In 3 short months, Ontarians will have the opportunity to participate in a public hearing on the future of the Pickering nuclear station. It is a very important hearing, and everyone who can participate should.
Briefly, the upshot of
In 3 short months, Ontarians will have the opportunity to participate in a public hearing on the future of the Pickering nuclear station. It is a very important hearing, and everyone who can participate should.
Briefly, the upshot of the hearing is whether Pickering will continue to put electrical power into Ontario’s grid after 2019.
If it does not, then Pickering’s electrical output will cease, and be replaced with natural gas.
Here’s how that could shake out. The charts on the left represent actual generation over the ten days up to around noon on February 6 (top left) and what that fuel mix would look like if gas were to replace Pickering (bottom left). The right-hand charts represent how those two fuel mix scenarios look cost-wise.
As you can see, the gas-replaces-Pickering scenario would have cost $53 million more than what it actually cost—which is pretty high already. Over a year, the gas-replaces-Pickering scenario could cost Ontario ratepayers an additional roughly $1.8 billion.
Notice how the proportional contributions of each fuel change from MWh generated to cost, i.e. that the thick dark blue (nuclear) and light-light blue (hydro) bands shrink in the cost chart, and how much the light beige (solar) band grows from generation to cost. This is because the costs of the different types of generation in Ontario’s system are roughly as follows:
- Nuclear: 6.3 cents.
- Hydro: 4.9 cents.
- Gas: ~15 cents.
- Wind: ~11.9 cents.
- Solar: ~49.9 cents.
To be clear, these are estimates of the contracted/regulated costs per kilowatt-hour of energy from each major source, and they are based on figures from the Ontario Auditor General’s 2015 report.
And to continue being clear, they also represent only the generators’ side of the ledger. i.e., they represent an estimate of the average per-kWh monetary amount that individual generating entities received for energy, within each of the major generator types.1
They do not represent what the classes of ratepayers paid for that same energy. That is a different matter.
And CO2? Here’s how the picture could look, beginning as early as 2019:
As you can see, there will be a significant increase in CO2 emissions when gas replaces Pickering. Over the past ten days, had gas provided Pickering’s output the CO2 cost would have been over 373,000 tons—three times as high as it actually was. Over a year, that works out to over 13 million tons.
That’s right: slightly in