Ontario Power Generation is moving ahead with a plan to extend the life of the aging Pickering Nuclear Generating Station by decades, as the province tries to secure more electricity supply in the face of increasing demand.
Energy Minister Todd Smith had instructed OPG in 2022 to study the feasibility of refurbishing four of the units at the nuclear plant, which have been operating since the 1980s, and he announced Tuesday that the project will proceed, The Canadian Press reports.
“Our province still needs this station and its workers,” he said at a news conference outside the nuclear plant. The construction phase will create about 11,000 jobs, he said, and the plant will provide about 6,000 jobs for decades.
OPG plans to spend C$2 billion on engineering and design work and securing key components for the project that is expected to run 11 years and conclude in the mid-2030s.
Neither Smith nor OPG officials would give an estimate for how much the entire refurbishment will cost.
“It would be irresponsible at this point in time to put a number out there, because it’s this essential design and scoping and engineering work that is going to get us to the place where we can have a number,” Smith said.
Lessons Learned
OPG said a refurbishment at its Darlington Nuclear Generating Station is costing $12.8 billion and is on time and on budget.
Ken Hartwick, CEO of OPG, said the Darlington refurbishment as well as one at Bruce Power will help guide the Pickering life extension.
“We have learned a lot about what it takes to refurbish a nuclear station the right way with thousands of lessons learned from Darlington and Bruce Power that we will apply to Pickering,” Hartwick said.
The four units produce about 2,000 megawatts of electricity, enough to power two million average Ontario homes.
The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has said Ontario’s electricity demand is expected to grow by about 2% each year or more. The Ford government’s promise to build 1.5 million homes by 2031 and several large-scale manufacturing investments such as electric vehicle battery plants are helping to push demand higher.
Renewable Costs ‘Drop Like a Stone’
The province needs more supply particularly starting in the mid-2030s, the IESO has said.
Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, said the price of wind and solar power with battery storage has “dropped like a stone” and should be more central to Ontario’s energy policy.
“Any credible independent cost-benefit analysis would find that we should be investing in the renewable-powered energy system of the future, rather than pouring billions more into rebuilding nuclear reactors long past their best-before date,” he wrote in a statement.
In 2022, an analysis conducted for the IESO by Montreal-based Dunsky Energy + Climate Advisors found that Ontario could deliver enough distributed energy resources (DER) to clear its large electricity shortage without resorting to costly, new centralized generating plants. A subsequent study concluded that wind and solar with energy storage would cost less to build than gas power plants in both Ontario and Alberta, and nuclear generation typically costs far more than gas.
NDP energy critic Peter Tabuns called on the province to release OPG’s feasibility study.
“It is important that we get energy decisions right, especially when billions in investments are on the line,” he wrote in a statement.
“We can’t assess this project without these details. We want to ensure they are prioritizing the needs of Ontarians over anything else.”
Pickering produces about 14% of the province’s electricity, CP writes, but its current licence to operate the four units in question expires at the end of this year. OPG has asked the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to extend that to 2026, but a public hearing for that application has not yet been scheduled.
The Favourite Child
CP says the nuclear safety commission would still have to approve the Pickering refurbishment. But while “formally speaking, it’s not a done deal,” TV Ontario reports, “it’s difficult to imagine this government—or one of its successors—reversing course.”
Notwithstanding the available cost data or the far faster turnaround for renewable energy projects, TVO’s John Michael McGrath maintains nuclear generation is the only way to clear an electricity shortfall the IESO projects at 4,000 megawatts by the summer of 2035.
And “then there’s the supply,” he writes. “While provincial policy-makers, like parents, claim to love all their industrial children equally, it would be silly to deny that the CANDU reactors have a special place in the hearts of Ontario leaders. A Canadian-made nuclear reactor (and a supply chain that involves thousands of Ontario workers) will always have a chorus of boosters at Queen’s Park.”
Green Party Leader Mike Schreiner said Greens understand that nuclear power will continue to be part of the power supply mix for decades, but the province also needs much more wind and solar power and no more natural gas generation.
“Instead of attracting jobs and investment in low-cost renewables, the Ford government is making Ontario’s grid dirtier and more expensive by prioritizing dirty fossil gas plants and the costly, poor-performing Pickering plant,” he wrote in a statement.
