Reactor contract details on way

Ontario Electricity Supply Gap threatens growth as demand from EVs, heat pumps, industry, and greenhouses surges, pressuring the grid and IESO to add nuclear, renewables, storage, transmission, and imports while meeting net-zero goals.

Key Points

The mismatch as Ontario's electricity demand outpaces supply, driven by electrification, EVs, and industrial growth.

✅ Demand growth from EVs, heat pumps, and electrified industry

✅ Capacity loss from Pickering retirement and Darlington refurb

✅ Options: SMRs, renewables, storage, conservation, imports

Ontario electricity demand is forecast to soon outstrip supply as it confronts a shortage in the coming years, a problem that needs attention in the upcoming provincial election.

Forecasters say Ontario will need to double its power supply by 2050 as industries ramp up demand for low-emission clean power options and consumers switch to electric vehicles and space heating. But while the Ford government has made a flurry of recent energy announcements, including a hydrogen project at Niagara Falls and an interprovincial agreement on small nuclear reactors, it has not laid out how it intends to bulk up the province’s power supply.

“Ontario is entering a period of widening electricity shortfalls,” says the Ontario Chamber of Commerce. “Having a plan to address those shortfalls is essential to ensure businesses can continue investing and growing in Ontario with confidence.”

The supply and demand mismatch is coming because of brisk economic growth combined with increasing electrification to balance demand and emissions and meet Canada’s goal to reduce CO2 emissions by 40 per cent by 2030 and to net-zero by 2050.

Hamilton’s ArcelorMittal Dofasco and Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie are leaders on this transformation. They plan to replace their blast furnaces and basic oxygen furnaces later this decade with electric arc furnaces (EAFs), reducing annual CO2 emissions by three million tonnes each.

Dofasco, which operates an EAF that is already the single largest electricity user in Ontario, plans to build a second EAF and a gas-fired ironmaking furnace, which can also be powered with zero-carbon hydrogen produced from electricity, once it becomes available.

Other new projects in the agriculture, mining and manufacturing sectors are also expected to be big power users, including the recently announced $5 billion Stellantis-LG electric vehicle battery plant in Windsor. Five new transmission lines will be built to service the plant and the burgeoning greenhouse industry in southwestern Ontario. The greenhouses alone will require enough additional electricity to power a city the size of Ottawa.

On top of these demands, growing numbers of Ontario drivers are expected to switch to electric vehicles and many homeowners and business owners are expected to convert from gas heating to heat pumps and electric heating.

Ontario is recognized as one of the cleanest electricity systems in the world, with over 90 per cent of its capacity from low-emission nuclear, hydro, wind and other renewable generation. Only nine per cent comes from CO2-emitting gas plants. But that’s about to get dirtier according to analysts.

Annual electricity demand is expected to grow from 140 terawatt hours (a terawatt hour is one trillion watts for one hour) currently to about 200 terawatt hours in 2042, according to the Independent Electricity System Operator, the agency that manages Ontario’s grid.

Demand is expected to outstrip currently contracted supply in 2026, reaching a growing supply gap of about 80 terawatt hours by 2042. A big part of this gap is due to the scheduled retirement of the Pickering nuclear station in 2025 and the current refurbishment of the Darlington nuclear station reactors. While the IESO doesn’t expect blackouts or brownouts, it forecasts the province will need to sharply increase expensive power imports and triple the amount of CO2-polluting gas-fired generation.

Without cleaner, lower-cost alternatives, this will mean “a vastly dirtier and more expensive electricity system,” York University researchers Mark Winfield and Collen Kaiser said in a recent commentary.

The party that wins the provincial election will have to make hard decisions on renewable energy, including new wind and solar projects, energy conservation, battery storage, new hydro plants, small nuclear reactors, gas generation and power imports from the U.S. and Quebec. In addition, the federal government is pressing the provinces to meet a new net-zero clean electricity standard by 2035. These decisions will have huge impact on Ontario’s future, with greening the grid costs highlighted in some reports as potentially very high.

