March 28, 2005

Power workers irked at provincial pledge

By Grant Cameron

staff writer

The provincial government’s pledge to close Ontario’s coal-fired generating plants is a mistake, says Don MacKinnon, president of the Power Workers’ Union.

“The province’s economy, electricity consumers and electricity system reliability will suffer,” if they’re closed, he said in a statement released last week.

“There is a better option — refurbish additional nuclear generation and finish the job of reducing pollution from the province’s coal plants.”

MacKinnon says returning the remaining two units at Pickering to service, along with Bruce Power’s commitment to bring back two idle units, would ensure more than 3,000 megawatts or 21 billion kilowatt hours of virtually emission free power each year.

“If this power reduced reliance on what we are currently generating with coal, Ontario’s electricity-related CO2 emissions would drop from 36,500 kilotonnes to 16,000 kilotonnes,” MacKinnon says.

Existing coal plants produce five per cent of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions, he said, and “our provincial government intends to replace coal-fired generation with natural gas to achieve at best a marginal reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.”

“They’ve forgotten that burning natural gas to generate electricity creates carbon dioxide emissions too — and they haven’t been honest about the cost.”

MacKinnon claims the provincial government is pursuing long-term contracts to buy power from private sector generation companies.

“This means the agreed-upon price of gas-generated power will have to be high enough so that private companies can recover costs and make a profit. Otherwise there is little incentive to invest money in the Ontario electricity sector.

“One big cost to recover is the fuel — and we all know that the price of natural gas has been climbing since the 1970s, and lately has spiked to unprecedented levels.”

Ontario industries and businesses that use large amounts of electricity already have among the highest electricity prices in North America and additional price rises will further weaken their competitive position — putting jobs at risk, MacKinnon says.

Meanwhile, he says, abandoning coal generation means eliminating a quarter of Ontario’s generating capacity at a time when provincial demand for electricity is set to overtake supply.

MacKinnon says coal generation has proven its value as the safety valve in Ontario’s electricity system — averting supply disasters, ensuring reliability and helping manage outage impacts.

“Ontario taxpayers have already invested hundreds of millions of dollars on pollution controls at two of the province’s coal-fired generating plants,” he says.

“Today, we’re generating more power with coal than in 1990, but nitrogen and sulphur emissions are less than half what they were in 1990.”

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