Why is Ontario Resisting Renewable Power?

https://www.thestar.com/business/opinion/2023/07/01/its-clean-cheap-and-theres-an-endless-supply-so-why-is-ontario-resisting-renewable-power.html

"Why is Ontario resisting renewable power?" asks Mike Brigham , President of energy co-op SolarShare. In support of his case, Mr. Brigham references the cost competitiveness of onshore wind and utility-scale solar as compared to nuclear, pointing out that the LCOE of the renewables is 1/3 that of nuclear. Of course, these numbers leave out an important part of the story that significantly alters the compelling economics, that being capacity factor. Nobody in Ontario would be content with intermittent access to electricity, not households, and certainly not industry. A nuclear power plant has the highest capacity factor of any power generation, typically around 93% uptime. That reliable output has real value on the grid, and it's not reflected in the LCOE numbers quoted by Mr. Brigham. Intermittent wind and solar, on the other hand, offer nowhere close to the same reliable output. I struggled to find good numbers for Canada, but according to this data (https://www.statista.com/statistics/474362/capacity-factor-renewable-energy-by-resource-canada/), solar in Canada has a capacity factor of just 10%. Onshore wind fairs a bit better at ~30%. It might be low cost power when it's available, but what about the other 90% of the time when solar is not contributing to the grid. Either the grid does without the power, and significant demand curtailment is required, or we need a backup source for that electricity. This is where Mr. Brigham's economics fall apart. If we correct the cost of solar and wind to reflect the additional cost of backup to ensure grid resiliency, one would find that neither wind nor solar is less expensive. Ontario would have to build wind and/or solar plus 100% redundancy, likely in the form of simple cycle natural gas.

Mr. Brigham references an IEA report that questions gas reliability globally. There is no need for availability of natural gas to be a concern. If the governments in both Canada and the US recognized the incredible value and importance of natural gas as a global energy source over the next several decades, and provided a supportive environment for responsible production of that gas, we would have no issues. Instead, they have chosen to impede development of the resource and transportation infrastructure at most every opportunity, limiting access to this valuable commodity for developed nations like Germany and more importantly, for developing nations in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, at great expense to human wellbeing.

Germany is a country-scale demonstration project in high renewables penetration. They have built renewable generation capacity that represents 150% of peak demand in the country, They maintain dispatchable generation capacity almost equal to peak demand in the country for all the times when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine. Because the dispatchable capacity is no longer quite sufficient to meet peak demand, they have also warned about need for curtailment - no charging your cars or running your heat pump during times of high demand. This is coupled with the highest electricity prices in Europe.

Is this a path Ontario wants to go down? Are high power prices and intermittent curtailments what VW signed up for when they agreed to locate their new battery plant in Ontario? Are Ontario consumers supportive of significantly higher retail power prices? Presumably, the answer to all of these is no. Let's hope that Ontario has looked at the outcome from the path Mr. Brigham suggests and recognized it is not a path to economic success for the province. Let's hope the rest of the provinces come to the same conclusion. Maybe that's why Ontario is resisting renewable power.

#affordableenergy #reliableenergy #accessibleenergy #nuclear #naturalgas #energypoverty #energypolicy