Ontario’s power problem — too much gas and too few renewables
By: Star Editorial Board
Until the current Greenbelt fiasco, it was the phrase “gas plants” that stood as political shorthand for costly failures of leadership and oversight in Ontario. A decade ago, a scandal over gas plant location, and relocation, essentially brought the career of former Liberal premier Dalton McGuinty to an end in a miasma of allegation and acrimony. One would expect Premier Doug Ford to have taken note of the risks attached to that form of infrastructure. If so, a recent report by the Star’s Marco Chown Oved and Andrew Bailey should certainly have caught his attention. Their investigation found that while gas plants in Ontario were billed as so-called “peaker plants” – an insurance policy to operate only during peak electricity demand, estimated at maybe two per cent of the time — many were, in fact, operating 12 or more hours a day. Instead of serving as a bridge to a non-emitting world of power generation through a mix of nuclear, hydro and renewables, the gas plants, their reporting revealed, have become part of the provincial baseload, resulting in dirtier power that adds to local air pollution and makes climate change worse. The report’s deep dive into hour-by-hour generation data showed that Ontario’s 12 biggest gas plants operated nearly 12 hours a day, on average, every day this year. Critics and environmental advocates were shocked and alarmed at the report. Keith Brooks, programs director at Environmental Defence, said the disturbing state of affairs is not an accident. “It’s a result of choices that this government has made to turn its back on clean energy and to instead go whole hog into more fossil fuels, using these existing plants more, extending their contracts longer, and also seeking to build new plants to add even more gas to the grid,” he said. Shortly after taking office in 2018, the Ford government spent more than $200 million to scrap more than 700 green energy projects, portraying them as “unnecessary and expensive.” But with the growing demand for electricity the province has announced three new gas plants and six upgrades across Ontario to ensure the reliability of the electricity grid. It is precisely in that chronology that the Ford administration demonstrated it has failed to learn a key lesson of the McGuinty experience. The previous Liberal government proposed to shut down coal-fired generating plants, which were significant contributors not only to climate change but to adverse health impacts on citizens, particularly children and the elderly. The new gas-fired plants the McGuinty government ordered were necessary to produce power to replace the coal-fired pollution machines. The key, after all, was to keep the grid reliable while decarbonizing. And to do so required a period where Ontario had some redundancy. The problem now is that the Ford government is doing the opposite: it is building gas and not building renewables. What it should be doing is building as many renewable sources as possible and, eventually, it will have enough power from those sources that gas “peaker plants” won’t be needed any more. (Battery plants that can store power will replace them.) While 100 per cent wind and solar power is unrealistic, there is huge room to expand those sources. This summer, solar provided 68 per cent of peak electricity load in California and in the Midwest wind covered 49 per cent. In Ontario, renewable sources provided only eight per cent of peak demand in 2022. Simply put, the more renewables Ontario has, the less pressure on the system to turn on the gas. Every non-emitting megawatt is one that doesn’t need to be generated by burning gas. In his 2015 memoir, McGuinty expressed “deep regret” for the failings in his gas-plant trials, failings that did his government, his reputation and his successor Kathleen Wynne considerable harm. It’s a good bet that Doug Ford may come to feel the same way about his cavalier scrapping of the clean energy initiatives so vital to Ontario’s clean power future.
