Opinion: the Ford government’s nuclear propulsion is a costly D!!!!! for Ontario’s energy sector

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Ralph Torrie is director of research at Corporate Knights.

It was 1976. I was 24 years old, single, and a physics student at the University of 8. Ontario Hydro was forecasting a 7 percent annual increase in electricity demand and was looking for 24 new nuclear reactors and 18 new coal-fired units. None of the factories were ever built. The maximum energy demand two decades later, in 1997, was 22,000 megawatts, not the 57,000 Hydro had predicted.

It was 1989. I was 37 years old, married with two children. Ontario Hydro requested 10 new nuclear power reactors at three sites, as well as several large fossil fuel plants. Hydro predicted that maximum demand would track economic growth by 2.5 percent a year and the highest 35,000 meters by 2014 – 50 percent above its 1989 level. What happened? In 2014, the maximum lower it was in 1989 when the project was launched.

It was 2005. I was 53 years old, vice president of ICF International, my children had grown up, and my wife and I had moved to Cobourg to care for my sick mother. The newly formed Ontario Power Authority (OPA) predicted that maximum demand for electricity would begin to grow nearly twice as fast as it had over the previous 15 years, reaching 30,000 MPP by 2025. Worried that a gap could develop between supply and demand, the government accelerated the adoption of new gas-fired power plants, and we all know how that went. The gap never materialized.

Now is the year 2023. I have two young grandchildren facing a future of climate chaos, my work focuses on the investment model needed for the sustainability transition and “gap-ology” is again ongoing in Ontario’s electricity sector.

The Government of Prime Minister Doug Ford is making a big push into nuclear power based on this years-long hunger. The OPA has been absorbed by The Independent Electric System Operator (IESO), and they are predicting a maximum requirement of 60,000 MFLIX by 2050 for Ontario to successfully decarbonize its economy. Like all those who came before him, it is a prediction that will surely prove both wrong and costly.

IESO puts the price at $ 400 billion over the next 27 years. And that’s only for the wholesale power system-it doesn’t include conversion costs for households and firms to electrify, or costs for local delivery services to cope with the transition. Much of this money is intended for unproven prototype technologies that we have never built or licensed before. The list starts with four 300 MFLIX enriched uranium light water reactors planned for Darlington, who won’t put power into the grid until who knows when (10 years from now? and who knows what cost.

Yes, it is reasonable that the transition to electric vehicles and heat pumps will add new electricity consumption to the system. But it’s a transition that will happen with many other conflicting factors at play – the same factors that made previous forecasts outdated and that are significantly outside the framework in which Ontario’s electricity planning takes place.

A global energy transition is under way, and while electrification is a central theme, so too is the development of technologies, materials and techniques that reduce the amount of electricity and maximum consumption required to meet the demand for human equipment that drives all economies.

These technologies and techniques are being researched and deployed more intensively in countries where natural resources are scarce and electricity is more expensive than in Canada, but once developed, they move through the global economy in less time than it takes to design, build and license a prototype of the multibillion-dollar nuclear power plant. These new technologies can keep maximum demand growth in Ontario below 1 percent per year, even as we electrify our vehicles and our homes and buildings with natural gas.

The story continues to transcend electricity planning in Ontario, as it has done for decades now, and we all pay for the overruns and misrepresentations that result. We cannot afford another round of ill-conceived commitments to multibillion-dollar megaprojects that will remain half-built and deadlocked just as technology, market forces and common sense are converging into a smarter, less expensive, more distributed and renewables-based energy system. One of our grandchildren can feel good.