China's coal supply for power generation is estimated to be 250-300 million tonnes below demand this year, a study by a senior government official showed, which may herald more power shortages in the coming seasons.
China experienced the worst power outage in four years in the past months due to coal shortages that in some degree were caused by a clampdown on small and unsafe coal mines.
Zou Yiqiao, director general of the Department of Tariffs and Financial Regulation, under the State Electricity Regulatory Commission, estimated that coal demand for power generation will surpass 1.4 billion tonnes this year and any supply volumes below that could lead to power shortages.
In 2007, a total of 1.282 billion tonnes of coal was used for power production, accounting for 51 percent of China's raw coal output of 2.523 billion tonnes last year, according to Zou.
Meanwhile, power plants that were initially reluctant to store the fuel due to soaring costs later found they were unable to secure supplies after freak winter weather disrupted transport.
The estimated deficit in coal supply for power generation was based on analysis of current production and stocks, said Zou in a study published on the commission's Web site (www.serc.gov.cn).
He did not elaborate on the current stocks and production levels.
"The coal supply and demand situation nationwide would be even grimmer given demand elsewhere from sectors including petrochemical, steel, coal deep-processing and exports," he concluded.
China's five major power generating groups so far have signed less than 50 percent of the term contracts they need for this year with coal suppliers, with prices for coal in supply deals already settled up 30-40 yuan a tonne from those in 2007.
Fuel costs for the power majors will increase 29.9 billion yuan ($4.27 billion) this year and some of their power plants will operate at a loss, Zou said, citing data from the power groups.
"Power firms are facing fairly large cost pressure because of rising costs, as well as a freeze in power prices in 2007," he said, which have yet to be raised in line with a government policy to link coal and power prices.
Zou proposed that the central government choose a proper time to implement the linkage policy to alleviate the power firms' pain and ensure sustainable development of the power sector.
Under a pricing scheme instituted in 2005 that is reviewed every six months, power generators can pass 70 percent of coal price increases on to consumers when coal prices rise by more than five percent.
But China did not activate the mechanism last year and has ruled out any such hikes nationwide in the near term due to inflation concerns.
The trend of rising coal prices is irreversible in the short term, and power groups should slow down their expansion in coal-fired power plants and invest in coal mines, he suggested.
Coal-fired power plants, accounting for 78 percent of China's installed power generating capacity, generated 83 percent of China's electricity last year.
Bitcoin energy consumption is driven by mining electricity demand, with TWh-scale power use, carbon footprint concerns, and Cambridge estimates. Rising prices incentivize more hardware; efficiency gains and renewables adoption shape sustainability outcomes.
Key Points
Bitcoin energy consumption is mining's electricity use, driven by price, device efficiency, and energy mix.
✅ Cambridge tool estimates ~121 TWh annual usage
✅ Rising BTC price incentivizes more mining hardware
✅ Efficiency, renewables, and costs shape footprint
"Mining" for the cryptocurrency is power-hungry, with power curtailments reported during heat waves, involving heavy computer calculations to verify transactions.
Cambridge researchers say it consumes around 121.36 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year - and is unlikely to fall unless the value of the currency slumps, even as Americans use less electricity overall.
Critics say electric-car firm Tesla's decision to invest heavily in Bitcoin undermines its environmental image.
The currency's value hit a record $48,000 (£34,820) this week. following Tesla's announcement that it had bought about $1.5bn bitcoin and planned to accept it as payment in future.
But the rising price offers even more incentive to Bitcoin miners to run more and more machines.
And as the price increases, so does the energy consumption, according to Michel Rauchs, researcher at The Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, who co-created the online tool that generates these estimates.
“It is really by design that Bitcoin consumes that much electricity,” Mr Rauchs told BBC’s Tech Tent podcast. “This is not something that will change in the future unless the Bitcoin price is going to significantly go down."
The online tool has ranked Bitcoin’s electricity consumption above Argentina (121 TWh), the Netherlands (108.8 TWh) and the United Arab Emirates (113.20 TWh) - and it is gradually creeping up on Norway (122.20 TWh).
