern Ohio utility, may have allowed too much to go wrong before technicians noticed. The loss in power soon forced as much as 5,000 megawatts – almost enough to power Nevada for a day – that had been moving west to east to suddenly change direction. The reversal happened so fast that operators did not have time to react, and within about 10 seconds, vast sections of the grid were overwhelmed. The failed lines in Ohio started a cascade that was able to crash more than 100 power plants, including 22 nuclear plants in the U.S. and Canada, despite a structure designed specifically with such a danger in mind. "There are so many systems in place to prevent this kind of thing from happening," says Maria Zazzera, a former utility manager who worked for the New York Power Authority for 21 years. "I know people whose whole lives are dedicated to the reliability of this system. They do drills. They have procedures in place."

Those procedures were meant to isolate problems and keep them from spreading. Because supply and demand need to match up for the system to work, relay mechanisms throughout the grid continuously monitor the flow of power. If there is a sudden failure for some reason, like a lightning strike on a transmission tower, circuit breakers open, and the sector unhinges itself from the grid. This process is called islanding; the goal is to contain the glitch by sealing it off from the rest of the network.

When that happens, it creates a hole; the network is programmed to quickly either pick up power from other sources or shed load, meaning purposely shut off power in one part of the grid to protect the rest of it. That’s one reason suburbs are more likely than urban centers to suffer brownouts: to protect commerce and hospitals in the most densely populated areas. But to work, any shift has to happen very fast, in real time, says Zazzera, "and nobody likes to drop load. You never want it to go black because you have to report it to your regulatory commission. You get in trouble; it’s difficult to start up again." In this case, there may never have been time to make a decision. In past blackouts, there was a window of as much as 45 minutes to try to adjust to a deviation. This one moved across hundreds of miles in seconds.

The fallout could have been worse. If you lived in Vermont, you could even say that the system worked. By quickly unplugging itself from power feeds from New York, the state was spared the same fate. Down in Chattanooga, Tenn., when engineers at the Tennessee Valley Authority operations center saw transmission flows spike, they managed to program their generators to slow down and stabilize the flow of electricity; that and a system of circuit breakers in Ohio stopped the crash from spreading south.

Vast amounts of money and time have gone into solving the problem of such chain reactions ever since the legendary blackout of November 1965, when an overloaded relay switch near Toronto left 30 million people without power all through New England and down to New York City. In those days, people wondered whether the Russians had attacked. That experience frightened the industry into the creation of the NERC., an industry group that sets standards for the whole transmission system. The NERC set up the system for quarantining sick plants so that if one failed, it would not infect the others. The council also hoped to coordinate utilities’ investments in maintaining the grid. "We had a cascading failure of great interest in 1965, and then we spent a whole bunch of money to make sure it didn’t happen again," observes Norm Rubin senior policy analyst for Energy Probe in Toronto. "They obviously didn’t get 100% at it."

Even with safeguards in place, there were other problems to contend with. That was made clear in July 1977, when a lightning bolt in northern Westchester County, N.Y., knocked out two transmission lines. Within an hour New York City sealed itself off electrically from the larger grid, but since the city does not generate enough power internally to sustain itself, 9 million people lost power, some for more than a day. Nor were the failures limited to the Northeast. In July 1996, some 2 million customers from Nebraska to Washington State to Baja California Norte in Mexico lost power when a 345 kilovolt line was shorted out by a tree in Idaho. A mechanical glitch shut down a parallel line, setting off the wider collapse. The industry learned to trim trees near power lines.

So what happened last week was a nasty reminder, not a complete surprise to electricity-industry types. Whatever safety margin was built into the system has been eaten away by lack of investment in modernization. "This is the fourth catastrophic failure of the central power grid within the last decade," says Kyle Datta, managing director of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s consulting practice, "and yet decision makers are not learning the right lessons from these crises." One such lesson is that it doesn’t matter how much power you can generate if you can’t deliver it reliably to the people who need it.

And here a combination of market forces, political foot dragging and the reluctance of people to welcome the arrival of high-voltage lines or towers in their backyards has made it almost impossible to create a transmission system that can keep up with demand. There is little incentive for utilities to erect new towers, especially after new federal rules in the late 1980s effectively capped the return on such investments at roughly 11%. One fight between West Virginians, who don’t want ugly transmission lines, and Virginians, who need power, has been going on for 12 years. By 1999 transmission investment was less than half the $5 billion it had been 20 years earlier. And Enron’s collapse didn’t exactly help make utility investment attractive. As energy policy was assembled piece by piece, there was both too little regulation and too much: no one was requiring the utilities to upgrade the grid, and utilities were worried that if they did it voluntarily, they might not be allowed to charge enough to make their money back.

"We have known for a long time now, a decade, that the utility industry is underinvesting in the reliability of the grid," says Charles Curtis, a Deputy Energy Secretary under President Clinton. "We can’t tolerate a system that’s this brittle. The social and economic costs are terrific." Congress has tried writing energy legislation that would give the NERC federal authority to enforce grid standards, and the Administration wants to provide financial incentives for putting up more wires. But so far, such language has not made it into law because it has always come bundled with other energy initiatives that are deal breakers, like opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil development. When New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who made the rounds of talk shows last week declaring the U.S. was "a superpower with a Third World grid," was Energy Secretary during the Clinton Administration, a blue-ribbon commission identified several areas of the country that had transmission problems. Congress effectively ignored the report.