With so much at stake, Ontario’s political parties need to tell voters during the upcoming campaign how they would address these enormous challenges.

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Renewable Energy Cost Trends highlight IRENA data showing solar and wind undercut coal, as utility-scale projects drive lower levelized electricity costs worldwide, with the Middle East and UAE advancing mega solar parks.

Key Points

They track how solar and wind undercut new fossil fuels as utility-scale costs drop and investment accelerates.

✅ IRENA reports renewables cheapest for new installations

✅ Solar and wind LCOE fell sharply since 2010

✅ Middle East and UAE scale mega utility projects

Renewable energy is now the cheapest option for new electricity installation in most of the world, a report from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) on Tuesday said.

Renewable power projects have undercut traditional coal fuel plants, with solar and wind power costs in particular falling as record-breaking growth continues worldwide.

“Installing new renewables increasingly costs less than the cheapest fossil fuels. With or without the health and economic crisis, dirty coal plants were overdue to be consigned to the past, said Francesco La Camera, director-general of IRENA said in the report.

In 2019, renewables accounted for around 72 percent of all new capacity added worldwide, IRENA said, following a 2016 record year that highlighted the momentum, with lowering costs and technological improvements in solar and wind power helping this dynamic. For solar energy, IRENA notes that the cost for electricity from utility-scale plants fell by 82 percent in the decade between 2010 and 2019, as China's solar PV growth underscored in 2016.

“More than half of the renewable capacity added in 2019 achieved lower electricity costs than new coal, while new solar and wind projects are also undercutting the cheapest and least sustainable of existing coal-fired plants,” Camera added.

Costs for solar and wind power also fell year-on-year by 13 and 9 percent, respectively, with offshore wind costs showing steep declines as well. In 2019, more than half of all newly commissioned utility-scale renewable power plants provided electricity cheaper than the lowest cost of a new fossil fuel plant.

The Middle East

In mid-May, a report by UK-based law firm Ashurst suggested the Middle East is the second most popular region for renewable energy investment after North America, at a time when clean energy investment is outpacing fossil fuels.

The region is home to some of the largest renewable energy bets in the world, with Saudi wind expansion gathering pace. The UAE, for instance, is currently developing the Mohammed Bin Rashid Solar Park, the world’s largest concentrated solar power project in the world.

Around 26 percent of Middle East respondents in Ashurst’s survey said that they were presently investing in energy transition, marking the region as the most popular for current investment in renewables, while 11 percent added that they were considering investing.

In North America, the most popular region, 28 percent said that they were currently investing, with 11 percent stating they are considering investing.

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Minnesota Carbon-Free Power by 2050 aims to shift utilities to renewable energy, wind and solar, boosting efficiency while managing grid reliability, emissions, and costs under a clean energy mandate and statewide climate policy.

Key Points

A statewide goal to deliver 100% carbon-free power by 2050, prioritizing renewables, efficiency, and grid reliability.

✅ Targets 100% carbon-free electricity statewide by 2050

✅ Prioritizes wind, solar, and efficiency before fossil fuels

✅ Faces utility cost, reliability, and legislative challenges

Gov. Tim Walz's plan for Minnesota to get 100 percent of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2050, similar to California's 100% carbon-free mandate in scope, was criticized Tuesday at its first legislative hearing, with representatives from some of the state's smaller utilities saying they can't meet that goal.

Commerce Commissioner Steve Kelley told the House climate committee that the Democratic governor's plan is ambitious. But he said the state's generating system is "aging and at a critical juncture," with plants that produce 70 percent of the state's electricity coming up for potential retirement over the next two decades. He said it will ensure that utilities replace them with wind, solar and other innovative sources, and increased energy efficiency, before turning to fossil fuels.

"Utilities will simply need to demonstrate why clean energy would not work whenever they propose to replace or add new generating capacity," he said.

Walz's plan, announced last week, seeks to build on the success of a 2007 law that required Minnesota utilities to get at least 25 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2025. The state largely achieved that goal in 2017 thanks to the growth of wind and solar power, and the topic of climate change has only grown hotter, with some proposals like a fully renewable grid by 2030 pushing even faster timelines, hence the new goal for 2050.