The energy it uses could power all kettles used in the UK, where low-carbon generation stalled in 2019, for 27 years, it said.
However, it also suggests the amount of electricity consumed every year by always-on but inactive home devices in the US alone could power the entire Bitcoin network for a year, and in Canada, B.C. power imports have helped meet demand.
Mining Bitcoin In order to "mine" Bitcoin, computers - often specialised ones - are connected to the cryptocurrency network.
They have the job of verifying transactions made by people who send or receive Bitcoin.
This process involves solving puzzles, which, while not integral to verifying movements of the currency, provide a hurdle to ensure no-one fraudulently edits the global record of all transactions.
As a reward, miners occasionally receive small amounts of Bitcoin in what is often likened to a lottery.
To increase profits, people often connect large numbers of miners to the network - even entire warehouses full of them, as seen with a Medicine Hat bitcoin operation backed by an electricity deal.
That uses lots of electricity because the computers are more or less constantly working to complete the puzzles, prompting some utilities to consider pauses on new crypto loads in certain regions.
The University of Cambridge tool models the economic lifetime of the world's Bitcoin miners and assumes that all the Bitcoin mining machines worldwide are working with various efficiencies.
Using an average electricity price per kilowatt hour ($0.05) and the energy demands of the Bitcoin network, it is then possible to estimate how much electricity is being consumed at any one time, though in places like China's power sector data can be opaque.
Space solar power promises wireless energy from orbital solar satellites via microwave or laser power beaming, using photovoltaics and rectennas. NRL and AFRL advances hint at 24-7 renewable power delivery to Earth and airborne drones.
Key Points
Space solar power beams orbital solar energy to Earth via microwaves or lasers, enabling continuous wireless electricity.
✅ Harvests sunlight in orbit and transmits via microwaves or lasers
✅ Provides 24-7 renewable power, independent of weather or night
✅ Enables wireless power for remote sites, grids, and drones
Earlier this year, a small group of spectators gathered in David Taylor Model Basin, the Navy’s cavernous indoor wave pool in Maryland, to watch something they couldn’t see. At each end of the facility there was a 13-foot pole with a small cube perched on top. A powerful infrared laser beam shot out of one of the cubes, striking an array of photovoltaic cells inside the opposite cube. To the naked eye, however, it looked like a whole lot of nothing. The only evidence that anything was happening came from a small coffee maker nearby, which was churning out “laser lattes” using only the power generated by the system as ambitions for cheap abundant electricity gain momentum worldwide.
The laser setup managed to transmit 400 watts of power—enough for several small household appliances—through hundreds of meters of air without moving any mass. The Naval Research Lab, which ran the project, hopes to use the system to send power to drones during flight. But NRL electronics engineer Paul Jaffe has his sights set on an even more ambitious problem: beaming solar power to Earth from space. For decades the idea had been reserved for The Future, but a series of technological breakthroughs and a massive new government research program suggest that faraway day may have finally arrived as interest in space-based solar broadens across industry and government.
Since the idea for space solar power first cropped up in Isaac Asimov’s science fiction in the early 1940s, scientists and engineers have floated dozens of proposals to bring the concept to life, including inflatable solar arrays and robotic self-assembly. But the basic idea is always the same: A giant satellite in orbit harvests energy from the sun and converts it to microwaves or lasers for transmission to Earth, where it is converted into electricity. The sun never sets in space, so a space solar power system could supply renewable power to anywhere on the planet, day or night, as recent tests show we can generate electricity from the night sky as well, rain or shine.
Like fusion energy, space-based solar power seemed doomed to become a technology that was always 30 years away. Technical problems kept cropping up, cost estimates remained stratospheric, and as solar cells became cheaper and more efficient, and storage improved with cheap batteries, the case for space-based solar seemed to be shrinking.
That didn’t stop government research agencies from trying. In 1975, after partnering with the Department of Energy on a series of space solar power feasibility studies, NASA beamed 30 kilowatts of power over a mile using a giant microwave dish. Beamed energy is a crucial aspect of space solar power, but this test remains the most powerful demonstration of the technology to date. “The fact that it’s been almost 45 years since NASA’s demonstration, and it remains the high-water mark, speaks for itself,” Jaffe says. “Space solar wasn’t a national imperative, and so a lot of this technology didn’t meaningfully progress.”
