Ontario’s Darlington B must be on line before 2020 and must be CANDU

By: Donald Jones, P.Eng., retired nuclear industry engineer, 2012 August.

A condensed version of this article will appear in the upcoming 2012 September edition of the Canadian Nuclear Society’s BULLETIN journal.

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By the end of 2012 after the restart of Bruce units 1 and 2 and with all eight units on line there could be up to 12,900 MW of nuclear generation being fed to the Ontario grid. Over the next 12 years or so units 3 and 4 at Bruce A, all four Bruce B units and all four Darlington units will be refurbished and Pickering A and B stations will be shutdown for good. This will have significant impact on the Ontario grid.

Both Pickering stations are slated for shutdown in 2020 so this will bring an immediate loss of around 3,000 MW. If this loss is replaced by combined cycle gas turbine units it will result in the annual dumping of 9.75 million tonnes (reference 1) of the greenhouse gas (GHG) carbon dioxide into the atmosphere just from the burning of the fuel. Life-cycle emissions would be more especially from the increasing use of “fracked” gas which, according to some reports, has life cycle emissions comparable to coal. If replaced by a less efficient coal-fired Nanticoke and Lambton converted to gas it will result in nearly 14 million tonnes being dumped. If replaced by nuclear there will be zero emissions.

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Why wind power does not work in Ontario – and the solution

Why wind power does not work in Ontario – and the solution

By: Donald Jones, P.Eng. – retired nuclear industry engineer

This article, with minor differences, was published as an opinion piece in the Canadian Nuclear Society’s BULLETIN journal, 2012 June edition.

I haven’t noticed the price of Ontario’s electricity dropping despite an over supply of generation and a ten year low in north American natural gas prices. This is mainly because of the Ontario government’s misguided policy of promoting more and more wind generation on the grid under the protection of the Green Energy Act. Large amounts of intermittent wind skew the market leading to take-or-pay contracts (necessary to ensure capacity is built and always available when wind is absent) with the gas-fired generators and the need to export electricity at subsidized give away prices. No one would build merchant gas-fired generators in Ontario since they would be operating at low capacity factors and would price themselves out of the market.

Nuclear electricity provides around 60 percent of Ontario demand and hydro about 20 percent leaving 20 percent or so for the rest, that is, mostly inflexible natural gas and some unreliable wind under Ontario government authority contracts, with flexible coal coming in at times of peak demand.  Without wind on the grid gas would have a better chance of supplying all the intermediate and peaking load and see an increasing amount of steady operating hours with lower generation costs. More and more wind being added to the grid in these times of continuing low demand result in very low market prices, even negative prices during the frequent periods of surplus baseload generation (SBG) that is indicative of a poorly designed grid.  Since wind is completely unnecessary in the first place it makes little sense to provide expensive energy storage, even if this were technically and environmentally achievable.