But Joel Johnson, a lobbyist for the Minnkota Power Cooperative, testified that the governor's plan is "misguided and unrealistic" even with new technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Johnson added that even the big utilities that have set goals of going carbon-free by mid-century, such as Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, acknowledge they don't know yet how they'll hit the net-zero electricity by mid-century target they have set.

Minnkota serves northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota.

Tim Sullivan, president and CEO of the Wright-Hennepin Cooperative Electric Association in the Twin Cities area, said the plan is a "bad idea" for the 1.7 million state electric consumers served by cooperatives. He said Minnesota is a "minuscule contributor" to total global carbon emissions, even as the EU plans to double electricity use by 2050 to meet electrification demands.

"The bill would have a devastating impact on electric consumers," Sullivan said. "It represents, in our view, nothing short of a first-order threat to the safety and reliability of Minnesota's grid."

Isaac Orr is a policy fellow at the Minnesota-based conservative think tank, the Center for the American Experiment, which released a report critical of the plan Tuesday. Orr said all Minnesota households would face higher energy costs and it would harm energy-intensive industries such as mining, manufacturing and health care, while doing little to reduce global warming.

"This does not pass a proper cost-benefit analysis," he testified.

Environmental groups, including Conservation Minnesota and the Sierra Club, supported the proposal while acknowledging the challenges, noting that cleaning up electricity is critical to climate pledges in many jurisdictions.

"Our governor has called climate change an existential crisis," said Kevin Lee, director of the climate and energy program at the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy. "This problem is the defining challenge of our time, and it can feel overwhelming."

Rep. Jean Wagenius, the committee chairwoman and Minneapolis Democrat who's held several hearings on the threats that climate change poses, said she expected to table the bill for further consideration after taking more testimony in the evening and would not hold a vote Tuesday.

While the bill has support in the Democratic-controlled House, it's not scheduled for action in the Republican-led Senate. Rep. Pat Garofalo, a Farmington Republican, quipped that it "has a worse chance of becoming law than me being named the starting quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings."

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TCS AI Partnership Paris Marathon integrates predictive analytics, digital twin simulations, real-time runner tracking, and sustainability solutions to elevate logistics, athlete performance, and immersive spectator engagement across the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris ecosystem.

Key Points

AI-driven TCS partnership enhancing Paris logistics, performance, engagement, and sustainability for three years.

✅ Predictive analytics and digital twins optimize race-day ops

✅ Real-time runner tracking and health insights

✅ Sustainable resource management and waste reduction

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has officially become the AI & Technology Partner for the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris, marking the start of a three-year collaboration with one of the world’s most prestigious running events. This partnership, announced on April 1, 2025, aims to revolutionize the marathon experience by integrating cutting-edge technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and data analytics, and modern AI data centers to power scalable capabilities, enhancing both the runner's journey and the spectator experience.

The Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris, which attracts over 55,000 runners from across the globe, is a renowned event that not only challenges athletes but also captivates a worldwide audience. As the Official AI & Technology Partner, TCS is set to bring its deep expertise in AI, digital innovation, and data-driven insights to this iconic event, drawing on adjacent domains such as substation automation training to strengthen operations. With more than 30 years of presence in France and its significant partnerships with French corporations, TCS is uniquely positioned to merge its global technology capabilities with local knowledge, thus adding immense value to this prestigious marathon.

The collaboration will primarily focus on enhancing the race logistics, improving athlete performance, and creating a personalized experience for both runners and spectators. Using advanced AI tools, predictive analytics, and digital twin technologies, TCS will streamline various aspects of the event. For example, AI-powered predictive models, reflecting progress recognized by European electricity prediction specialists in forecasting, will be used to track and monitor runners in real-time, providing insights into their performance and well-being during the race. Additionally, the implementation of digital twin technology will enable TCS to create accurate virtual models of the event, improving logistics and supporting better decision-making.