John Mankins, a former physicist at NASA and director of Solar Space Technologies, witnessed how government bureaucracy killed space solar power development firsthand. In the late 1990s, Mankins authored a report for NASA that concluded it was again time to take space solar power seriously and led a project to do design studies on a satellite system. Despite some promising results, the agency ended up abandoning it.
In 2005, Mankins left NASA to work as a consultant, but he couldn’t shake the idea of space solar power. He did some modest space solar power experiments himself and even got a grant from NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts program in 2011. The result was SPS-ALPHA, which Mankins called “the first practical solar power satellite.” The idea, says Mankins, was “to build a large solar-powered satellite out of thousands of small pieces.” His modular design brought the cost of hardware down significantly, at least in principle.
Jaffe, who was just starting to work on hardware for space solar power at the Naval Research Lab, got excited about Mankins’ concept. At the time he was developing a “sandwich module” consisting of a small solar panel on one side and a microwave transmitter on the other. His electronic sandwich demonstrated all the elements of an actual space solar power system and, perhaps most important, it was modular. It could work beautifully with something like Mankins' concept, he figured. All they were missing was the financial support to bring the idea from the laboratory into space.
Jaffe invited Mankins to join a small team of researchers entering a Defense Department competition, in which they were planning to pitch a space solar power concept based on SPS-ALPHA. In 2016, the team presented the idea to top Defense officials and ended up winning four out of the seven award categories. Both Jaffe and Mankins described it as a crucial moment for reviving the US government’s interest in space solar power.
They might be right. In October, the Air Force Research Lab announced a $100 million program to develop hardware for a solar power satellite. It’s an important first step toward the first demonstration of space solar power in orbit, and Mankins says it could help solve what he sees as space solar power’s biggest problem: public perception. The technology has always seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea, and the cost of setting up a solar array on Earth is plummeting, as proposals like a tenfold U.S. solar expansion signal rapid growth; but space solar power has unique benefits, chief among them the availability of solar energy around the clock regardless of the weather or time of day.
It can also provide renewable energy to remote locations, such as forward operating bases for the military, which has deployed its first floating solar array to bolster resilience. And at a time when wildfires have forced the utility PG&E to kill power for thousands of California residents on multiple occasions, having a way to provide renewable energy through the clouds and smoke doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. (Ironically enough, PG&E entered a first-of-its-kind agreement to buy space solar power from a company called Solaren back in 2009; the system was supposed to start operating in 2016 but never came to fruition.)
“If space solar power does work, it is hard to overstate what the geopolitical implications would be,” Jaffe says. “With GPS, we sort of take it for granted that no matter where we are on this planet, we can get precise navigation information. If the same thing could be done for energy, especially as peer-to-peer energy sharing matures, it would be revolutionary.”
Indeed, there seems to be an emerging race to become the first to harness this technology. Earlier this year China announced its intention to become the first country to build a solar power station in space, and for more than a decade Japan has considered the development of a space solar power station to be a national priority. Now that the US military has joined in with a $100 million hardware development program, it may only be a matter of time before there’s a solar farm in the solar system.
U.S. 100% Tariff on Chinese EVs aims to protect domestic manufacturing, counter subsidies, and reshape the EV market, but could raise prices, disrupt supply chains, invite retaliation, and complicate climate policy and trade relations.
Key Points
A 100% import duty on Chinese EVs to boost U.S. manufacturing, counter subsidies, and address supply chain risks.
✅ Protects domestic EV manufacturing and jobs
✅ Counters alleged subsidies and IP concerns
✅ May raise prices, limit choice, trigger retaliation
President Joe Biden's administration recently made headlines with its announcement of a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), marking a significant escalation in trade tensions between the two economic powerhouses. The decision, framed as a measure to protect American industries and promote domestic manufacturing, has sparked debates over its potential impact on the EV market, global supply chains, and bilateral relations between the United States and China.
