Ontario green energy act pdf

It also aims at using methane as a clean source of energy. This program encourages the development of active transportation infrastructure by providing funding to build and expand infrastructure such as bike lanes and trails. The bill recognizes that air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are a risk to the environment and to our health. The bill also addresses and lays out the national standards on air pollution as well as greenhouse gas emissions GGE.

It states that products shipped into Canada must comply with energy efficiency standards. Further, it gives the Minister powers to promote the efficient use of energy and the use of alternative energy sources. Under this act, every 3 years, the Minister has to include a comparison of energy efficiency standards in the yearly report.

It includes four main regulatory frameworks: the industrial sector, transportation, consumer products and improving indoor air quality. It regulates GGE and air pollutants across the industry, the fuel efficiency of motor vehicles, smog and acid rain forming from vehicle emissions, and it strengthens energy efficiency standards. The Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change is a plan to meet emission reduction targets while maintaining economic growth and building resilience to climate change.

One of the measures included is the carbon tax. The framework advises reductions in economic sectors so that we can phase into clean sources of energy. The government supports actions under the framework through policy and investments. The Canadian Environmental Protection Act gives the government the right to use their powers to protect the environment and human health, and to enforce pollution prevention. This act put in place a consistent set of environmental protection standards throughout Canada.

It outlines the protection of the environment, including diversity and human health from toxic substances, pollutants and wastes by using safer technology. It also requires the government, when making a decision, to consider the environmental and human impacts in the short and long term. The act states that projects must be done conscious of the environmental impact and seeking to limit it; to promote sustainable development for a healthy environment and economy; and to encourage the study of the impact that the activities will have on the environment in that region and to consider the results in environmental assessments.

Some of the factors included in an environmental assessment are: the environmental effects of a project including the effects of any problems or accidents that could occur within the project and the significance of the effects ; and the ways to realistically lessen the negative impacts. This Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act recognizes the economic benefits of the natural resources in the arctic waters, it takes responsibility for the welfare of the Inuit and other inhabitants in the Canadian arctic and preserves the ecological balance of the arctic.

The act aims to prevent pollution in the arctic waters of the Canadian mainland and islands in the arctic. For instance, dumping waste in arctic waters is prohibited. The Canada Shipping Act provides regulations to protect the marine environment coming from navigation and shipping activities, with some exceptions. The Fisheries Act covers the management and control of fisheries, conservation and protection of fish as well as their habitat, and pollution prevention.

In addition, it gives the Minister the powers to manage the fisheries for purposes of conservation and the protection of the fish.

This allows the Minister to ask for tests or sampling to be done and see how the fish are affected. The act helps prevent anyone from causing serious harm to the fish and from depositing harmful substances. The aim of the Environmental Protection Act is to protect and conserve our natural environment. The act includes provisions on vehicles, waste management, renewable energy, spills, and it covers the prohibition, reporting, and handling of contamination.

Regulation on air contaminants released into the air within the Environmental Protection Act includes regulation on local industrial and commercial facilities. The goal of the legislation is to limit the substances which affect our health and our environment.

It instructs industry to be transparent in their operations. The regulation states that facilities must act to reduce risk to local communities. Other purposes of the act are: to prevent, reduce and eliminate the use, generation and release of pollutants that are not necessary, and that threatens our environment; and protection and conservation of diversity, natural resources and ecologically sensitive areas or processes. The act allows the people of Ontario to take part in the making of environmental decisions of the Government of Ontario.

The aim is in protecting, conserving and restoring the environment. Also, it provides for the sustainability of the environment. The purpose of the Water Resources Act is to outline the regulations for protecting, conserving and managing our water resources, and to set up a system to assure they are used in an efficient and sustainable way. The act makes the discharge of pollutants into water illegal and it regulates the discharge of sewage into water.

The Clean Water Act protects our drinking water sources. It gives municipalities responsibility on the enforcement in the protection of water in the municipality. This includes passing by-laws as part of the enforcement and appointing a risk management official to handle enforcement.

For instance, under this act, municipalities must have their waste disposal strategies approved by the Ministry. The Ministry also gives approval to other projects where an environmental assessment is required.

In addition, the act gives the Minister the power to prepare policy guidelines in relation to the protection, conservation and wise management of the environment for a Tribunal to use when making decisions under this act. The Safe Drinking Water Act recognizes that Ontarians expect to have access to safe drinking water, and it sets regulations to protect our health and prevent drinking water contamination.

The act gives the Minister responsibility for overseeing the regulation, and it requires a mandatory yearly report to be written for the Minister regarding information on the drinking water systems. Some important measures included in this act include the mandatory: use of licensed labs for drinking water testing, reporting of any adverse test results, and certified operators for every drinking water system.

It also gives the MOE inspection powers, and sets strong prohibitions and penalties. The Green Energy Act encourages the growth of renewable energy projects in the province, which use cleaner sources of energy, and to give more opportunities for the development of these projects to foster a green economy. Grid electricity demand in Ontario is projected to drop back to levels by This will effectively eliminate the need for new reactors to replace the aging Pickering nuclear station.