"Congress has pretty much neglected the day-to-day operation of the system because we’re so focused on this religious battle over whether to deregulate or not deregulate," says a House energy expert. And it has been hard to get lawmakers to override vocal constituents. "If the accepted policy continues to be ‘Not in my backyard,’" says Ken Johnson, a spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, "there are going to be a whole lot of people walking home from closed businesses to dark houses in the future."

Last week’s crisis looked sure to change the landscape when lawmakers return next month and take up competing versions of an energy bill that gives the NERC enforcement power and encourages states to coordinate their electricity policies in wider regions – not to mention $13 billion in goodies for the oil, gas and nuclear industries. g.o.p. Congressman Billy Tauzin, who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, also announced that it will launch an investigation into what happened.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who walks the streets in Rudy Giuliani’s large shoes, began his mayoral training years ago on the trading floors of Wall Street, where an ability to stay calm amid chaos can make you very, very rich. That skill set served him well in those first blackout hours, as he briefed White House chief of staff Andrew Card; assembled his police and fire chiefs; phoned the head of Consolidated Edison, New York’s power company; and declared that terrorism was not involved, soothing the city’s nerves. Bloomberg advised people to treat Friday as a snow day—a charming image on a day when temperatures were heading into the 90s. He asked essential workers to go in but everyone else to stay home: "There are worse things than taking a summer Friday off from work."

That’s because by then he and the other big-city mayors knew that there were no quick, easy fixes. Getting a power system up and running after a blackout – called a black start – involves much more than just flipping a switch. Power-generating units have to be brought online one at a time. If one power plant were brought up with all of Toledo waiting with its air conditioners in the on position, it would just shut down again. So technicians have to carve up cities into electrically isolated pieces and bring each neighborhood back up one by one in bite-size chunks that the system can handle. As they build more and more islands, they can start to string them together, but try to move too fast, and the whole thing goes dark again.

Nuclear-power plants usually take at least 24 hours to restart. In the meantime, the cities had no choice but to cope as best they could – get the sanitation workers out to harvest the remains of every dead refrigerator, get the buses and trains moving. Ohio Governor Bob Taft declared a state of emergency in Cleveland after all four pumping stations that lift water out of Lake Erie went out and residents were ordered to boil their water at least through Sunday. Even the beaches were off limits for swimming after a sewage discharge sent bacteria levels soaring. At least one house fire in the city was blamed on burning candles.

By nightfall in many places, time seemed to be moving backward, back to the days of candlelight and carriages and cigar boxes as cash registers, when ice cream sold for a nickel a scoop. As it grew darker, many of the bars in New York City even went back to the days when people were allowed to smoke indoors, in the belief that the police had better things to worry about than enforcing the new ban. Tourists curled up on the street in Times Square, on library steps and in hotel ballrooms; city residents slept on their roofs, where it was cooler. By morning you could buy T-shirts reading where were you when the lights went out? with the date, confirming New York’s position as the capital of capitalism. Meanwhile, half a world away, the few residents of Baghdad who had electricity sat stuck to their TV sets, watching the superpower grope in the dark. "We stayed up for an hour watching it," said a taxi driver, "until the electricity shut down."

Janet McFarland
Globe and Mail
August 18, 2003

North America will see more power outages unless it deals not only with the engineering flaws that allowed last week’s blackout to spread within seconds across Ontario and eight U.S. states, but also with the policy flaws that have left electricity systems routinely on the knife edge of capacity.

Almost instantly, experts were debating how North American jurisdictions can boost their generating capacity, improve inadequate transmission systems and even restructure the basic architecture of how electricity is supplied to consumers.

The blackout has especially rekindled the debate in Ontario, where the provincial government last year sidelined its project to deregulate the retail electricity market, announcing a price cap on retail electricity rates. Private companies have suspended their plans to build new power plants in the province, saying the capped rate is not enough to cover costs.

Ontario New Democratic Party Leader Howard Hampton said that the power failure that swept across the province demonstrates the need to keep electricity in government hands.

"It’s too essential to be put in the hands of companies that put profit before reliability."

Others argued that the blackout sends the opposite message, demonstrating that the private sector should be given more encouragement to build power plants to fill a growing demand for electricity.

Jan Carr, an independent electricity consultant at Barker Dunn & Rossi in Toronto, said most regions in North America have long relied on a centralized system of huge power plants that supply electricity across long distances.

He said electricity deregulation should encourage private companies to build a larger number of smaller power plants that are closer to the communities they supply. The result is a power system that can bounce back more easily when another part of the grid has suffered a failure.

Indeed, greater flexibility was touted as one of the long-term benefits that was to have come from Ontario’s scuttled electricity deregulation.

"That clearly would lead to a reduction in the propensity for [power failures] to happen," Mr. Carr said. "When you break the system up, you have an easier job of balancing generation with [demand] on a regional basis."

He said New York has been especially prone to blackouts because so much of its electricity must be imported over long distances, making it vulnerable to problems at any point over a large network.

