Making predictions is hard, especially about the future. The politics of Ontario, not to mention Canada and the rest of the world, are tumultuous and seemingly changing every week. Which isn’t to say that you can’t make some safe prognostications: the sun will continue to rise in the east, water will continue to be wet, and Ontario’s electricity supply will continue to depend hugely on nuclear power. The simple fact is that the projects already announced by the current government — refurbishments at Bruce and Darlington, a small modular-reactor pilot also at Darlington, and potentially more to come at Bruce and a refurbishment at Pickering — will cement a large fraction of the province’s electricity supply for decades to come.
But if the most bullish projections for electricity demands are right, that won’t be enough. We’ll need more electricity still. The demand from consumers opting for electric cars instead of the ones powered by gasoline alone will mean a massive increase in electricity needs. Adding home heating and other loads will mean yet more — and that’s before we get to the more uncertain stuff, like the hyperscale data centres being proposed by various AI companies.
It’s in that context that Energy and Electrification Minister Stephen Lecce announced this week that the government is sounding out three communities in Ontario to see whether they’d be willing to host new power plants; the official statement pointedly mentioned nuclear power by name.
“To meet soaring energy demands, we’re working with communities to plan ahead and build for our future so that we can generate more power that is reliable and affordable for our families today and tomorrow,” Lecce said in the statement. The three communities are Lambton, Haldimand County, and Port Hope (which, respectively, host sites conveniently already owned by Ontario Power Generation that once hosted power stations). The sites in Lambton and Haldimand are former coal-fired plants — Nanticoke, in Haldimand County, was North America’s largest until it was decommissioned in 2013.
Wesleyville, in Port Hope, is an odd case in that it was supposed to be an oil-fired power plant that would have entered service right at the moment the OPEC oil embargo of the early 1970s began; OPG continued to own the site even as the power plant was abandoned. The provincial power utility briefly considered selling the lands to the municipality of Port Hope a few years ago, but that sale was halted by then-minister of energy Todd Smith, who was concerned about exactly this question: Where would the province actually put the next generation of big new power plants?
It’s not just that the public already owns these lands. Hydro One, the provincial transmission utility, had the lands it owns for transmission corridors transferred to public ownership back in 2002 — and the public held those lands despite Hydro One’s privatization under the Kathleen Wynne government more than a decade later. They are, in a sense, the perfect places to put new power plants. That isn’t surprising: What could be better than a site that has already been home to a power plant?
The fact that two of these sites are in southwestern Ontario (Wesleyville is east of the GTA) is an added bonus, since a large share of the province’s electricity demand is expected to come from population and manufacturing growth in the southwest.
So, easy-peasy, right? Well, maybe not. The reason Lecce so carefully made sure to mention nuclear isn’t just that this government is fond of the province’s nuclear industry (though it is). It’s that nuclear is one of the only obvious candidate technologies at hand that checks the boxes the government needs checked. But, to date, Ontario’s nuclear expansions have come in communities that already had large nuclear plants in them, with a substantial workforce (and voting bloc) that supported their continued existence. It’s difficult to overstate how important that has been for the province’s energy policy in the past decade: the Bruce and Darlington refurbishments were first green-lit under the Wynne government. There’s almost no other decision you could describe with the words “uncontroversial Liberal energy policy,” and not even the Green party is seriously proposing to undo that one (as leader Mike Schreiner told Steve Paikin and I on the #onpoli podcast earlier this fall.)
It's been an incredible cheat code for energy planning in this province that some communities don’t just tolerate nuclear power but welcome it. (I say that without judgment, as someone who enjoys playing games with cheat codes.) But whether the nuclear industry’s current relatively positive public image can survive encounters with new communities is very much an open question.
Strictly speaking, the province doesn’t actually need local community support to build a nuclear power plant anywhere it wants to. If anything, federal regulations could end up being a more difficult bar to clear. But it will be easier on elected officials if they can successfully woo a local council to express support.
The problem is that, even if they get an affirmative vote once, it takes longer than a single municipal election cycle to build a nuclear power plant (or much of anything in Ontario, these days). So the job ahead for this government or for any of its likely successors is not just getting support for nuclear power in places with no history of hosting it before — it’s keeping that support for years to come.
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