TVO’s McGrath noted that the province’s two larger opposition parties questioned the due diligence and competence behind the government’s announcement, but not the decision to rebuild Pickering.
“I think it’s really important we get this right,” NDP leader Marit Stiles told media at Queen’s Park. “We know that Ontario has the best energy workers in the world, but there are lots of questions. Frankly, I don’t trust this government to get it right.”
“Since coming to power, the Ford Conservatives have been asleep at the switch when it comes to planning ahead for the electricity system we all depend on,” Liberal energy critic Ted Hsu added in an email. “Experts warned us that record-breaking heatwaves, the adoption of electric vehicles, building new homes, and tacking climate change would greatly pump up electricity demand. This lack of foresight will harm both businesses and ratepayers in the long run.”
Rising Emissions
The IESO announced late last year that it is looking to add 2,000 megawatts of non-emitting electricity generation online such as wind, solar, bioenergy and hydro to the system by 2030, then another 3,000 MW by 2034. However, it maintains natural gas is still required to ensure supply and stability in the short to medium term, though that strategy will dramatically increase greenhouse gas emissions from the electricity sector.
Ontario’s electricity system was 94% emissions-free in 2020, but today that figure has fallen to 90%, and it’s set to drop further as the province’s current strategy takes hold.
Opposition critics have said Ontario wouldn’t be in as much of a supply crunch if the Progressive Conservative government hadn’t cancelled 758 green energy contracts and ripped a living, breathing wind farm out of the ground when it first took office in 2018.
But Smith vigorously defended the move Tuesday, claiming the contracts that paid above-market prices made rates too expensive for Ontarians and drove businesses out of the province.
“We would cancel those projects again, given the opportunity,” he said.
“It was just backwards the way that the previous government operated. What they should have done was built out the storage—which is what we’re doing now—to accommodate adding renewables, but we’re doing it in a competitive way.”
At the time, battery storage was just beginning the price plummet that makes it so competitive today, whereas solar and wind costs had already fallen substantially.
In the wake of the provincial announcement, Canadians for Nuclear Energy took a victory lap for the years it spent lobbying for the refurbishment, styling a project it priced at $10 billion as the best economic and climate choice for the province. But in a post for the Toronto Star about a week before the provincial announcement, Mark Winfield, co-chair of Sustainable Energy Initiative at York University, said the Pickering rebuild was “previously assessed as uneconomic”, while a separate project at the Bruce nuclear station had been “optimistically” priced at $50 billion.
No Silver Bullet
Rachel Doran, vice president of policy and strategy at Clean Energy Canada, said Ontario had rightly focused on non-emitting power over gas, but urged the province not to overlook the cost-competitiveness of renewables.
“While nuclear will be part of the energy mix for a net-zero future, it’s not a silver bullet,” she said in a statement. “Other non-emitting sources of power, like wind and solar, can produce power more cheaply in Ontario than natural gas, and costs are expected to decline by as much as 40% by 2035,” making the renewables “high cost-competitive” even after the added cost of battery storage is factored in.
“Looking forward, distributed energy solutions, like grid-connected EVs, also offer options to cut power bills and meet demand,” Doran added, citing a Royal Bank of Canada estimate that distributed energy resources integrated into smart homes could save Ontario ratepayers $500 million per year.
(Mark Winfield and Clean Energy Canada’s Evan Pivnick are both members of the community sounding board for The Energy Mix’s Heat & Power edition.)
In an action alert to supporters, the Ontario Clean Air Alliance (OCAA) called the Pickering announcement “another backroom deal bonanza”, adding that the 11-year plan to bring the plant back online “is a strange way to deal with a supposedly pressing need for increased electricity supply. And it sure won’t help this province’s lame efforts to address climate change as it relies more and more on polluting gas power to fill the gap.”
There’s “not a chance that the cost of power from these rebuilt reactors will be competitive with the current cost of solar and wind power,” much less the future, lower cost of those technologies, OCAA added. “Which explains why the Ford government has not required OPG to put forward its proposal in any sort of competitive procurement process, like what it requires for truly cost-effective solar and wind projects.”
On Thursday, the IESO announced that Smith had appointed Tom Mitchell, a former OPG president and CEO who now chairs the World Association of Nuclear Operators, to its board of directors.
Major segments of this report were first published by The Canadian Press on January 30, 2024.