The imposition of a 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs reflects the Biden administration's broader efforts to revitalize the American automotive industry and promote the transition to electric vehicles as part of its climate agenda and tighter EPA emissions rules that could accelerate adoption. By imposing tariffs on imported EVs, particularly those from China, the administration aims to incentivize domestic production and create jobs in the growing green economy, and to secure critical EV metals through allied supply efforts. Additionally, the tariff is seen as a response to concerns about unfair trade practices, including intellectual property theft and market distortions, allegedly perpetuated by Chinese companies.
However, the announcement has triggered a range of reactions from various stakeholders, with both proponents and critics offering contrasting perspectives on the potential consequences of such a policy. Proponents argue that the tariff will help level the playing field for American automakers, who face stiff competition from Chinese companies benefiting from government subsidies and lower production costs. They contend that promoting domestic manufacturing of EVs will not only create high-quality jobs but also enhance national security by reducing dependence on foreign supply chains at a time when an EV inflection point is approaching.
On the other hand, critics warn that the 100% tariff on Chinese-made EVs could have unintended consequences, including higher prices for consumers, as seen in the UK EV prices and Brexit debate, disruptions to global supply chains, and retaliatory measures from China. Chinese EV manufacturers, such as NIO, BYD, and XPeng, have been gaining momentum in the global market, offering competitive products at relatively affordable prices. The tariff could limit consumer choice at a time when U.S. EV market share dipped in Q1 2024, potentially slowing the adoption of electric vehicles and undermining efforts to combat climate change and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Moreover, the tariff announcement comes at a sensitive time for U.S.-China relations, which have been strained by various issues, including trade disputes, human rights concerns, and geopolitical tensions. The imposition of tariffs on Chinese-made EVs could further exacerbate bilateral tensions, potentially leading to retaliatory measures from China and escalating trade frictions. As the world's two largest economies, the United States and China have significant economic interdependencies, and any escalation in trade tensions could have far-reaching implications for global trade and economic stability.
In response to the Biden administration's announcement, Chinese officials have expressed concerns and called for dialogue to resolve trade disputes through negotiation and mutual cooperation. China has also emphasized its commitment to fair trade practices and compliance with international rules and regulations governing trade.
Moving forward, the Biden administration faces the challenge of balancing its domestic priorities with the need to maintain constructive engagement with China and other trading partners, even as EV charging networks scale under its electrification push. While promoting domestic manufacturing and protecting American industries are legitimate policy goals, achieving them without disrupting global trade and undermining diplomatic relations requires careful deliberation and strategic foresight.
In conclusion, President Biden's announcement of a 100% tariff on Chinese-made electric vehicles reflects his administration's commitment to revitalizing American industries and promoting domestic manufacturing. However, the decision has raised concerns about its potential impact on the EV market, global supply chains, and U.S.-China relations. As policymakers navigate these complexities, finding a balance between protecting domestic interests and fostering international cooperation will be crucial to achieving sustainable economic growth and addressing global challenges such as climate change.
Sudbury Microburst Power Outage strains hydro crews after straight-line winds; New Sudbury faces downed power lines, tree damage, and hazardous access as restoration efforts, mutual aid, and safety protocols aim to reconnect customers by weekend.
Key Points
A microburst downed lines in New Sudbury, cutting power as crews tackle hazardous access and complex repairs.
✅ Straight-line winds downed poles, trees, and service lines
✅ Crews face backyard access hazards, complex reconnections
✅ Mutual aid linemen, arborists, and crane work speed restoration
About 300 Sudbury Hydro customers are still without power Thursday after Monday's powerful microburst storm, part of a series of damaging storms in Ontario seen across the province.
The utility's spokesperson, Wendy Watson, says the power in the affected New Sudbury neighbourhoods should be back on by the weekend, even as Toronto power outages persisted in a recent storm.
The storm, which Environment Canada said was classified as a microburst or straight line wind damage, similar to a severe windstorm in Quebec, downed a number of power lines in the city.
