Hydro disaster in Ontario Billions and Billions of dollars continue to be wasted

Here is a partial quote from Eamon O’Riordan A/Senior Economist from Premier Wynne’s Office: The conversion of Atikokan GS helped protect existing jobs at the plant See bottom of page to read his letter The liberals spent $1 billion to upgrade the Lambton coal plant to burn clean coal then shortly afterwards they shut it down. I billion wasted. Also when the Liberals shut down the coal plants they signed a contingency support agreement with OPG from 2009 -2010. $929 million was paid out , this contact ran until 2014.

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So how many billions of dollars was wasted to have the coal plants on standby while the Americans ,Quebec and Manitoba were getting free hydro or for pennies a kWh? I would also like to note there are roughly 25 OPG workers are still employed to run the closed Lambton coal plant. The Thunder Bay Biomass plant runs at less than 2% capacity and employs 72 people at 25x the cost of other biomass stations also the coal pellets they use must be imported from Norway or from Texas and Premier Wynne thinks this is great. The liberals say they are proud of the Atikokan Biomass plant which they say is the largest in the world yet it runs at less than 10% capacity and costs 8x more than other biomass plants to run. Just think for a moment if the Thunder Bay plant employs 72 people to run at 2% capacity, how many OPG workers are employed to run the Atikokan Biomass plant at 10% capacity? And it gets worse: the Atikokan plant is to only scheduled to operate 29 days a year so what do the OPG workers do to earn their pay when the plant is not producing power? Just remember that there are 7600 OPG workers making a minimum of a $100.000 a year. The Ontario Liberals chose not to burn coal even though there was technology out there that coal would burned 99.9%. clean with scrubbers installed. The British do this and with the particles trapped in the scrubbers it gets recycled into drywall board.. The truth of the matter is we are using less hydro today than we were in 2003 and over 300 thousand manufacturing jobs are gone from Ontario. We have the highest hydro rates in North America with no end in sight. We know that people who have donated to the Liberal party are and have gotten rewarded with generous Solar and Wind contracts and under this failed Liberal experiment Ontarians will soon only own 40% of Hydro One.

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One must sit back and think how many billions of free hydro Quebec, Manitoba and the Americans have gotten under the Ontario Liberals. We know the Samsung deal costs Ontarian's 1.5 billion dollars and the cancelled gas plants cost Ontari-owe 1.1 billion. One may assume the Wynne Liberals are more concerned about union votes than the high cost of hydro.

Ontario gov't ignored chance to cut $1.5B in hydro bills:

May 22, 2016 - Newly unearthed documents suggest Ontario's Liberal government ... $1.5 billion by terminating an agreement with Samsung, but decided ... Over-cost Muskrat Falls hydro megaproject will likely go ahead: ... But instead of calling off the deal, the Liberals renegotiated the contract to save only $3.7 billion ...

Clean Coal Technologies - America's Power

The following provides a brief description of 16 clean coal technologies. ... According to EPA, wet scrubbers achieve SO2 and acid gas removal efficiencies of 90 percent to ... Fabric filters can achieve 99 percent to 99.9 percent PM removal.10 ..

EnergyBC: Coal Power

British Columbia mines millions of tons of coal, both for coking and power generation, ..... These Wet Scrubbers are effective at preventing almost 99% of coal's ...

Ontario's Auditor General report slams use of Thunder Bay, Atikokan

Dec 3, 2015 - Ontario Power Generation's Thunder Bay Generating Station on Mission ... the cost of generating power from other biomass plants in Ontario. ... completely in Thunder Bay, skilled employees would leave the city to ... The forecast for the Ontario Power Generation plant in Atikokan is to operate for about 29 ...

Hudak's major misstep on LRT | Sherring | Columnists | Opinion ...

Jun 9, 2014 - Hudak's message throughout the campaign has been clear. He was going to wrestle down ..... The Lambton coal plant had just been upgraded at a. cost of $1 billion to produce clean coal before it was closed in. October 2013.

Thunder Bay Generating Station test-fires on imported pellets

Sep 15, 2014 - Thunder Bay Generating Station test-fires on imported pellets ... The Thunder Bay Generating Station conversion from coal to biomass is on track for ... Despite the tricky logistics of acquiring the rare fuel, Boyko said adopting it ..