Peter Budd, a Toronto lawyer who is chairman of the Ontario Energy Association, said the issues that must be tackled first are engineering problems. He said Thursday’s blackout was not the result of inadequate supplies, despite the hot weather. He said Ontario has had many days with higher demand.

"We were not at the cliff," he said. "And what I’m hearing is that the operators were shocked. Obviously it was a system failure."

Mr. Budd said the problems were technical engineering issues, and must be studied and solved to try to protect against similar cascading blackouts in the future.

"The interconnected nature of an electricity market is the best safeguard we have. Just periodically, technically, it goes awry," he said. "I hope the engineers are able to determine what happened and look to find engineering solutions that will automatically isolate one jurisdiction from another in those kinds of crisis moments."

But Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe in Toronto, said technical improvements must be matched by broader fixes that make the electricity system more reliable.

"There are ways of improving the inherent reliability of the system and making it less vulnerable, so that we aren’t so reliant on engineered protections."

For example, a more decentralized power grid would improve the system’s reliability, because no single element would have as big a role to play, he said.

"[Today], a few generating stations or transmission elements are carrying these gigantic loads. It puts more eggs in one basket."

While tight supplies of electricity can exacerbate system problems, Thursday’s failure was spread through the transmission system, where power lines overloaded like dominoes. Each line tripped its switches and shut down, pushing electricity onto adjoining lines, which then in turn overloaded and shut down in a cascade.

It is estimated the entire system spanning areas including Ontario, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan shut down within 10 seconds.

Mr. Carr said the transmission system is so overloaded that there is little ability to adapt and switch transmission routes when lines fail. "The [transmission] highway has to be sufficiently broad, with high enough capacity that it can withstand a shock and allow traffic to start flowing in a different direction."

In a report issued Friday, UBS Securities Canada Inc. electricity analysts Andrew Kuske and Ronald Barone said North America’s electricity transmission grid "is facing a looming crisis" and estimated that the equivalent of $48-billion in grid investment is needed over the next decade.

The industry’s roots are in monopoly franchises that were built regionally and lack "horizontal" market reach, creating a fragile grid. The analysts said the North American Electric Reliability Council "has been largely ineffective" at dealing with the lack of investment in transmission systems.

"For the last 20 years, there has been a decline in annual transmission capacity and investment," they said. "This investment decline has come at a time when peak demand for electricity has grown considerably."

The trend is expected to get worse, with growth in annual demand between 2001 and 2010 estimated to far outpace growth in transmission systems.

Mr. Adams of Energy Probe said transmission systems have been starved for cash.

"We have transmission lines in service that are 70 years old and were designed to operate for 20 or 30 years. It’s absolutely a miracle of engineering that the work that was done back in the Thirties is still hanging in there."

Associated Press
CNN News
August 19, 2003

Toronto: Environmentalists in the United States and Canada fear last week’s blackout will provide potent ammunition for the politicians and business groups seeking massive investments in new power plants and transmission lines.

A better legacy of the outage, activists say, would be a bold push for renewable energy and effective conservation measures. They hope that the post-blackout spectacle in Ontario will be replicated elsewhere – a pro-business Conservative government preaching conservation to industry and householders alike, to the point of suggesting clothes-washing in cold water.

"Building more plants and transmission lines – for consumers and people uneducated about the issues, it’s an argument that will seem to make sense," said Steve Clemmer, energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "Those are the obvious responses, but it’s more complicated than that."

The immediate push – if the blackout indeed is blamed on problems with the distribution grid – is likely to be for improved transmission lines. Many environmentalists agree that transmission systems need improvement, but say existing lines can be upgraded to improve capacity and efficiency.

"Nobody wants a new transmission line in their backyard," Clemmer said.

Long term, environmentalists fear the blackout will provide impetus for a component of the Bush administration energy policy envisioning widespread construction of new power plants.

"There’s a better way," said Debbie Boger, a Sierra Club energy expert in Washington. "The best way to prevent energy bottlenecks and grid overload is to increase the efficiency of our buildings, homes, factories and appliances, in addition to our transmission lines."

Among the specific proposals being touted are tighter efficiency standards for lighting fixtures and major appliances, including air conditioners.

Environmentalists also are calling for speedier development of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power.

"They’re cleaner, and if they go off line, there won’t be a ripple effect," said Clemmer, whose organization has proposed that 20 percent of U.S. electricity be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.

However, Gavin Donohue, executive director of the Independent Power Producers of New York, said environmentalists should accept the fact that expanded transmission and generating facilities also are needed.

"This blackout covered 9,300 square miles and affected 50 million people," Donohue said. "Renewable energy and conservation are an important part of the solution, but it’s laughable to say they could have made up the difference of what occurred here."

Jack Gibbons, chairman of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, said any new power plants constructed in the province should be fueled by natural gas or other relatively clean energy.

"The people of North America are going to demand a more reliable supply, and also cleaner air," he said. "Wind power, natural gas, water power — people in those businesses will seize the opportunity. The coal-burning power industry will try to do that also, but ultimately they will fail, because their competitors have the better option."

Air pollution is likely to be a pivotal issue as policy-makers and lobbyists debate post-blackout alternatives.

The U.S. government and several Northeastern states have taken legal action against some coal-burning power companies in the Midwest, accusing them of violating pollution-control laws and thus causing acid rain and health problems in downwind regions. Three Northeastern states also are trying force coal-fired power plants in Ontario to reduce pollution emissions.