Now crews are struggling with access to the lines, a challenge that BC Hydro's atypical storm response also highlighted, as they work to reconnect service in the area.
"In some cases, you can't get to someone's back yard, or you have to go through the neighbour's yard," Watson said.
"We have one case where [we had] equipment working over a swimming pool. It's dicey, it's really dirty and it's dangerous."
Monday's storm caused massive property damage across the city, particularly in New Sudbury. (Benjamin Aubé/CBC)
Veteran arborist Jim Allsop told CBC News he hasn't seen damage like this in his 30-plus years in the business.
"I don't know how many we've done up to date, but I have another 35 trees on houses," Allsop said. "We'll be probably another week."
"We've rented a crane to help speed up the process, and increase safety, and we're getting five or six done in our 12-hour days."
Scott Aultman, a lineman with North Bay Hydro, said he has seen a few storms in his career, and isn't usually surprised by extensive damage a storm can cause.
"When you see a trailer on its side, you know, you don't see that every day," Aultman said.
But during the clean up, Aultman said the spirit of camaraderie runs high with crews from different areas, as seen when Canadian crews helped Florida during Hurricane Irma.
"We were pumped. It's part of the trade, everybody gets together," Aultman said. "We had a big storm in 2006 and the Sudbury guys were up helping us, so it's great, it's nice to be able to return the favour and help them out."
ITER Nuclear Fusion advances tokamak magnetic confinement, heating deuterium-tritium plasma with superconducting magnets, targeting net energy gain, tritium breeding, and steam-turbine power, while complementing laser inertial confinement milestones for grid-scale electricity and 2025 startup goals.
Key Points
ITER Nuclear Fusion is a tokamak project confining D-T plasma with magnets to achieve net energy gain and clean power.
✅ Tokamak magnetic confinement with high-temp superconducting coils
✅ Deuterium-tritium fuel cycle with on-site tritium breeding
✅ Targets net energy gain and grid-scale, low-carbon electricity
It sounds like the stuff of dreams: a virtually limitless source of energy that doesn’t produce greenhouse gases or radioactive waste. That’s the promise of nuclear fusion, often described as the holy grail of clean energy by proponents, which for decades has been nothing more than a fantasy due to insurmountable technical challenges. But things are heating up in what has turned into a race to create what amounts to an artificial sun here on Earth, one that can provide power for our kettles, cars and light bulbs.
Today’s nuclear power plants create electricity through nuclear fission, in which atoms are split, with next-gen nuclear power exploring smaller, cheaper, safer designs that remain distinct from fusion. Nuclear fusion however, involves combining atomic nuclei to release energy. It’s the same reaction that’s taking place at the Sun’s core. But overcoming the natural repulsion between atomic nuclei and maintaining the right conditions for fusion to occur isn’t straightforward. And doing so in a way that produces more energy than the reaction consumes has been beyond the grasp of the finest minds in physics for decades.
But perhaps not for much longer. Some major technical challenges have been overcome in the past few years and governments around the world have been pouring money into fusion power research as part of a broader green industrial revolution under way in several regions. There are also over 20 private ventures in the UK, US, Europe, China and Australia vying to be the first to make fusion energy production a reality.
“People are saying, ‘If it really is the ultimate solution, let’s find out whether it works or not,’” says Dr Tim Luce, head of science and operation at the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER), being built in southeast France. ITER is the biggest throw of the fusion dice yet.
Its $22bn (£15.9bn) build cost is being met by the governments of two-thirds of the world’s population, including the EU, the US, China and Russia, at a time when Europe is losing nuclear power and needs energy, and when it’s fired up in 2025 it’ll be the world’s largest fusion reactor. If it works, ITER will transform fusion power from being the stuff of dreams into a viable energy source.
Constructing a nuclear fusion reactor ITER will be a tokamak reactor – thought to be the best hope for fusion power. Inside a tokamak, a gas, often a hydrogen isotope called deuterium, is subjected to intense heat and pressure, forcing electrons out of the atoms. This creates a plasma – a superheated, ionised gas – that has to be contained by intense magnetic fields.
