One of the hardest jobs in public policy in 2025 is planning for the future of our electricity system. The stakes are high (even tiny miscalculations in planning could imperil the system that literally keeps the lights on) and the electricity sector is in the midst of massive changes thanks to rapidly changing technologies. Just to take one example, the cost of batteries is falling so quickly (40 per cent for utility-scale batteries in one year alone) that they’re starting to displace natural gas in grids that have adopted them fastest.
But we do need a plan, because demand for electricity is surging thanks to things like electric vehicles, data centre construction, and increased industrial investment.
In Ontario, the agency responsible for that planning is the Independent Electricity System Operator, which is in the midst of planning for new power plants in the province — including refurbishing existing nuclear plants and building new ones in Port Hope and at the site of the current Bruce station. The IESO is also (without as much fanfare from the current provincial government) planning a potential role for renewable energy like wind and solar, and determining the role batteries could play in smoothing out supply and demand.
A new technical paper released by the IESO suggests, at first glance, that we’ve finally arrived at the destination green energy advocates have been predicting for so long.
“For years, the nuclear industry and the IESO have been saying we’ve got to invest in new nuclear because wind, solar, and battery storage can’t provide us with 24/7 reliable power. And this report says they can,” says Jack Gibbons, chair of the Ontario Clean Air Alliance. “It shows that these options are lower cost than new small modular reactors. We’ve got confirmation from the IESO what clean energy people have been saying for years, which is that renewables are reliable and they’re our lowest-cost source of new supply.”
A briefing note published by the OCAA earlier this month highlighted its own analysis of the IESO’s findings, including that renewables perform well even with assumptions around nuclear power that the OCAA finds overly optimistic.
The IESO is quick to pump the brakes on that kind of talk. In reality, it says the paper is a much more modest intellectual exercise, intended to make public internal work modelling regional questions about how much power various sources can deliver in different regions of Ontario.
“The paper is just trying to demonstrate a methodology for how to look at these questions when it doesn’t warrant using the entire scope of our modelling capability just because of the expense and practicality of it,” says Mike Risavy, director of resource planning at the IESO.
Risavy calls the model outlined in the new paper a “desktop” version intended to handle lighter analysis of planning questions that don’t rise to the level of needing larger, more complex, and more labour-intensive modelling. Its annual planning outlook has already answered the question of where Ontario’s future energy needs should come from, and it’s not exclusively renewables.
“It’s really an all of the above answer,” Risavy says. “We really need everything, and both the IESO and political leaders are saying the same thing.”
The model in the recent paper, however, is useful for finer-grained questions of what kinds of supply are appropriate in different contexts. For example, greenhouses in southwest Ontario have a different demand profile than mines in the northwest, which in turn are different from auto assembly plants in the GTA. A different mix of electricity sources might be applicable in each of those regions.
Crucially, though, Risavy says the model is just the first filter of analysis that the IESO would do before procuring any new electricity projects: next would come questions about land use, transmission capacity, and any number of other important questions. Basically, he warns against reading too much into the positive assessment of renewables.
Gibbons isn’t surprised that he and the IESO come to different conclusions.
“The IESO is schizophrenic. On the one hand, they would really like to provide us with reliable power at the lowest possible cost, but on the other hand, they want to justify Doug Ford’s nuclear and gas policies,” Gibbons says.
The political reality is that in Ontario at least, there’s no prospect of a renewables-only electricity system. The refurbishments of the Bruce and Darlington nuclear reactors alone will keep thousands of megawatts of nuclear energy on the grid for decades to come, and it’s possible that the new small modular reactors at Darlington will be far enough along in their construction by the next election that no government will cancel them. That’s before counting the large expansions proposed at Bruce and Port Hope.
Nevertheless, Gibbons says that renewables can play an important role in the province’s energy system. If the government wants.
“The rest of the world is going renewable. Last year, 92 per cent of new global electricity capacity was renewable. But the Doug Ford government wants to go in the opposite direction.
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