If large numbers of new power plants are built, one result could be a substantial increase in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The United States has rejected an international protocol requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; Canada, by contrast, has signed the Kyoto Protocol and is proposing an array of efficiency measures for consumers and industry.

Tom Adams of the Toronto-based watchdog group Energy Probe said the blackout will likely provide ammunition to both sides in the debate over power and conservation.

"Those within the power industry who have been saying for a long time that we haven’t been making appropriate investments in our grid systems – they have an audience now," Adams said.

"But the pro-conservation forces have received also substantial vindication – you hear the political leadership in Ontario crying from rooftops, begging people to be careful with their electricity consumption."

Associated Press
CNN News
August 19, 2003

Toronto: Environmentalists in the United States and Canada fear last week’s blackout will provide potent ammunition for the politicians and business groups seeking massive investments in new power plants and transmission lines.

A better legacy of the outage, activists say, would be a bold push for renewable energy and effective conservation measures. They hope that the post-blackout spectacle in Ontario will be replicated elsewhere – a pro-business Conservative government preaching conservation to industry and householders alike, to the point of suggesting clothes-washing in cold water.

"Building more plants and transmission lines – for consumers and people uneducated about the issues, it’s an argument that will seem to make sense," said Steve Clemmer, energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "Those are the obvious responses, but it’s more complicated than that."

The immediate push – if the blackout indeed is blamed on problems with the distribution grid – is likely to be for improved transmission lines. Many environmentalists agree that transmission systems need improvement, but say existing lines can be upgraded to improve capacity and efficiency.

"Nobody wants a new transmission line in their backyard," Clemmer said.

Long term, environmentalists fear the blackout will provide impetus for a component of the Bush administration energy policy envisioning widespread construction of new power plants.

"There’s a better way," said Debbie Boger, a Sierra Club energy expert in Washington. "The best way to prevent energy bottlenecks and grid overload is to increase the efficiency of our buildings, homes, factories and appliances, in addition to our transmission lines."

Among the specific proposals being touted are tighter efficiency standards for lighting fixtures and major appliances, including air conditioners.

Environmentalists also are calling for speedier development of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power.

"They’re cleaner, and if they go off line, there won’t be a ripple effect," said Clemmer, whose organization has proposed that 20 percent of U.S. electricity be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.

However, Gavin Donohue, executive director of the Independent Power Producers of New York, said environmentalists should accept the fact that expanded transmission and generating facilities also are needed.

"This blackout covered 9,300 square miles and affected 50 million people," Donohue said. "Renewable energy and conservation are an important part of the solution, but it’s laughable to say they could have made up the difference of what occurred here."

Jack Gibbons, chairman of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, said any new power plants constructed in the province should be fueled by natural gas or other relatively clean energy.

"The people of North America are going to demand a more reliable supply, and also cleaner air," he said. "Wind power, natural gas, water power — people in those businesses will seize the opportunity. The coal-burning power industry will try to do that also, but ultimately they will fail, because their competitors have the better option."

Air pollution is likely to be a pivotal issue as policy-makers and lobbyists debate post-blackout alternatives.

The U.S. government and several Northeastern states have taken legal action against some coal-burning power companies in the Midwest, accusing them of violating pollution-control laws and thus causing acid rain and health problems in downwind regions. Three Northeastern states also are trying force coal-fired power plants in Ontario to reduce pollution emissions.

If large numbers of new power plants are built, one result could be a substantial increase in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The United States has rejected an international protocol requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; Canada, by contrast, has signed the Kyoto Protocol and is proposing an array of efficiency measures for consumers and industry.

Tom Adams of the Toronto-based watchdog group Energy Probe said the blackout will likely provide ammunition to both sides in the debate over power and conservation.

"Those within the power industry who have been saying for a long time that we haven’t been making appropriate investments in our grid systems – they have an audience now," Adams said.

"But the pro-conservation forces have received also substantial vindication – you hear the political leadership in Ontario crying from rooftops, begging people to be careful with their electricity consumption."

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Janet McFarland
Globe and Mail
August 19, 2003

Toronto: The Ontario government needs to clarify its long-term electricity plans and tell the private sector what the future holds for Ontario Power Generation, the chief executive officer of TransCanada Corp. said yesterday.

Harold Kvisle, whose company is already one of the largest private investors in Ontario’s power system, said business is willing to make investments to meet the province’s pressing need for more electricity generation capacity. But it needs to know the long-term game plan, he said.

Mr. Kvisle said the future of OPG, a Crown corporation whose power plants generate 66 per cent of the province’s electricity, needs to be clearer. He said investors don’t know whether OPG is going to be privatized, or whether it is still facing a requirement to sell many of its plants to reduce its market control to 35 per cent.

"If the Ontario market is going to have one monster generator that generates two-thirds of the power in the marketplace, that makes for a different playing field from the competitive side than if one monster generator only has a 35-per-cent share of the market."

TransCanada owns 31.6 per cent of Bruce Power LP, which operates the Bruce nuclear plant, and owns five small power plants in Northern Ontario.

