Canada: Power crazy

Across Canada, provincial governments are aggressively following the call of green power and energy conservation. No watt of electricity is exempt, from mandated fluorescent light bulbs to subsidies for windmill farms to the campaign to rehabilitate the granddaddy of power boondoggles, nuclear energy, out of long-term care.

The rationale for this massive release of plans and mega-schemes is climate change. In the name of curbing carbon emissions, no form of electricity is too outlandish or too costly. And even if some electricity projects are too costly — nuclear power, for example — Dalton McGuinty’s Ontario remains ready to spend and risk whatever it takes.
Promoters are boosting nuclear power in Alberta and New Brunswick, home of the Point Lepreau nuclear fiscal calamity. Gordon Campbell’s British Columbia is steadfastly anti-nuclear, but the government is in the grip of green power fantasies. B.C. aims to be “self-sufficient” in electricity by 2016 and only through the addition of renewable power, also apparently regardless of cost.

And now Ottawa, spurred in part by the Bush administration’s grand nuclear power ambitions, seems set to join the U.S. President’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. The aim of the GNEP project is to expand the use of nuclear energy for environmental and geopolitical reasons.

There’s a lot of craziness in all this, in the United States and Canada, but especially in Ontario, home of a 20-year, $60-billion integrated power plan. A new version this week reveals a patchwork of unstable assumptions and arbitrary directives from the Premier. The province faces a 24% increase in energy demand over the next 20 years, and a 30% increase in required power capacity. Under the plan, half of the capacity need will be met, under government directive, by “conservation.” In other words, the rising demand for power will be covered by forcing consumers not to demand it.

But the major hole in Ontario’s energy market, created mostly by the arbitrary shut-down of carbon-emitting coal plants, will be filled with $26.5-billion in new spending on nuclear power.

Financial Post