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I have read all the reports.  I conclude there is significant amounts of missing or misleading information in these reports so as to deny the Ontario citizens an unbiased understanding of the issues.  I conclude that these reports are Ontario government propaganda to slant the public to be less critical of its current government, or to distract and deny the underlying problems in the system, or negligence, or other conspiracy against the people of Ontario.

 

For example, I believe the following facts should have been included in these reports, and should have been considered in reaching the conclusions and recommendations:

 

CANDU reactors only extract 0.75% of the nuclear energy from the fuel, and thereby create huge amounts of nuclear waste, far more and worse than what initially went into the reactor as new fuel bundles.

 

Liquid thorium cycle nuclear reactors have more than 70 times the nuclear fuel efficiency of CANDU technology.

 

On the steam side of nuclear, coal, NG, and wood fired boilers, OPG has an average cycle efficiency of about 30% due to the huge amounts of low grade waste heat that is dumped into the environment. Some or most of the waste heat could be used for microgrid heating for homes and industry.  For example Bruce Nuclear used to sell waste low grade steam to greenhouses that were encouraged to build around the nuclear site.

 

Solar PV is about 13.5% efficient at trapping the sun's energy with current commercial technology and degrades by 1% per year, yet solar water heating is about 73% efficient for a 20 year lifecycle.  Dr, David Suzuki says adding solar water heating to a home is the #1 thing a homeowner can do to decrease their environmental footprint.  That focus can significantly reduce the electrical and fossil fuel demand, making a better environmental choice.

 

Electricity is the most expensive and perishable energy source (used or lost each 1/60th of a second), and is 3 to 4 times more expensive that the fuel used to create it.  Electrical use must be minimized, yet Ontario (and most other jurisdictions) have had programs to maximize electrical usage.  Wrong-headed meddling by the government, likely due to undue influence by Special Interest Groups who benefitted from these dysfunctional policies.  This must stop immediately!

 

About 5% of all hydro-electric sites in N. America are currently tapped to produce electricity. Most of these untapped sites are still available as hydro-electric sources, but are micro-hydro sites that do not require a dam construction (a dam having significant environmental consequences), and are for example run-of-river and similar environmentally sustainable uses of hydro-electricity. Mega-project dam sites have a huge financial and environmental cost, far more expensive on both of these costs than micro hydro.  They can be tapped by encouraging locals to develop and operate them.  They are not economically nor logistically feasible for a huge bureaucracy like a provincial government, OPG, or Hydro 1 to do it.

 

Ontario is currently selling excess power to many other jurisdictions at a loss, due to prior mismanagement & poor planning.  Do not bother claiming that the 2007 to 2016+ recession and the resulting excess electrical capacity could not be foreseen, as recessions have occurred ever 4, 7 or 10 years throughout my life and for hundreds of years before I was born, and major crashes or epoch endings occurred every 75 to 150 years.  Ontario Hydro made the same mistake when they started on nuclear power, forecasting huge increases in demand, year after year, likely due to the self-serving benefits that are derived therefrom.  Unfortunately, the Ontario taxpayer is forced to pick up the debt charges from this misguided overbuilding.

 

OPG and Hydro 1 and all those riding their coattails are run like a country club with huge fringe benefits, and have grown into a huge bureaucracy that is self-serving those on the inside at the expense of taxpayers.  The Ontario government has failed to rein in this runaway monster they created, or at least continue to allow it to run amok with few effective controls.  Somebody has to set these organizations back onto an even keel, and do it soon.  For example, executive salaries should be no more than 60 times the lowest salary within that organization (current CEO base of $750,000 and topping out at $4 million with bonuses is ridiculous).  Announce the policy today, it takes effect in 1 year from now, then slowly trends to a lower & lower ratio over time as improvements are made.  In the future, all executive bonuses are tied to:   a) $/kW-hr production costs and power quality(OPG);   b) $/kW-hr transmission & all other charges (Hydro 1);   c) # Customers * (seconds duration)^2 weighting of all outages for number customers & duration (Hydro 1), d) overall reliability (OPG & Hydro 1); e) man-hrs per kW-hr produced; f) Executive salary ratio reductions; and g) Customer satisfaction to survey questions chosens by customers.  The bloated bureaucracy must be trimmed to the essential personnel.

 

When you consider all of the charges on the electricity bill (ie. total bill divided by kW-hrs consumed to give $/kW-hr), Ontario has one of the highest cost electricity in N. America.  People are now forced to freeze or starve to death because they can't afford to buy both electricity and food, they are forced to choose one or the others.

 

All of the nuclear plants have failed to live up to their technical lifecycle promises, mainly due to incompetency, lack of process control during plant operation, mistakes, and lack of accountability.  Now they want a premium price sweetheart deal to produce nuclear power so they can afford to refurbish they plants they prematurely destroyed.  If this is allowed, they will only repeat the same mistakes again, destroying the refurbished plants prematurely again, at a lifecycle cost that Ontario taxpayers cannot afford.

 

Ontario Hydro and OPG have been on a debt binge for the last 30+ years.  Now that interest rates are rising again, that debt bubble will blow up in the face of all taxpayers, totally unaffordable and un-sustainable.

 

Ontario is on the same public debt glidepath as Greece, but Ontario is just 20 years or so behind the Greeks.  Witness the current selling off of Greek assets (eg. sewer, water, airports, waterfront, grid, power generation, etc.) just like the Ontario government is doing for Ontario Hydro.  Unfortunately Hydro 1, OPG, et al. are the same or worse than Ontario.  Today, global financial vultures are circling Greece and scooping up the best parts, to enslave the Greek people for centuries to come with their rent seeking.  Soon those same or similar financial vultures will be circling Ontario.  Can this government not see where this is all going?

 

District heating systems can run at 90%+ efficiency vs. 30% for OGP.  Why will the government not force these needed efficiencies into to current system.

 

Municipal landfills generate GHG for 100+ years after they close, and potentially pollute the groundwater.  Blue box sorting and recycling is ultra expensive and marginally efficient and barely viable financially.  As an alternative, municipal waste anaerobic digestion can produce captured methane for district heating and microgrid systems, the recyclables are squeaky clean and easily sorted out of the resulting compost, then and waste streamed and recycled, and the compost can go on to make high purity foodgrade topsoil; all at a cost far less than the current systems.  Most agricultural lands in N. America started out as 28% organic, but are mostly less than 3% today, and all that carbon is in the atmosphere as CO2, and the soils are depleted so that crops require chemical fertilizer & ag. chemicals  to grow, and those fertilizers/chemicals are primarily sourced from oil & natural gas.  World-wide crop lands are transitioning to desserts, making it more & more difficult and expensive to grow food.  If the world-wide soils were rebuilt to 28% organic, atmospheric CO2 would drop to similar concentrations that existed before the Industrial Revolution. The world's leading expert on how to make all this work as an environmentally sound profit centre is Dr. Bill Jewell at Cornell University.  Your tiny paragraphs on biomass do dis-service as a superficial coverage of this important topic. If Ontario moved to province-wide biomass, ON ag would be aided and we would have an environmentally sustainable & affordable electricity and heat system.

 

Full heat recovery cogen CHP or CCHP can be 80% to 90% cycle efficiency, vs. OPG's current 30%

 

Lifecycle all-in cost for hydo-electric is approximately $0.03 per kW-hr, wind at $0.10, PV solar to grid at $0.50,and if we included ALL of the true costs in nuclear, we would be shocked at how expensive it would be.  These should be strongly considered when designing our electricity future.

 

[Original Comment ID: 207048]