The containment is vital, as no material on Earth could withstand the intense heat (100,000,000°C and above) that the plasma has to reach so that fusion can begin. It’s close to 10 times the heat at the Sun’s core, and temperatures like that are needed in a tokamak because the gravitational pressure within the Sun can’t be recreated.
When atomic nuclei do start to fuse, vast amounts of energy are released. While the experimental reactors currently in operation release that energy as heat, in a fusion reactor power plant, the heat would be used to produce steam that would drive turbines to generate electricity, even as some envision nuclear beyond electricity for industrial heat and fuels.
Tokamaks aren’t the only fusion reactors being tried. Another type of reactor uses lasers to heat and compress a hydrogen fuel to initiate fusion. In August 2021, one such device at the National Ignition Facility, at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, generated 1.35 megajoules of energy. This record-breaking figure brings fusion power a step closer to net energy gain, but most hopes are still pinned on tokamak reactors rather than lasers.
In June 2021, China’s Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak (EAST) reactor maintained a plasma for 101 seconds at 120,000,000°C. Before that, the record was 20 seconds. Ultimately, a fusion reactor would need to sustain the plasma indefinitely – or at least for eight-hour ‘pulses’ during periods of peak electricity demand.
A real game-changer for tokamaks has been the magnets used to produce the magnetic field. “We know how to make magnets that generate a very high magnetic field from copper or other kinds of metal, but you would pay a fortune for the electricity. It wouldn’t be a net energy gain from the plant,” says Luce.
One route for nuclear fusion is to use atoms of deuterium and tritium, both isotopes of hydrogen. They fuse under incredible heat and pressure, and the resulting products release energy as heat
The solution is to use high-temperature, superconducting magnets made from superconducting wire, or ‘tape’, that has no electrical resistance. These magnets can create intense magnetic fields and don’t lose energy as heat.
“High temperature superconductivity has been known about for 35 years. But the manufacturing capability to make tape in the lengths that would be required to make a reasonable fusion coil has just recently been developed,” says Luce. One of ITER’s magnets, the central solenoid, will produce a field of 13 tesla – 280,000 times Earth’s magnetic field.
The inner walls of ITER’s vacuum vessel, where the fusion will occur, will be lined with beryllium, a metal that won’t contaminate the plasma much if they touch. At the bottom is the divertor that will keep the temperature inside the reactor under control.
“The heat load on the divertor can be as large as in a rocket nozzle,” says Luce. “Rocket nozzles work because you can get into orbit within minutes and in space it’s really cold.” In a fusion reactor, a divertor would need to withstand this heat indefinitely and at ITER they’ll be testing one made out of tungsten.
Meanwhile, in the US, the National Spherical Torus Experiment – Upgrade (NSTX-U) fusion reactor will be fired up in the autumn of 2022, while efforts in advanced fission such as a mini-reactor design are also progressing. One of its priorities will be to see whether lining the reactor with lithium helps to keep the plasma stable.
Choosing a fuel Instead of just using deuterium as the fusion fuel, ITER will use deuterium mixed with tritium, another hydrogen isotope. The deuterium-tritium blend offers the best chance of getting significantly more power out than is put in. Proponents of fusion power say one reason the technology is safe is that the fuel needs to be constantly fed into the reactor to keep fusion happening, making a runaway reaction impossible.
Deuterium can be extracted from seawater, so there’s a virtually limitless supply of it. But only 20kg of tritium are thought to exist worldwide, so fusion power plants will have to produce it (ITER will develop technology to ‘breed’ tritium). While some radioactive waste will be produced in a fusion plant, it’ll have a lifetime of around 100 years, rather than the thousands of years from fission.
At the time of writing in September, researchers at the Joint European Torus (JET) fusion reactor in Oxfordshire were due to start their deuterium-tritium fusion reactions. “JET will help ITER prepare a choice of machine parameters to optimise the fusion power,” says Dr Joelle Mailloux, one of the scientific programme leaders at JET. These parameters will include finding the best combination of deuterium and tritium, and establishing how the current is increased in the magnets before fusion starts.