One of the key goals of the partnership is to improve the sustainability of the marathon. By utilizing advanced AI solutions, including AI for energy savings approaches, TCS will help optimize race-day operations, ensuring efficient management of resources, reducing waste, and minimizing environmental impact. This aligns with the growing trend of incorporating sustainability into large-scale events, ensuring that such iconic marathons not only provide an exceptional experience for participants but also contribute to global environmental goals.

TCS’s PacePort™ innovation hub in Paris will play a pivotal role in the collaboration. This innovation center will serve as the testing ground for new AI-powered solutions and tools aimed at improving runner performance and creating a more engaging race experience. Early priorities for the project include the development of personalized AI-based training programs for runners, real-time tracking systems for athlete health monitoring, and advanced analytics to support better training and recovery strategies, drawing on insights from EU smart meter analytics to inform personalization.

Additionally, TCS will introduce new technologies to enhance spectator engagement. Digital experiences, such as virtual race tracking and immersive content, will bring spectators closer to the event, even if they are not physically present at the marathon. This will allow fans worldwide to engage with the race in more interactive ways, enhancing the global reach and excitement surrounding the event.

TCS’s role in the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris is part of its broader strategy to leverage technology in the realm of sports. The company already supports several major global marathons, including those in New York, London, where projects like the London electricity tunnel showcase infrastructure innovation, and Mumbai, contributing to their operational success and social impact. In fact, marathons supported by TCS raised nearly $280 million for charitable causes in 2024 alone, demonstrating the company’s commitment to blending innovation with social responsibility.

The strategic partnership with the Paris marathon also underscores TCS’s continued commitment to its French operations, and aligns with Schneider Electric’s Notre Dame restoration initiatives that highlight local impact, reinforcing its role as a leader in AI and digital technology. Through this collaboration, TCS aims to not only support the marathon’s logistical and technological needs but also to contribute to the broader development of digital sports experiences.

This partnership promises to deliver a more dynamic, sustainable, and engaging marathon experience, benefiting runners, spectators, and the broader event ecosystem. With TCS’s cutting-edge technology and commitment to enhancing the marathon, the Schneider Electric Marathon de Paris is poised to set new standards for global sports events, blending athletic performance with digital innovation in unprecedented ways.

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Alberta wind power surpasses coal as AESO reports record renewable energy feeding the grid, with natural gas conversions, solar growth, energy storage, and decarbonization momentum lowering carbon intensity across Alberta's electricity system.

Key Points

AESO data shows wind surpassing coal in Alberta, driven by coal retirements, gas conversions, and growing renewables.

✅ AESO reports wind output above coal several times this week

✅ Coal units retire or convert to natural gas, boosting renewables

✅ Carbon intensity falls; storage and solar improve grid reliability

Marking a significant shift in Alberta energy history, wind generation trends provided more power to the province's energy grid than coal several times this week.

According to data from the Alberta Energy System Operator (AESO) released this week, wind generation units contributed more energy to the grid than coal at times for several days. On Friday afternoon, wind farms contributed more than 1,700 megawatts of power to the grid, compared to around 1,260 megawatts from coal stations.

"The grid is going through a period of transformative change when we look at the generation fleet, specifically as it relates to the coal assets in the province," Mike Deising, AESO spokesperson, told CTV News in an interview.

The shift in electricity generation comes as more coal plants come offline in Alberta, or transition to cleaner energy through natural gas generation, including the last of TransAlta's units at the Keephills Plant west of Edmonton.

Only three coal generation stations remain online in the province, at the Genesee plant southwest of Edmonton, as the coal phase-out timeline advances. Less available coal power, means renewable energy like wind and solar make up a greater portion of the grid.

EVOLUTION OF THE GRID
"Our grid is changing, and it's evolving," Deising said, adding that more units have converted to natural gas and companies are making significant investments into solar and wind energy.

For energy analyst Kevin Birn with IHS Markit, that trend is only going to continue.