Long-term power planning was thrown into disarray last November when the province closed its recently opened market for retail electricity and reimposed a rate cap of 4.3 cents a kilowatt-hour.

For seven years, the provincial government’s plan for electricity supplies was based on the assumption that the private sector would build new plants under a deregulated system. But prices soared after the market opened in May, 2002, and the government shut down the experiment after just six months.

With deregulation on hold until at least 2006, the private sector has scuttled many of its investment plans. Ontario’s tight capacity has become a focus of attention since a power failure plunged parts of Ontario and seven U.S. states into blackness last week.

Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, said Ontario needs a new long-term plan to ensure its electricity system will be adequate as demand soars and no new capacity is built.

"We’re living in limbo between central planning and the market," he said. "I call it central planning without a plan. And the system simply can’t hold for very long."

In June, the provincial government announced a new task force to draft a strategy. Co-chaired by Enersource Corp. president Gunars Cekster and Toronto lawyer Peter Budd, it is supposed to report early next year.

Mr. Kvisle said the task force is a good idea, because the province needs a comprehensive high-level plan to figure out how future power demand will be met.

"I believe that either a regulated or deregulated world would work in Ontario. All I think the industry needs is a clear set of ground rules and clarity," he said.

Geneviève Lavallée, an analyst who follows the Canadian electricity market at Dominion Bond Rating Service in Toronto, said the political uncertainty in Ontario has deterred future investment.

She said the retail price caps have not been a significant problem, however, because the wholesale electricity market still trades openly.

As a result, she said, the Ontario government may be able to win back private-sector support by developing a new long-term plan and sticking to it.

Donald Dewees, an economics professor at the University of Toronto, said responsibility for long-range planning for electricity supply used to be in the hands of the former Ontario Hydro, which has been broken up into separate companies.

Today, Ontario Power Generation, a Crown corporation, has no mandate to build major new plants.

Someone else must take clear responsibility for long-range planning, Prof. Dewees said.

"With the private investors scared away, I don’t think the current situation is going to work. We have to do something. Since the government introduced restructuring and then changed course in mid-stream, and hasn’t told OPG it has that responsibility, I think it’s up to the government to say ‘We’ve got it’ or to say who has it."

Although the private sector is on the sidelines, Hydro One and OPG may not be able to afford future construction.

Ms. Lavallée at DBRS said neither Ontario Power Generation nor Hydro One can undertake huge new construction projects without private-sector money.

She said the two Crown corporations cannot raise funds in the equity markets, and have highly leveraged balance sheets that cannot easily absorb new debt to pay for big projects.

But with government, normal market rules don’t always apply.

She said the province could decide to supply money for big projects, or be willing to allow major new debt to erode credit ratings.

Associated Press
The Daily Times – Pakistan
August 25, 2003

Toronto: Environmentalists in the United States and Canada fear last week’s blackout will provide potent ammunition for the politicians and business groups seeking massive investments in new power plants and transmission lines.

A better legacy of the outage, activists say, would be a bold push for renewable energy and effective conservation measures. They hope that the post-blackout spectacle in Ontario will be replicated elsewhere – a pro-business Conservative government preaching conservation to industry and householders alike, to the point of suggesting clothes-washing in cold water.

"Building more plants and transmission lines – for consumers and people uneducated about the issues, it’s an argument that will seem to make sense," said Steve Clemmer, energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists in Cambridge, Mass. "Those are the obvious responses, but it’s more complicated than that."

The immediate push – if the blackout indeed is blamed on problems with the distribution grid – is likely to be for improved transmission lines. Many environmentalists agree that transmission systems need improvement, but say existing lines can be upgraded to improve capacity and efficiency.

"Nobody wants a new transmission line in their backyard," Clemmer said. Long term, environmentalists fear the blackout will provided impetus for a component of the Bush administration energy policy envisioning widespread construction of new power plants.

"There’s a better way," said Debbie Boger, a Sierra Club energy expert in Washington. "The best way to prevent energy bottlenecks and grid overload is to increase the efficiency of our buildings, homes, factories and appliances, in addition to our transmission lines."

Among the specific proposals being touted are tighter efficiency standards for lightning fixtures and major appliances, including air conditioners. Environmentalists also are calling for speedier development of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power.

"They’re cleaner, and if they go off line, there won’t be a ripple effect," said Clemmer, whose organization has proposed that 20 percent of U.S. electricity be supplied by renewable energy by 2020.

However, Gavin Donohue, executive director of the Independent Power Producers of New York, said environmentalists should accept the fact that expanded transmission and generating facilities also are needed.

"This blackout covered 9,300 square miles and affected 50 million people," Donohue said. "Renewable energy and conservation are an important part of the solution, but it’s laughable to say they could have made up the difference of what occurred here."

Jack Gibbons, chairman of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, said any new power plants constructed in the province should be fueled by natural gas or other relatively clean energy. "The people of North America are going to demand a more reliable supply, and also cleaner air," he said. "Wind power, natural gas, water power – people in those businesses will seize the opportunity. The coal-burning power industry will try to do that also, but ultimately they will fail, because their competitors have the better option." Air pollution is likely to be a pivotal issue as policy-makers and lobbyists debate post-blackout alternatives.

