On January 30, the Ford government announced it would be proceeding with the refurbishment of the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station. The project will “help produce at least another 30 years of safe, reliable and clean electricity to power the next major international investment, the new homes we are building and industries as they grow and electrify,” said Energy Minister Todd Smith.
Not everyone welcomed the move. Taylor C. Noakes wrote last week that “Doug Ford is shifting Ontario into reverse, setting the province back 30 years or more.” He suggests that we should build renewable energy systems in part because they are less expensive and cites a claim from Mark Z. Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s Atmosphere/Energy Program, that “today batteries are beating natural gas for wind and solar backup needs.”
The idea of getting all the electricity we need from things as natural as sunshine and summer breezes is certainly a very seductive one. And it’s no surprise that, when it turned out that both could be harvested cheaply, governments threw themselves wholeheartedly into doing something that seemed like a win-win for voters. But we can’t allow fundamental misunderstandings to cloud our judgment when it come this province’s energy future, and the reality is that the wind and solar dream just is not working and probably never will.
Let’s take the matter of cost first: it may seem counterintuitive, but buying electricity cheaply doesn’t necessarily lead to cheap electricity.
Throughout the history of modern economic development, electricity has been delivered on demand when and where it was wanted. Society is now built around that and would collapse without it. Our demand for electricity varies during the day, through the seasons, and with the weather. There is a baseload that is always there, and then there are times it is very cold or very warm, when demand increases and “peaks.”
This variation used to be easily managed through the constant use of high-capital, low-operating-cost plants — so-called baseload generators such as coal, hydro, and nuclear — that could be supplemented at peak times with electricity from cheaper plants that typically use higher-cost fuels, like gas. Generally, the generators that operated all the time had the lowest-cost power because their costs were written off against the greater quantity of electricity they produced.
But the key feature of all the plants was that we could control them, keeping the baseload generators operating all the time and turning the peak load generators on and off, as needed.
Obviously, all plants need to be taken offline occasionally for maintenance, but this could be accommodated by sequencing the maintenance and avoiding peaks by doing it in the seasonal margins.
Everything changed when wind and solar started to be connected to grids. For the first time, they included generators whose availability was not under the grid operators’ control. They became known as renewables, but their real defining feature was that they could not be relied on, as the sun does not always shine, and the wind does not always blow. The “unreliables” would have been a more accurate way to define them.
Because we can’t rely on their electricity production, they must always be backed up with other forms of generation. The expensive electricity these back-up plants produce is an artifact of the unreliability of wind and solar — it is not an intrinsic characteristic of the plant, which would produce cheaper electricity if it were operated all the time. The electricity from the unreliable sources is cheap, but it makes its back-up plant more expensive.
Batteries may seem attractive as a back-up option, but currently, they can store only enough power to allow alternative power to be brought online when the wind unexpectedly dies or the skies suddenly go dark. They can’t continue to replace the missing power for very long, especially at peak times. And they can’t be recharged until the peak is over and the unreliable capacity comes back online.
This brings us to blackouts. We all know that the weather is unreliable, but, ironically, it is the reliable aspects of the weather that cause the biggest problem. Ontario sees two peaks — on hot sultry days, when our air conditioners are fighting heat and humidity, and on crisp, cold days, when our heaters are stopping us from freezing to death.
Both are caused by high-pressure systems that are, by their very nature, wide and slow-moving, such that everyone in the region suffers for several days, sometimes weeks. Both are characterized by darkness at night and a lack of wind.
This type of weather brought Alberta close to multiple blackouts this year. If Albertans hadn’t turned everything down to survival levels, people would almost certainly have died. Noakes implies that wind and solar systems saved the day, stating that it was “thanks to renewable-energy systems that the grid alert was lifted” and referencing an article titled “Wind and sun come through to help Alberta electricity operator end extreme-cold grid alerts.” But what this article was actually saying was that it was the return of the wind and solar, which had been absent during the crisis, that brought the crisis to an end. Basically, its kind of like saying that a travel crisis caused in part by the buses not running was solved when the buses started to run. Wind and solar were not the sole cause of the problem (some bad luck was involved as well), but they will always be absent at these critical times, maintaining the threat of blackouts when people are most vulnerable.
Suggesting that we should build unreliables because they are cheap ignores the fact that this would still drive up electricity prices. The idea that times of low generation could be managed by spreading the unreliables far and wide ignores the fact that this would make no difference, because, at these peak times, none of them would be operating. Batteries can help buy time but would not have helped Alberta — it would just have taken longer for people to freeze.
The Ford government has to ensure Ontarians have the reliable low-cost electricity they need, when they need it. It cannot gamble on the weather in the way Alberta has, especially as it knows that the weather that causes our peak demand also leads to the lowest production from wind and solar. Proceeding with the Pickering refurbishment proves the Ford government is taking advice from people who know how the grid works and are acting sensibly on behalf of Ontarians.