Chalk up 45% of electricity cost increases to nuclear, 6% to green
Opportunity knocks for ending reliance on nuclear as well as coal
By Kate Harries AWARE Simcoe June 4 2012
Nuclear power, not the cost of green energy, lies behind soaring electricity prices, a recent meeting of AWARE Simcoe in Barrie was told.
Jack Gibbons, of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, pointed to a recent Ontario Energy Board report and said that, since 2006, subsidies for the nuclear power industry have pushed up electricity generation costs by 45 per cent.
During the same time period, green energy has been responsible for six per cent of the increase, he said.
When it comes to nuclear power, Progressive Conservative leader Hudak and Ontario Premier McGuinty are two peas in a pod, Gibbons said. “They are both committed to a massive nuclear spending program. They both claim nuclear will be a low-cost option although all the evidence points to the contrary.”
Gibbons said that right now, Ontario is at a crossroads.
That’s because all of its dirty coal powered plants are to be phased out by 2014, while at the same time its aging nuclear reactors are coming to the end of their lives within the next decade or so.
“That means we have a unique opportunity to rebuild our electric power system from the ground up,” Gibbons said.
There are competing visions of how best to do that.
McGuinty talks up his made-in-Ontario green energy policy, proposing to raise the proportion of renewable energy to 38 per cent by 2030, from the present 25 per cent (22 per cent from hydro, the rest from new technologies like wind, solar, biomass etc.).
But McGuinty plays down his plans for construction of two new nuclear reactors, and rebuilding the four reactors at Darlington and another four at Bruce ‘B,’ at a projected cost of $33 billion.
Nothing that every nuclear project in the history of Ontario has gone over budget, on average by 2.5 times, Gibbons predicted that the cost of the McGuinty plan will exceed $80 billion.
In response to a question from the audience, Gibbons explained that the debt retirement charge on Ontario residents’ electricity bills is due to the cost overruns and poor performance of the old nuclear reactors.
“When Ontario Hydro was broken up in 1999, there was this $20 billion nuclear cost that the nuclear industry couldn’t afford to pay.”
“With McGuinty’s program, do you see us ever getting out of debt?” asked Mariane Cancilla of AWARE Barrie. “ Will we be paying those costs overruns forever on our bills?”
“Yes,” Gibbons replied, “that’s why we’ve got to not go there.”
Asked why there’s little public discusson of the cost of nuclear, Gibbons pointed to the nuclear special interest lobby, which comprises Ontario Power Generation and Bruce Power, the biggest electricity generators in Ontario; SNC Lavalin and Aecon Construction, huge contractors that are in line to build and rebuild the nuclear reactors; the Power Workers Union; as well as pension funds and insurance companies that like to buy nuclear bonds guaranteed by the Ontario government.
He said the Ontario Clean Air Alliance opposes this wasteful nuclear spending program “when there are cleaner, greener, and dramatically lower-cost options to keep our lights on.”
The first is increased energy efficiency.
Gibbons noted that since 2005, electricity consumption has fallen by 10 per cent despite the fact that the economy has continued to grow – and there’s still plenty of room for improvement because Ontarians’ per-capita consumption is 27 higher than that of New York State. The cost of getting energy by implementing measure to increase efficiency is 1/10 to 1/5 the cost of a new nuclear power plant, he added.
Gibbons said McGuinty talks as if he considers conservation and efficiency to be priorities, “but when you follow the money, you discover the reality does not match the rhetoric.”
He said the OPA and the OEB have created “perverse” financial incentives and red tape that discourage local distribution utilities like PowerStream from promoting energy conservation.
This, Gibbons said, is how it works: The OEB has established legally binding conservation targets and the OPA provides funding to support conservation . But then the OPA offered utilities a profit bonus if they underspend their conservation budget, even if they fail to achieve the minimum targets set by the OEB.
Gibbons calculated that the profit bonus for Toronto Hydro is as much as $8.5 million for underspending its conservation budget.
“This makes no sense, it’s penny-wise and pound-foolish,” he said “If we don’t spend the money on conservation, we’re going to have to spend the money on higher-cost electricity supply.”
Another OCAA solution: stop wasting natural gas. Instead of using natural gas just for heat, combined heat and power plants can produce both at an energy efficiency rate of 80 to 90 per cent.
The energy efficiency of a nuclear reactor is 30 per cent, he added.
He said Orillia’s Soldiers Memorial Hospital and the Ontario Provincial Police headquarters use a combined heat and power plant.
Low-cost hydro power imports from Quebec are the remaining element of the OCAA’s plan for meeting Ontario’s energy needs. This province presently gets 1.8 per cent of its energy from Quebec, despite the fact that with existing transmission lines, Quebec could provide 17 per cent “at the flick of a switch,” Gibbons said.
Quebec is obligated to sell to Ontario at the same low cost that New York State enjoys “but we’re too stupid to buy.” Gibbons said the OCAA does not support the construction of any new dams in Quebec.
Other speakers at the May 26 meeting at Grace United Church were Susan Hirst of the Simcoe Huronia Association for Renewable Energy and Oro-Medonte Councillor Marty Lancaster, a renewable energy and Feed-In-Tariff program specialist.
A new AWARE Simcoe board of directors was elected.
Recent reports on the Ontario Energy Board report:
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