The U.S. government and several Northeastern states have taken legal action against some coal-burning power companies in the Midwest, accusing them of violating pollution-control laws and thus causing acid rain and health problems in downwind regions. Three Northeastern states also are trying to force coal-fired power plants in Ontario to reduce pollution emissions. If large numbers of new power plants are built, one result could be a substantial increase in emissions of greenhouse gases blamed for global warming. The United States has rejected an international protocol requiring reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; Canada, by contrast, has signed the Kyoto Protocol and is proposing an array of efficiency measures for consumers and industry.

Tom Adams of the Toronto-based watchdog Energy Probe said the blackout will likely provide ammunition to both sides in the debate over power and conservation.

"Those within the power industry who have been saying for a long time that we haven’t been making appropriate investments in our grid systems – they have an audience now," Adams said. "But the pro-conservation forces have received also substantial vindication – you hear the political leadership in Ontario crying from rooftops, begging people to be careful with their electricity consumption."

Barrie McKenna
Globe and Mail
August 29, 2003

Washington: A U.S. congressional committee probing this month’s massive cross-border power blackout will hold public hearings next week without any input from Canadian government officials, regulators or power company executives.

Billed as a sweeping examination of how and why the blackout happened, the U.S. House of Representatives energy commerce committee has summoned more than two dozen witnesses to its Sept 3-4 hearings, including U.S. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, three state governors, plus regulators and power company executives.

There is concern in Canada that the hearings could lay the groundwork for a sweeping overhaul of U.S. energy policy, including regulation of the power grid.

The Aug. 14 power failure is believed to have begun in Ohio, quickly cascading through eight states and Canada and leaving roughly 50 million people without power. In the immediate aftermath of the power failure, officials on both sides of the border blamed each other.

The committee opted not to invite Canadian authorities because Congress is responsible for determining "accountability" for the blackout on the U.S. side of the border, said Arturo Silva, a spokesman for committee chairman Billy Tauzin.

"It’s a disappointment," noted Tom Adams, executive director of Toronto-based watchdog group Energy Probe. "We have a lot to add. We weren’t just involved in the event, we are going to have to be involved in the solutions as well."

Of 28 witnesses slated to appear, the committee will hear from just one Canadian – David Goulding, chief executive officer of Ontario’s Independent Electricity Market Operator, or IMO.

The IMO is the five-year-old quasi-public company created to run the province’s wholesale electricity market and oversee the reliability of the power grid.

Indirectly, Canadian utilities will also be represented at the hearings through the New Jersey-based North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC), the industry’s cross-border self-regulatory arm. NERC’s president, Michehl Gent, is slated to testify.

Congressional hearings are often long on political grandstanding and short on answers. And Canada is a joint partner in the official bi-national task force set up last week by Mr. Abraham and his Canadian counterpart, Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal.

As a matter of protocol, Canadian officials almost never testify at foreign government hearings, although they often file letters into evidence.

Canada has "plenty of input" into the blackout investigation through the task force, which met for the first time yesterday, noted Alexandra Muir, Mr. Dhaliwal’s director of communications.

"The formalized joint Canada-U.S. process is through the task force," she said. "The minister and his officials are working hand in hand with the United States through that vehicle. . . . There’s already a dialogue."

Ontario was miffed last week to learn that it had been denied a seat on the cross-border task forced launched by Ottawa and Washington to examine the causes of the blackout.

A spokesman for Ontario Power Generation, the provincially owned utility, said the company is willing to help the committee. "It’s early in the process," said OPG spokesman Bill McKinlay. "OPG is willing and prepared to provide any information, and help in any way."

Still, not having a greater voice at these hearings could prove costly. Committee hearings are typically powerful tools for focusing public attention and pressuring the U.S. administration.

And given the timing of these hearings, the committee’s work is likely to have significant impact on proposed electricity transmission reforms contained in pending U.S. energy legislation.

Mr. Tauzin, a Louisiana Republican, is the lead House negotiator working with the U.S. Senate to draft a final bill that could be ready for President George W. Bush to sign as early as next month.

Canadian industry and government officials have expressed concerns that new rules for the North American transmission grid could be drafted with little or no Canadian input.

John Ivison
National Post
September 6, 2003

Wawa: Veteran Queen’s Park reporters admit, shame-faced, how they helped to elect Bob Rae in 1990 by completely ignoring him.

Rae didn’t even unveil his platform until two weeks into the campaign, and it was only in its dying days that it became clear he was likely to unseat David Peterson.

And so to Wawa, in the shadow of its giant Canada goose, to ensure that Howard Hampton does not fly under the media radar screen straight into power.

Could history repeat itself? Not according to today’s Compas poll, which has the NDP languishing at 12% support – way behind the Liberals’ 46% and the Tories’ 41%. Hampton maintained yesterday that polls at this stage of the campaign are irrelevant, but there will undoubtedly be potential NDP voters who will switch to the Liberals if they think an NDP vote is wasted and might help the Tories sneak back into office.

The New Democrats have slipped even since the last Compas poll, taken in the immediate aftermath of last month’s blackout.

While most observers expect they will retain the seats they already hold, there is skepticism about their ability to break through in areas like the Kawarthas, London and the industrial ridings in the 905 belt around Toronto, where they have hopes of adding seats.