Ontario taxpayers shell out almost $1B to keep Nanticoke ready ...

Dec 3, 2011 - But that's a speck of coal dust compared to the $929 million it's cost Ontario ... that have stack scrubbers like Lambton Generating At Lambton the stacks ... had the government just spent this money to keep the coal plants on standby. ... This means not a billion dollars was wasted as the coal generation was.

OPG and Pan Am top Ontario's 2016 Sunshine List of public servants ...

Mar 24, 2016 - A staggering amount of Ontario Power Generation employees appeared on the province's 2016 sunshine list, with more than 7,600 employees.

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Eamon O’Riordan A/Senior Economist wrote this for me from Premier Wynnes Office Write2us (ENERGY) Thank you for your email regarding electricity prices and generation facilities in Ontario. I am pleased to respond.

Transforming Ontario’s Electricity System

Ontario is the first jurisdiction in North America to eliminate coal as a source of electricity production. Replacing coal-fired electricity generation was the single largest climate change initiative undertaken in North America and was the equivalent of taking up to 7 million cars off the road. Since the phase-out of coal-fired electricity generation in Ontario, the province has increased the use of bioenergy sources in its electricity supply mix. This has contributed to the decrease of greenhouse gases (GHG), nitrogen oxides, sulphur dioxide and mercury emissions. As part of Ontario’s commitment to replace coal generation with a mix of cleaner electricity sources, we decided to convert one unit at TBGS and the only unit at Atikokan GS to biomass. The conversion of these facilities to biomass provides valuable peaking capacity for the electricity system – this means that rather than operating continuously as baseload generation facilities, TBGS and Atikokan GS are available to respond to periods of high electricity demand. Hourly generation data on the province’s larger generation facilities such as TBGS and Atikokan is available via the following link on the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) website: [url=http://reports.ieso.ca/public/GenOutputCapability/]http://reports.ieso.ca/public/GenOutputCapability/[/url].

Thunder Bay Generating Station

One 150 megawatt unit at the Ontario Power Generation’s (OPG) Thunder Bay Generating Station (TBGS) is now in service putting Ontario on the leading edge of advanced biomass research worldwide. The conversion also maintained about 60 existing jobs and created an additional 12 jobs during the project. The converted unit began operating in Q1 of 2015 and is contracted to operate for five years.

Atikokan Generating Station

Ontario has successfully completed the conversion of the 205MW Atikokan GS from coal to biomass. Atikokan is now the largest 100% biomass facility in North America. In 2015, the plant generated 135 million kilowatt hours of renewable power, enough to power more than 14,000 homes. The conversion of Atikokan GS created up to 200 construction jobs and helped protect existing jobs at the plant and it continues to support the biomass sector in Ontario.

Sir Adam Beck Complex

OPG is proceeding with projects to redevelop and expand some of its aging hydroelectric fleet. Ontario's updated 2013 Long-Term Energy Plan (2013 LTEP) extended the existing hydroelectric target of 9,000 MW by 2018 to 9,300 MW by 2025. Large hydroelectric generating stations such as the Beck I and Beck 2 facilities at Niagara Falls have capacity factor of approximately 75%. The 10.2 kilometer Niagara Tunnel Project came in-service on March 2013. The tunnel increases the amount of water available for power generation at the Sir Adam Beck generating complex. No new capacity was added. Rather, the project provides more water to run through the existing Beck complex – an additional 500 cubic metres of water per second, which will allow for the generation of an additional 1.6 terrawatts (TWh) of electricity a year. This is enough to meet the needs of around 160,000 residences. -- Niagara Tunnel Project In addition, OPG continues to work on a reservoir rehabilitation project at the 174 MW Sir Adam Beck pump generating station (PGS) Once it returns to service (expected to be in April 2017), water diverted to the Sir Adam Beck generating complex will be typically pumped into the reservoir at night so it can be used to generate electricity during subsequent periods of high electricity demand. More information regarding Beck PGS and OPG’s other hydroelectric facilities is available via the link: I hope you will find this information helpful, and thank you for writing. Eamon O’Riordan A/Senior Economist Confidentiality: If you have received this email in error, please advise us through the Ministry of Energy website at [url=http://www.energy.gov.on.ca/en/contact-us/]http://www.energy.gov.on.ca/en/contact-us/[/url] and destroy all copies of this message. Thank you.

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