Three of Ontario’s nuclear reactors are near the end of their service lives. With no clean energy plan to replace them, the Ford government will have to fill the gap with natural gas-powered electricity generation, the IESO says.
When the wind is blowing strong enough, the entire province can be powered without producing any carbon emissions — the product of an unprecedented push to end our dependence on coal.
But that’s about to change.
Over the next two decades, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from Ontario’s energy grid are set to skyrocket more than 400 per cent as the province cranks up the dial on its underused fleet of natural gas plants.
That rapid rise in emissions is revealed in the official forecast put out by the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), a crown corporation that manages Ontario’s energy grid.
Since all renewable energy projects were cancelled when Premier Doug Ford was elected, the province currently has no other way to compensate for the looming shutdown of a major nuclear reactor in Pickering, responsible for roughly 16 per cent of province-wide power. Only natural gas is available to meet rapidly growing demand for electricity, according to the IESO projections.
The projections show that the province’s natural gas plants — which only operate about 60 per cent of the time now — will run non-stop by 2033. The additional annual emissions this will produce over the next 20 years are equivalent to a large Alberta oilsands project.
Nuclear power has been a key element to developing Ontario’s decarbonized energy system. It provides reliable round-the-clock power with zero emissions (if you don’t count the construction of the reactor or the transportation of fuel and waste). This nuclear “baseload” complements renewables like solar and wind, which are intermittent producers, only generating power when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.
But Ontario’s three aging nuclear reactors are coming to the end of their service lives. Bruce and Darlington are in a decade-long process of refurbishment that should allow them to keep operating for another 40 years. Pickering, on the other hand, is slated to shut permanently in 2025.
This will leave a yawning gap between supply and demand for electricity in the province. And it’s a baseload gap that cannot be filled with wind and solar. A lack of planning — we could have built up storage capacity to collect surplus wind and solar and feed it back into the grid when needed — means the province has no choice but to replace non-polluting nuclear with fossil fuel generation, according to the IESO projections.