Arguably, Hampton has chosen the wrong issues on which to campaign and is proposing the wrong solutions to the problems he has identified.

Earlier in the day, standing outside the Falconbridge plant in the Nickel Belt riding of his wife, Shelley Martel, you could see why Hampton’s party is sometimes taken less than seriously. The NDP leader was waving around a large hunk of Swiss cheese, full of holes, which was somehow meant to represent the shortcomings of his rivals’ hydro policies.

While the Tories have proven as much fun as a trip to the proctologist, and the Liberals tend toward pomposity, the NDP have become the Monty Python of Ontario politics. They regularly pull stunts like Hydrozilla, which requires some hapless staffer to stalk senior Tories while wearing a rubber Godzilla suit, and now the Swiss cheese sketch, with its refrain of "What have the Tories ever done for us?"

The responsibility for ensuring that they are not bringing out their dead come Oct. 2 rests with Hampton. In the first week of the campaign, he has identified the issues he thinks resonate with Ontarians – auto insurance on Thursday, hydro yesterday – and he has moved to paint Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty and Premier Ernie Eves as two sides of the same profit-driven coin.

Against the hardscrabble landscape of northern Ontario, Hampton tried to portray an inimical link between the prosperity of the north and the hydro issue. He called Wawa the "canary in the coal mine" – a harbinger of the evils of electricity deregulation.

Wawa saw its hydro prices more than double because the local hydro company was able to dictate prices once they were deregulated, with the result that local companies such as Dubreuil Forest Products laid off hundreds of workers.

Unfortunately for Hampton, the mill workers and grandmothers who turned out to support him did not display his maniacal zeal for the subject. To give the NDP leader his due, if the Son of God had stopped off in Wawa and started talking about kilowatts and gigajoules, he would have had a hard job attracting a crowd.

The problem for Hampton goes deeper than simply picking an issue that doesn’t move people. While many potential NDP voters give him credit for identifying problems like hydro, tainted meat and auto insurance, they don’t necessarily agree with his solutions.

Yesterday in Sudbury, he said the province should build new electricity generating capacity, in the form of billion-dollar power plants. "It will cost less than paying for it privately," he said, adding higher interest costs, profit margins and executive pay would all drive up the cost of private power.

But critics of this policy point out we already have direct experience of public power at work, in the form of the Pickering A nuclear plant, which is four years behind schedule and 200% over budget.

"The government may be able to borrow money more easily but that’s just giving them more rope with which to hang themselves," said Tom Adams, executive director of think-tank Energy Probe.

"Building generating plants is risky. Businesses can go bankrupt and I don’t want the public sector to take those risks. The solution is to go back to the market."

Hampton was a lone voice of alarm on the hydro file for a couple of years before it started making headlines. When the lights went out last month, he appeared vindicated and the critics who accused him of being alarmist were humbled. He should have been able to translate that prescience into electoral support.

But, unlike other leaders in this election race, Hampton is burdened with a burning belief in the singular correctness of his vision. There is no room for compromise on issues like ownership in his dogmatic world. It is this rigidity that means he is unlikely to repeat Bob Rae’s feat of 1990.

As former Clinton advisor Dick Morris notes in his book Power Plays: "The man who stands on his convictions waiting for the world to come around must be prepared to go patiently into the wilderness." That may end up being Hampton’s fate.

John Spears
Keeping the streets from going dark
September 11, 2003

Liberal power policy is focused on conservation, closing coal-fired plants; platform couched in environmental terms.

Since last month’s blackout, keeping Ontario’s lights on has become much more than a simple metaphor for the province’s electricity policy.

As the party leading the polls in the current provincial election campaign, how would the Liberals maintain a steady supply of power at reasonable prices?

The Conservatives and New Democrats have put their hydro policies front and centre – the Conservatives through their actions as a government, the NDP by choosing "publicpower" as its campaign theme.

The Tories have been criticized for inconsistency – they deregulated energy prices, then froze them; they tried to sell Hydro One, then retreated.

The New Democrats have a more consistent policy based on a power system that’s largely in public hands, but have taken their lumps for trying to turn back the clock to the days of Ontario Hydro.

But the Liberals have chosen to highlight other issues. Their most prominent energy promise – a pledge to shut down all coal-burning generating stations by 2007 – is couched more in environmental than in energy terms.

The Liberals do have an energy policy. They say they’d stop the sell-off of public power assets, provide a better environment for private generators and, possibly, build new nuclear plants.

But it’s not clear how all the pieces of their policy fit together; and the Liberals themselves acknowledge that many details will have to be worked out after the election, following a round of public consultation.

The Liberal energy policy document starts with a firm commitment to maintaining public ownership over the majority of Ontario’s power system.

"We will not sell any public generating stations or the transmission grid – period," the party vows. And they’ll push Ontario Power Generation (OPG) to increase its capacity, at Niagara Falls and elsewhere.

But privately operated generators would still have a place in the system.

When additional supply is needed, "independent generators that can sell power to the provincial utility at a fair rate will be able to do so," according to the Liberal policy document.

The question is: Why would an independent generator want to?

OPG currently is a behemoth sitting astride the Ontario market, generating more than 60 per cent of the supply.

