A healthy civil society demands robust, evidence-based debate on major government initiatives. Ontario's recent decision to refurbish the four newest reactors at the Pickering nuclear station fits the bill.
Last week, Taylor Noakes wrote a piece arguing that the Ford government’s recent announcement of its plan to refurbish Pickering would set “the province back 30 years or more, both environmentally and economically” and that “taxpayer money would be better spent on fully renewable energy.” While the article is heavy on rhetoric, it plays fast and loose with the realities of our grid.
Decisions that drive up the price of electricity disproportionately affect the poor and cause industrial flight. In Ontario, major price increases followed a lucrative feed in tariffs paid to private wind and solar developers under the Green Energy Act. The Financial Accountability Office estimates that these contracts will cost Ontarians a further $38 billion in subsidies between 2020 and 2040.
On an even more serious note, the grid is our civilizational life-support structure. Getting it wrong can result in prolonged blackouts that have the potential to cause massive economic losses and threaten life itself. The 2021 Texas blackouts led to 246 deaths and $130 billion in economic damages.
What motivated our non-profit, Canadians for Nuclear Energy, to lead a four-year campaign to refurbish Pickering? We saw no sense in retiring an emissions-free facility that produces more power than all of our hydroelectric infrastructure at Niagara Falls during a climate crisis and a drive to electrification. If used solely to charge EVs, Pickering could power the electrification of Ontario’s entire light-duty fleet, which currently comprises 7 million vehicles.
This power is delivered emissions-free. The initial choice to build the Pickering nuclear station in place of a coal plant has so far offset one gigaton of CO2, a quantity equivalent to 1/35th of all humanity’s CO2 emissions in 2023. The restart of Pickering’s two reactors in the early 2000s alongside four at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station provided 90 per cent of the power required to kick Ontario’s coal habit. That, combined with emissions controls on vehicles, caused Toronto’s smog days to disappear; air pollution has dramatically improved.
But is Pickering too old to carry on this critical work? The four units set to be refurbished are five to six years younger than sister units undergoing similar refurbishment work at Bruce.
So does it make economic sense to refurbish Pickering — or should we pursue other clean-energy alternatives?
Noakes claims that nuclear power is “the most expensive energy money can buy.” But nuclear power in Ontario is the second-cheapest source of electricity, after legacy hydroelectricity — at 10.1c/kWh compared to 14.7c/kWh for wind and 47.4c/kWh for solar, according to prices set by the Ontario Energy Board. As for the cost of refurbishment, Bruce Power receives only 9c/kWh, which covers the $13 billion needed to complete the refurbishment of all eight of the CANDU reactors at the site.
It is true that, without substantial tariffs and subsidies, wind and solar are the cheapest forms of electricity, but only when the weather co-operates. Electricity, though, like health care, is a service — not a commodity. Electrons can’t be harvested from a wind farm to spend when needed. Supply must always match demand.
Think of wind and solar as doctors and nurses that work when they feel like it, refuse night shifts, and abandon their patients in their hour of greatest need. Hyperbole? Consider the consequences of a prolonged blackout to a society that has “electrified everything.”
Year after year, during our peak-demand season — summer, which brings with it heat waves — Ontario’s wind fleet drops to its lowest output. In a fully electrified heat-pump future, we will become a winter-peaking grid again during a time of year when wind output slackens provincewide and solar approaches near-total hibernation. Backup for these prolonged periods of high demand and low output from renewables requires a costly system involving overbuilt wind and solar, huge amounts of expensive battery storage, long transmission lines, and hydroelectricity from an increasingly drought-afflicted Quebec. These system costs explain why jurisdictions that lead the world in wind and solar deployment — California, Germany, and Denmark — struggle with some of the world’s highest electricity prices.
Then there’s issue of capacity. Ontario’s solar produces only 16 per cent of its rated capacity and wind, 29 per cent. Nuclear, by contrast, weighs in at around 90 per cent.
During a two-week peak-demand period in summer 2019, Ontario’s 4,957MW wind fleet — which is one and a half times larger than Pickering — operated at only 6.85 per cent of its potential. Over the same period, Pickering operated at 97.79 per cent of installed capacity, producing 8.9 time more electricity. That means you’d need 44,120MW of wind capacity to produce the same amount of energy as Pickering during this period alone. Nation Rise, Ontario's most recent wind farm (and also its least expensive) cost $2.33 million per MW. At that price, 44 GW of wind costs $101 billion dollars, or probably around six times the cost of refurbishing Pickering B.
How can nuclear, an inflexible base-load source of electricity, excel at load-following and -matching seasonal changes in demand? Fleet mode. We time the outages and maintenance of our 18-reactor-strong fleet for our low-demand shoulder seasons of spring and fall in order to run our nuclear fleet all-out when the electricity is most needed. This past summer, Pickering ran all six of its units for 100 days straight. This provision of reliable, dispatchable emissions-free nuclear energy dwarfs our fair-weather friends wind and solar.
The electricity grid is our most vital commons and our society’s life-support system. As we move to “electrify everything,” we must ensure that it remains affordable and ultra-reliable. Thankfully, our electricity grid is being planned and operated by experts. Wishful thinking won’t keep the lights on, our homes comfortable, or our hospitals running. While the refurbishment of Pickering will not be cheap, it’ll produce high-value power when Ontario needs it. It will also cost less than a replacement with wind and solar due to their poor capacity factors and poor match for Ontario’s grid demands. The government made the right decision to refurbish Pickering.
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