Electricity Generation in Ontario

[roger1818]

Originally Posted by casper

Weird discussion in a thread on Via Rail.

Agreed, so I decided to move the conversation to a new thread. Maybe a moderator can move the appropriate posts to this thread.

Originally Posted by casper

The fundamental problem with Nuclear in the 1980's and 1990's in Canada was Ontario Hydro dragging out Darlington construction schedule. The key driver for playing that game was they needed the extra power when the project was launched but after raising prices demand dropped and there was a glut in the market. End result is they slowed out the project. That drove up borrowing costs for the project while delaying when it would start to make money. The Candu plants in China and South Korean went up much more quickly.

Nuclear makes sense as base load in Ontario but only as part of a mix of different generation capability. Nuclear provides good low cost base load. In the rest of Canada, nuclear is a hard sell. To have economies of scale the plants have to be huge and are a bad fit in places like Saskatchewan (a very pro nuclear province). In places like Manitoba, BC and Quebec there are lots of hydro electric options that are equally low cost.

I have not been involved in the nuclear industry for nearly 15 years. Back then Ontario Hydro use to set records for continuous operation without a shutdown. There was always two schools of through, the first being just how great that is and the second one was that a proper preventative maintenance program would have scheduled outages and fixing things before they fail. With a good preventative maintenance program you never set these records because your are more regularly down for maintenance, however the down time is more predictable. Not certain where it is today.

Ontario has just as much potential for hydro electric generation on James Bay as Quebec does, but for whatever reason, have decided to not take advantage of it and decided to go Nuclear instead. I know the Quebec project was very controversial.

[Loco101]

Originally Posted by roger1818

Agreed, so I decided to move the conversation to a new thread. Maybe a moderator can move the appropriate posts to this thread.



Ontario has just as much potential for hydro electric generation on James Bay as Quebec does, but for whatever reason, have decided to not take advantage of it and decided to go Nuclear instead. I know the Quebec project was very controversial.

I wouldn't say Northern Ontario has as might potential in the James Bay and Hudson Bay (Arctic) watershed as Quebec does but there certainly is potential.

Most of the rivers don't have as many large vertical drops as the ones in Quebec and development of them would cost much more for what they would produce. There would of course have to be consultations with many First Nations. For example, the Five Nations Energy Inc. (FN owned) would have to play a pivotal role and there would have to be new housing and FNs moved with new infrastructure due to flooding. (and many of them flood almost annually anyways under natural conditions)

Lately, Ontario Power Generation (OPG) has rebuilt most of the existing hydro-dams in Northeastern Ontario and with better designs many of them produce almost twice as much power as they did before.

I would support new dams in the Arctic watershed if then are controlled by First Nations and benefit all First Nations and the Town of Moosonee.

[vid]

Northern Ontario, unlike Northern Quebec and much of Northern Manitoba, is actually a swampy lowland. Imagine damming the Red River in Winnipeg. You'd get no real benefit from it, just a large, muddy lake. That's why we didn't build dams up there—we simply couldn't. That region actually isn't even on the Canadian Shield (orange parts on this map):


http://kids.britannica.com/comptons/art-143239

And as for the Red Lake region (which is the part of Ontario in the corner of the border with Manitoba), we didn't build large dams because we lacked the skills and infrastructure to get electricity from there to Toronto at the time. We didn't even have a permanent road connection to the rest of the province until the 1950s. Even today, Northwestern Ontario is actually isolated from the rest of the North American grid. Three switch points (Kenora, Fort Francis and Wawa) are all that connect us to everything else. By tripping a switch at Wawa, we escaped the 2003 blackout, and OPG was able to use energy from its Northwest plant group to kick start power plants in the south.

In the great lakes basin though, we have a lot of rocky hills and waterfalls. Most of our dams are based on those. Thunder Bay is powered by five dams, three on the Nipigon River (the largest of which raised the water level of Lake Nipigon—which is about 90% of the size of PEI—by several feet) and two along the Kam River, including one around Kakabeka Falls (with a similar set up to the Niagara Falls power plant, where the water is brought through an underground aqueduct to the generating station which is built into the cliff face downstream from the falls to preserve them). Thunder Bay actually has a hydro dam within the city, which was built over 100 years ago to power street cars. Its reservoir is the focal point of the city's largest greenspace.

Northern Ontario also has a growing wind and solar sector (Northwestern Ontario is the sunniest place in Eastern Canada, by virtue of being the westernmost part of it lol), numerous gas plants (since the natural gas lines from the west cross the region, so plants are built along it in strategic locations) and two biofuel plants (former coal plants) which are powered by "high tech" pellets from Norway and only operate about five hours a year. It cost the Thunder Bay Generation Station over $1,000 per kilowatt hour last year. They turned it on for a few hours in January and it operated at around 5% capacity before demand dropped and it was turned off again, because apparently you can just turn them on and off within an hour like that.

[vid]

Sort of onto the topic: I support nuclear as a base load for the grid but think we should transition to point-of-use power generation and storage, using solar panels, wind turbines, geothermal, biofuel, and other methods at or near the site of consumption. It's already quite common here, our hospital, pulp mill, city landfill, several grain elevators, the airport and dozens of other businesses actually generate their own energy on-site using renewable methods or by burning waste products. The Canada Malting plant uses waste heat from the fermentation process to generate energy and is about to become the most cost effective plant in the company's network because of this. The pulp mill produces so much energy that it sells it to subsidize the business during slower economic periods. The city and school boards are putting solar on every large, flat roof they've got.

In the past, before large-scale energy generation, grain elevators actually had coal power plants built-in and would make extra money selling the electricity to the surrounding area. That was pre-WWI, so it isn't like this is a new idea!

[1overcosc]

Originally Posted by vid

Northern Ontario also has a growing wind and solar sector (Northwestern Ontario is the sunniest place in Eastern Canada, by virtue of being the westernmost part of it lol), numerous gas plants (since the natural gas lines from the west cross the region, so plants are built along it in strategic locations) and two biofuel plants (former coal plants) which are powered by "high tech" pellets from Norway and only operate about five hours a year. It cost the Thunder Bay Generation Station over $1,000 per kilowatt hour last year. They turned it on for a few hours in January and it operated at around 5% capacity before demand dropped and it was turned off again, because apparently you can just turn them on and off within an hour like that.

Even faster. Thermal plants (thermal = anything that burns something, whether coal, natural gas, oil, or biofuel) can be turned on and off in about 20 minutes.

Ontario takes advantage of this to have gas plants backup wind plants. The government uses weather forecasting to predict how much power wind plants will generate in the next few hours, and uses that information to either scale up or scale down gas plants as necessary. I believe they actually do this forecast on an hourly basis; ie. at 9:30pm they'll forecast wind output for 10:00pm-11:00pm and have gas plant output changed between 9:40pm and 10:00pm.

In Kingston, we have a major windfarm and a natural gas power plant. The gas plant only ever turns on when the windfarm's output falls low. Because Kingston is a very windy city, the plant is almost always turned off.

[MolsonExport]

There was this grand plan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_...elopment_Canal