The groundwork laid down at JET should accelerate ITER’s efforts to accomplish net energy gain. ITER will produce ‘first plasma’ in December 2025 and be cranked up to full power over the following decade. Its plasma temperature will reach 150,000,000°C and its target is to produce 500 megawatts of fusion power for every 50 megawatts of input heating power.
“If ITER is successful, it’ll eliminate most, if not all, doubts about the science and liberate money for technology development,” says Luce. That technology development will be demonstration fusion power plants that actually produce electricity, where advanced reactors can build on decades of expertise. “ITER is opening the door and saying, yeah, this works – the science is there.”
Ontario Electricity Grid Decarbonization outlines the IESO's net-zero pathway: $400B investment, nuclear expansion, renewables, hydrogen, storage, and demand management to double capacity by 2050 while initiating a 2027 natural gas moratorium.
Key Points
A 2050 plan to double capacity, retire gas, and invest $400B in nuclear, renewables, and storage for a net-zero grid.
✅ $400B over 25 years to meet net-zero electricity by 2050
✅ Capacity doubles to 88,000 MW; demand grows ~2% annually
✅ 2027 gas moratorium; build nuclear, renewables, storage
Ontario will need to spend $400 billion over the next 25 years in order to decarbonize the electricity grid and embrace clean power according to a new report by the province’s electricity system manager that’s now being considered by the Ford government.
The Independent System Electricity Operator (IESO) was tasked with laying out a path to reducing Ontario’s reliance on natural gas for electricity generation and what it would take to decarbonize the entire electricity grid by 2050.
Meeting the goal, the IESO concluded, will require an “aggressive” approach of doubling the electricity capacity in Ontario over the next two-and-a-half decades — from 42,000 MW to 88,000 MW — by investing in nuclear, hydrogen and wind and solar power while implementing conservation policies and managing demand.
“The process of fully eliminating emissions from the grid itself will be a significant and complex undertaking,” IESO president Lesley Gallinger said in a news release.
The road to decarbonization, the IESO said, begins with a moratorium on natural gas power generation starting in 2027 as long as the province has “sufficient, non-emitting supply” to meet the growing demands on the grid.
The approach, however, comes with significant risks.
The IESO said hydroelectric and nuclear facilities can take 10 to 15 years to build and if costs aren’t controlled the plan could drive up the price of clean electricity, turning homeowners and businesses away from electrification.
“Rapidly rising electricity costs could discourage electrification, stifle economic growth or hurt consumers with low incomes,” the report states.
The IESO said the province will need to take several “no regret” actions, including selecting sites and planning to construct new large-scale nuclear plants as well as hydroelectric and energy storage projects and expanding energy-efficiency programs beyond 2024.
READ MORE: Ontario faces calls to dramatically increase energy efficiency rebate programs
Ontario’s minister of energy didn’t immediately commit to implementing the recommendations, citing the need to consult with stakeholders first.
“I look forward to launching a consultation in the new year on next steps from today’s report, including the potential development of major nuclear, hydroelectric and transmissions projects,” Todd Smith said in a statement.
Currently, electricity demand is increasing by roughly two per cent per year, raising concerns Ontario could be short of electricity in the coming years as the manufacturing and transportation sectors electrify and as more sectors consider decarbonization.
At the same time, the province’s energy supply is facing “downward pressure” with the Pickering nuclear power plant slated to wind down operations and the Darlington nuclear generating station under active refurbishment.
To meet the energy need, the Ford government said it intended to extend the life of the Pickering plant until 2026.
READ MORE: Ontario planning to keep Pickering nuclear power station open until 2026
But to prepare for the increase, the Ontario government was told the province would also need to build new natural gas facilities to bridge Ontario’s electricity supply gap in the near term — a recommendation the Ford government agreed to.
The IESO said a request for proposals has been opened and the province is looking for host communities, with the expectation that existing facilities would be upgraded before projects on undeveloped land would be considered.
The IESO said the contract for any new facilities would expire in 2040, and all natural gas facilities would be retired in the 2040s.