"What we've seen for the last 24 to 36 months is a dramatic acceleration in ambition, policy, and projects globally around cleaner forms of energy or lower carbon forms of energy," Birn said.

Birn, who is also chief analyst of Canadian Oil Markets, added that not only has the public appetite for cleaner energy helped fuel the shift, but technological advancements have made renewables like wind and solar more cost-efficient.

"Alberta was traditionally heavily coal-reliant," he said. "(Now) western Canada has quite a diverse energy base."

LESS CARBON-INTENSIVE
According to Birn, the shift in energy production marks a significant reduction in carbon emissions as Alberta progresses toward its last coal plant closure milestone.

Ten years ago, IHS Markit estimates that Alberta's grid contributed about 900 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent per megawatt-hour of energy generation.

"That (figure is) really representing the dominance and role of coal in that grid," Birn said.

Current estimates show that figure is closer to 600 kilograms of CO2 equivalent.

"That means the power you and I are using is less carbon-intensive," Birn said, adding that figure will continue to fall over the next couple of years.

RENEWABLES HERE TO STAY
While many debate whether Alberta's energy is getting clean enough fast enough, Birn believes change is coming.

"It's been a half-decade of incredible price volatility in the oil market which had really dominated this sector and region," the analyst said.

"When I think of the future, I see the power sector building on large-scale renewables, which means decarbonization, and that provides an opportunity for those tech companies looking for clean energy places to land facilities."

Coal and natural gas are considered baseline assets by the AESO, where generation capacity does not shift dramatically, though some utilities report declining coal returns in other markets.

"Wind is a variable resource. It will generate when the wind is blowing, and it obviously won't when the wind is not," Deising said. "Wind and solar can ramp quickly, but they can drop off quite quickly, and we have to be prepared.

"We factor that into our daily planning and assessments," he added. "We follow those trends and know where the renewables are going to show up on the system, how many renewables are going to show up."

Deising says one wind plant in Alberta currently has an energy storage capacity to preserve renewably generated electricity during summer demand records and peak hours as needed. As the technology becomes more affordable, he expects more plants to follow suit.

"As a system operator, our job is to make sure as (the grid) is evolving we can continue to provide reliable power to Albertans at every moment every day," Deising said. "We just have to watch the system more carefully." 

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Nuclear Plant Climate Risks span flood risk, heat stress, and water scarcity, threatening operations, safety systems, and steam generation; resilience depends on mitigation investments, cooling-water management, and adaptive maintenance strategies.

Key Points

Climate-driven threats to nuclear plants: floods, heat, and water stress requiring resilience and mitigation.

✅ Flooding threats to safety and cooling systems

✅ Heat stress reduces thermal efficiency and output

✅ Water scarcity risks limit cooling capacity

Climate change can affect every aspect of nuclear plant operations like fuel handling, power and steam generation and the need for resilient power systems planning, maintenance, safety systems and waste processing, the credit rating agency said.

However, the ultimate credit impact will depend upon the ability of plant operators to invest in carbon-free electricity and other mitigating measures to manage these risks, it added.
Close proximity to large water bodies increase the risk of damage to plant equipment that helps ensure safe operation, the agency said in a note.

Moody’s noted that about 37 gigawatts (GW) of U.S. nuclear capacity is expected to have elevated exposure to flood risk and 48 GW elevated exposure to combined rising heat, extreme heat costs and water stress caused by climate change.

Parts of the Midwest and southern Florida face the highest levels of heat stress, while the Rocky Mountain region and California face the greatest reduction in the availability of future water supply, illustrating the need for adapting power generation to drought strategies, it said.

Nuclear plants seeking to extend their operations by 20, or even 40 years, beyond their existing 40-year licenses in support of sustaining U.S. nuclear power and decarbonization face this climate hazard and may require capital investment adjustments, Moody’s said, as companies such as Duke Energy climate report respond to investor pressure for climate transparency.

“Some of these investments will help prepare for the increasing severity and frequency of extreme weather events, highlighting that the US electric grid is not designed for climate impacts today.”

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