Potential investors have long complained that it’s hard to compete with the sheer bulk of a company that large. The Tories promise to reduce OPG’s market share to 35 per cent by 2012. But if they’re elected, the Liberals say that won’t happen.

How would a publicly owned OPG and Hydro One mesh with private elements of an electricity system?

Liberal MPP Michael Bryant (St. Paul’s) says a new government would have to meet directly with OPG and Hydro One to sort out policy directions before it can give definite answers.

But he also claims a Liberal election victory would, by itself, set Ontario on the road to a healthier power industry.

"A change of government is going to encourage the industry, because this industry has been totally betrayed by Ernie Eves," Bryant says confidently. "So a change of government is necessarily going to be more positive for that industry."

Perhaps.

The Liberals have other ideas for increasing supply. They propose to provide $150 million in incentives for renewable energy projects, and creation of a more stable operating environment for all power companies.

But that brings back the pesky question of the market.

Investors ask: What kind of marketplace will exist, so that we can estimate our chances of earning a return on the considerable investment required to build a generator?

The Liberals say they won’t restore the spot market that produced the price spikes that triggered last summer’s consumer revolt.

Instead, they pledge: "Ontario consumers will buy their power at a regulated rate from their public power company."

That doesn’t mean energy hogs get a free ride.

The Liberals say they’ll charge a basic consumer electricity rate for the amount of power that a typical household might expect to use. Power-guzzlers who choose to use more are free to do so – but they’ll pay a higher rate for the amount they use beyond the benchmark.

They’ll also install "smart meters" in every home in the province by 2006, when the current price freeze expires. These meters measure more than the amount of power you use; they also record when you use it.

Power used at peak times, when the electricity system is under stress, would be more expensive than power used at 3 a.m., when demand is low.

But it’s hard to see how that fits with the Liberal pledge to charge a standard rate for basic power consumption.

Suppose two households each used the standard, regular-price quantity of power, but one household chose to use most of it during peak demand periods while the other managed to shift the bulk of their use to nights and weekends. Would one household pay a higher rate? The answer isn’t clear.

‘ … we are not hamstrung by some blind faith in spot-market ideology’

Michael Bryant, Liberal MPP

And such "smart metering" generally assumes there’s a spot market, based on supply and demand, determining when prices peak and when they don’t. Yet the Liberals are effectively abolishing the spot market.

Liberal strategists say these problems aren’t necessarily insurmountable.

One possible solution is for a central agency to contract for most of the power supply. The central agency would sign long-term contracts with suppliers – public or private – who would commit to sell large blocks of power at fixed prices.

The Liberals argue that generators don’t necessarily like the volatility of the spot market much more than consumers. Investors who have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into a plant are also eager to lock in long-term contracts for sizable portions of the production at known prices.

But the Liberals say they can’t commit to a specific market model until after the election, because they’ll have to consult broadly with producers and consumers first.

Bryant says specifics aren’t crucial at this point.

"I don’t think the voters really want to play air traffic controller on electricity policy," he says.

"They just want to make sure that their government is consulting with everybody and putting something together that provides reliable, affordable electricity or increases the supply.

"The reason we are going to do a better job than the Tories is we are not hamstrung by some blind faith in spot-market ideology. Nor are we living in the ideological fantasyland of Howard Hampton."

Bryant argues that price and reliability are all voters really care about.

"I don’t think the people of Ontario care when they flip on a light switch whether that’s coming from Mother Hydro or an independent power producer, as long as it’s reliable and prices are stable and they’re seen as reasonable and affordable."

Then why not sell off some of OPG’s generators?

"Because these are seen as very much part of our public history and too important a public service to sell off now when we already own it today," Bryant says.

"To my mind, the privatization logic runs up against a brick wall when it comes to certain public assets."

The Liberals have other ideas for encouraging new supply. They’d build new transmission lines into Manitoba and Quebec. (Quebec has balked at a new transmission line to Ontario; some Liberals suggest Ontario could offer to pay the full cost of building the Quebec portion of a new link.)

The Liberals would also encourage industries capable of generating power to do so. Companies that use steam in industrial processes, for instance, can often harness the steam to run a generator as well.

And Bryant says new nuclear generators are not out of the question.

"We’re going to provide more electricity in the province of Ontario," he says.

"We need to provide a mix of electricity. Whether or not that includes new nukes is not for us an ideological question. It’s a cost-benefit analysis. We can’t afford to be ideological in a province where most of the hydro-electric opportunities have been exhausted."

Energy policy observers say there are Liberal policies raise question marks.

Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe, says some Liberal proposals to stimulate the investment needed to replace coal-burning generators are expensive.

They would push power prices higher, or force the government to run up debt if it decided to hold prices down.

Jan Carr, of consulting firm Barker, Dunn & Rossi, says both the Liberal and Conservative energy policies suffer from inconsistencies.

Shutting down coal plants (which will reduce supply), stimulating investment to increase supply, and regulating prices, which discourages investment, are all at odds with each other, Carr says.

"I find both the Liberal and Conservative policies lacking," he says. "They don’t have a consistent set of principles. In fact, they don’t have principles."

The Liberals and Tories have both tried to pick and choose random pieces of an energy policy, he says, when in fact a policy should be like a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces fit.

"The only party that’s got a rational energy policy is the NDP, though I think the rationale is wrong," Carr says.