Ontario is in the midst of reviewing its long-term energy plan LTEP. The most recent iteration of the plan calls for two new reactors to be built at the Darlington nuclear station. A decrease in future demand therefore has significant consequences. The proposed new reactors at Darlington would be providing electricity that will not be needed, while incurring substantial construction and operating costs. Apart from the Pickering station, Ontario has several other nuclear stations approaching the end of their operational lives.

This report asks the question that electricity planners are precluded from asking by the current LTEP: as they reach the end of their lives, can Ontario replace nuclear reactors with a cost-effective, low-carbon energy mix? The evidence presented in this report shows that putting conservation first, and supplementing it with a diversified portfolio of green energy sources, can be more cost-effective than renewed investment in nuclear stations whose costs continue to increase.

The electricity generated by new reactors is estimated to cost more than 15 cents per kilowatt hour kWh. A portfolio of green alternatives could provide the same energy for just over 10 cents per kWh, and at more effective times of the day.

The cost of renewable energy technologies, and especially solar power, is dropping dramatically. This is why jurisdictions across the United States and Europe are cancelling planned nuclear projects in favour of renewable alternatives. The continued rapid decline in solar costs makes it increasingly likely that residents and businesses across Ontario will look to produce power themselves.

By constraining alternatives, this requirement ultimately leads to higher electricity costs in Ontario. Instead, there should be fair competition among all alternatives based on cost as well as their environmental risks and benefits. Because all past nuclear projects in Canada have significantly exceeded their budgeted cost, the costs and risks of reactor life-extension projects should be subject to open and transparent public review. These two assumptions — which have consistently proven incorrect — have led past Ontario governments to focus on building large nuclear stations to fill a perceived shortage of electricity decades into the future.

As result, the ambition for both conservation and renewable sources is either significantly reduced or capped in the longer term. Figure A1 in the appendix also shows how the growth of renewables is arbitrarily capped by Such an approach has the potential to displace existing supply, in particular nuclear stations as they reach the end of their operational lives after It would be a truly different approach to electricity planning.

Prioritizing energy savings, and then incremental clean energy supplies as demand evolves, would heed the lessons learned from past long-term energy plans that have started with the premise of large, centralized supply. These smaller options can be deployed more quickly and incrementally compared to mega-projects, which often require lead times of 10 years or more.

In order to implement a conservation-first approach rather than a nuclear-first one, the government must clearly direct the Ontario Power Authority OPA to make conservation and efficiency the first priority. This direction should include ambitious milestones for procurement targets and transparency mechanisms to ensure timely implementation. These procurement targets should be enshrined in the LTEP directive, with escalating minimum conservation targets between now and No need for new reactors: Falling electricity demand With electricity demand set to return to levels by , there is no need for new nuclear reactors.

In , the Ontario government directed Ontario Power Generation OPG to begin the planning and secure the approvals needed to build up to four additional reactors at the Darlington nuclear station.

This was done to address a significant increase in demand predicted by the OPA and the possible closure of the Pickering nuclear station. It called for the construction of up to 2, megawatts MW of new nuclear generation to replace the Pickering nuclear station after its closure.

Combined, these reductions in demand more than offset the energy a new nuclear plant would produce. It will rebound slightly to TWh in , when grid demand would equal levels. This forecast is significantly lower than the medium growth scenarios used for planning in both the LTEP and the LTEP review, as well as the low growth scenarios in both.

This is slightly less than the combined output of the existing Darlington nuclear generating station henceforth referred to simply as Darlington and the Bruce A and B stations henceforth referred to as Bruce A and Bruce B.

Furthermore, if the government follows through on its renewed commitment to conservation, the need to refurbish and extend the life of the eight reactors at Bruce B and Darlington would be called into question. As with their previous forecasts, the OPA is predicting significant growth in all but one scenario. This significant uncertainty underlines the need for caution in electricity system planning, especially when considering procuring such large-scale increments of generation.

This drop is in part a consequence of changes in the industrial structure, successful conservation programs, and the replacement of old capital with new, more efficient equipment. They reduce demand and strain on the provincial transmission grid because they are not connected to it, and they reduce the need to transmit electricity from other parts of Ontario to meet local demand.

The majority of embedded generation is solar power, and its output will increase to 1, MW by the end of This report proposes an adaptive, incremental approach to dealing with possible future changes in electricity demand based first on conservation, and second on the deployment of clean energy options. Nuclear costs keep going up Over the past decade, the cost of building new nuclear reactors has been consistently underestimated in Ontario.

New reactors are not cost-effective. In , based on the advice of the OPA, the Ontario government committed to building new reactors. This would cost the consumer from 6. That turned out not to be the case. This bidding process required full risk transfer to reactor vendors, meaning that vendors would be responsible for delays and cost overruns.

