The Sir Adam Beck hydro facilities in Niagara Falls marked their highest energy production since 1982 this year. At the same time, the Pickering Nuclear station recorded its second-highest output ever as a six-unit station.
Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is crediting a decrease in outages, along with higher unit utilization during periods of demand to these record high productions.
“We’re working really hard at this plant to try and provide availability, so we’ve doing some overhauls coming up, so actually 19. We’re going to look to increase the capacity of the station by maybe one percent or so, and that’ll convert to about another half a terawatt hour of production,” said Nicholas Pender, Niagara Region VP of OPG.
Pender tells CityNews it’ll become increasingly important to squeeze more juice out of existing facilities with demand expected to soar.
Everyone’s driving a lot more EVs, demand in the province is going up,” Pender added. It’s demand the grid must be ready for.
In 2022, California asked residents not to charge their EV’s during a heatwave. Around the same time, residents in Colorado found they were locked out of their smart thermostats by officials protecting the energy grid, and most recently, we saw Alberta asking residents to cut back during a cold snap.
“I think we’ve got a bit more of a flexible fuel mix here, so we’ve got a really high proportion of hydro, a high proportion of nuclear, so that’s not really a concern I see in the short term. If you rolled forward 10 or 15 years, we need to do the development in the province to keep providing that reliability to everyone..”
Keena Trowell, an assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, said it’s good to maximize existing power plants and also agrees we need to be thinking now about future demand.
“I think there are well-founded concerns about whether we’re building our capacity up at a rate that is going to meet the future demand,” said Trowell. “From a technical standpoint, it’s doable, but it really is about creating the policy framework and the investment framework to start to roll out the solutions on a large scale.”
She’s urging people to think carefully about what should be electrified. For example, she said, plug-in electrification works for cars, “sort of the daily commuter, the going to the grocery store,” but said long-haul shipping may be better served by hydrogen.
“Where they’re travelling thousands of kilometres and taking a long time to refuel has such massive negative impacts,” Trowell explained.
Or heating, she said, which isn’t that well served by electrification. “This is where we should be looking at long-duration thermal energy storage.”
As for the reliable, but hotly debated fuel sources like nuclear and natural gas, she said nuclear must be a part of the future discussion.
But as for the gas? “Natural gas plants have a life expectancy and within that life expectancy, we should be ramping up alternatives technologies, but the nuclear we’re talking about now is not the same that was on offer 30 years ago,” said Trowell.
In Canada, the federal and provincial governments share jurisdiction over energy. In Ontario, grid management is handled by the IESO, the Independent Electricity System Operator.