Notably, a number of the assumptions used to calculate these costs differ significantly from both market risk assessments and historic nuclear performance. However, the OPA stated during public consultations that it would not consider non-nuclear options for replacing Pickering. If not, the vendors could dramatically reduce their upfront prices by passing potential cost overruns onto taxpayers or electricity consumers. All past nuclear projects While the cost of new reactors has increased significantly over the past in Ontario have gone decade, the cost of renewables continues to drop.

To increase conservation targets beyond current levels, the government will need to revisit its arbitrary commitment to maintaining nuclear at historic levels. This occurs when there is more electricity being produced by non-flexible power plants than is needed or can be readily sold to neighbouring electricity markets. Turning off supply is also costly because generators that are curtailed i. Ontario has historically used nuclear stations to provide baseload generation, but reactors cannot be turned on and off rapidly in response to changes in demand.

With electricity demand expected to continue falling, and with the government committed to reducing demand further through energy conservation, SBG conditions will persist for decades unless the government reduces its commitment to nuclear generation. The predicted return of electricity demand to levels should be taken as a warning: if it wants to avoid a situation of continued SBG, Ontario should reduce its installed nuclear capacity while continuing to prioritize energy conservation.

This same challenge has arisen before. When Darlington went online in , the result was a significant surplus of electricity. This forced the government of the day to scale back on its commitments to green energy and conservation. As seen when Darlington went online in , a surplus of electricity is a barrier to conservation. Any policy seeking to prioritize conservation must address how the costs and inflexibility of nuclear generation could be a barrier to the continued long-term advancement of conservation.

Unlike large, centralized nuclear stations, renewable energy and conservation can be ramped up gradually — and switched on and off safely — in response to changes in demand. As proposed in this report, a diverse mix of conservation, demand-side management and renewable energy, combined with smart grid technology, can replace the traditional base and peak loads model.

Unlike other reactor designs, CANDU reactors require extensive repairs after approximately 25 years in order to continue operating. These repairs involve the removal and replacement of the hundreds of highly radioactive pressure tubes from the reactor core, as well as the replacement of other life-limiting components such as steam generators. The plant systems also have to be upgraded to meet modern regulatory requirements.

A decade ago, CANDU operators argued that these extensive repairs were nonetheless economical compared to other generation options.

The OPA now estimates the cost of refurbishment to range between 5. It estimated that refurbishing Gentilly-2 would result in an electricity cost of Because there is no obligation to demonstrate that future refurbishment projects are cost-effective, the OPA and OPG appear to have decided to withhold information on refurbishment estimates from the public. In , OPG estimated the cost of refurbishing Darlington to be between six and eight cents per kWh. OPG, however, has refused to release its detailed cost estimates in response to Freedom of Information requests.

Such an approach could prevent future increases in electricity demand or even accelerate the current trend of declining demand.

Putting conservation first and reducing future electricity demand allows for a slower, more incremental approach to building new generation when it is needed. Green energy projects tend to be built in smaller and more diverse increments than large nuclear facilities.

Such an approach is not only more sustainable, but also more flexible. New generation can be built out in a manner that better reflects changes in demand. An example of a potential green energy portfolio that could replace nuclear generation is illustrated in Table 1.

The full green energy portfolio would therefore be installed and feeding power into the grid well before the earliest proposed new reactors at Darlington could go online. This incremental approach can be sped up or slowed down depending on how demand in Ontario changes in the coming years. The combined output of a diversified green energy portfolio actually follows typical changes in hourly demand better than nuclear generation, which runs at a constant output day and night see Figure A3 in the appendix for details.

The costs for this portfolio were calculated based on feed-in tariff FIT prices,54 as well as previous FIT prices for larger projects. The result was a weighted cost of As is shown in Figure 5, this is lower than the cost of electricity from new reactors as estimated by independent analysts. The green energy portfolio is also diversified in terms of technologies. This helps to ensure that any increases in the cost of a specific technology or its associated fuel such as in the case of CHP and biomass have minimal impact on the portfolio.

That said, the costs of renewable energy technologies have actually been continually declining. Renewable energy opponents often emphasize that variable renewable generators are dependent on fossil fuel backups. However, these sceptics fail to acknowledge that large, centralized nuclear stations also need fossil-fuel-powered stations for backup in the case of planned or unplanned outages. Ontario was forced to shut down seven reactors in due to safety concerns.

This solution was undermined by the same problems that often afflict nuclear projects: cost overruns and delays. OPG initially claimed that it could restart all four of the Pickering reactors by the end of ,61 but abandoned the restart of the last two Pickering A reactors in because of the prohibitive cost.

In , the OPA estimated that GHG emissions would increase by approximately six megatonnes between and , as gas generation is used to back up reactors at Darlington while they are refurbished. Given this context, reducing electricity demand and shifting to a more decentralized renewables-based system looks even more appealing — it is a lower-risk and more cost-effective approach to achieving a low-carbon electricity system.

The green energy portfolio described in this report is an affordable, low-carbon alternative to building new reactors. This green energy portfolio reduces electricity demand through additional efficiency and conservation, and provides reliable electricity when Ontarians need it using green energy technologies.

The portfolio was modelled using actual IESO historic output data for each supply source.