Falling demand raises doubts about power plants

Iraq Nuclear Power Plan targets eight reactors and 11 GW to ease blackouts, curb emissions, and support desalination, with financing via partners like Rosatom and Kepco amid OPEC-linked demand growth and chronic grid shortages.

Key Points

A $40B push to build eight reactors adding 11 GW, easing blackouts, cutting emissions, and supporting desalination.

✅ $40B, 20-year payback via partner financing

✅ Talks with Rosatom, Kepco; U.S. and France consulted

✅ Parallel solar buildout to meet 2030 demand

Iraq is working on a plan to build nuclear reactors as the electricity-starved petrostate seeks to end the widespread blackouts that have sparked social unrest.

OPEC’s No. 2 oil producer – already suffering from power shortages and insufficient investment in aging plants – needs to meet an expected 50% jump in demand by the end of the decade. Building atomic plants could help to close the supply gap, though the country will face significant financial and geopolitical challenges in bringing its plan to fruition.

Iraq seeks to build eight reactors capable of producing about 11 gigawatts, said Kamal Hussain Latif, chairman of the Iraqi Radioactive Sources Regulatory Authority. It would seek funding from prospective partners for the $40 billion plan and pay back the costs over 20 years, he said, adding that the authority had discussed cooperation with Russian and South Korean officials, as Iran-Iraq energy cooperation progresses across the sector.

Plunging crude prices last year deprived Iraq of funds to maintain and expand its long-neglected electricity system, though grid rehabilitation deals have been finalized to support upgrades. The resulting outages triggered protests that threatened to topple the government.

“We have several forecasts that show that without nuclear power by 2030, we will be in big trouble,” Latif said in an interview at his office in Baghdad. Not only is there the power shortage and surge in demand to deal with, but Iraq is also trying to cut emissions and produce more water via desalination — “issues that raise the alarm for me.”

Raising financing will be a major task given that Iraq has suffered budgetary crises amid volatile oil prices. Even with crude at about $70 a barrel now, the country is only just balancing its budget, according to data from the International Monetary Fund.

The government will also have to tackle geopolitical concerns around the safety of atomic energy, which have stymied nuclear ambitions elsewhere in the region, even as Europe's nuclear decline underscores broader energy challenges.

Nuclear power, which doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, would help Gulf states’ efforts to cut emissions as governments worldwide, including India's nuclear push to expand capacity, look to become greener. The technology would also allow them to earmark more of their valuable hydrocarbons for export. Saudi Arabia, which is building a test reactor, burns as much as 1 million barrels of crude a day in power plants during its summer months when temperatures soar beyond 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit).

The Iraqi cabinet is reviewing an agreement with Russia’s Rosatom Corp. to cooperate in building reactors, Latif said. South Korean officials this year said they wanted to help build the plants and offered the Iraqis a tour of UAE nuclear reactors run by Korea Electric Power Corp. Latif said the nuclear authority has also spoken with French and U.S. officials about the plan.

Kepco, Rosatom
Kepco, as the Korean energy producer is known, is not aware of Iraq’s nuclear plans and hasn’t been in touch with Iraqi officials or been asked to work on any projects there, a company spokesman said Tuesday. Rosatom didn’t immediately comment when asked about an agreement with Iraq.

Even if Iraq builds the planned number of power stations, that still won’t be sufficient to cover future consumption. The country already faces a 10-gigawatt gap between capacity and demand and expects to need an additional 14 gigawatts this decade, Latif said.

With this in mind, Iraq plans to build enough solar plants to generate a similar amount of power to the nuclear program by the end of the decade.
Iraq currently boasts 18.4 gigawatts of electricity, including 1.2 gigawatts imported from Iran into the grid. Capacity additions mean generation will rise to as much as 22 gigawatts by August, but that’s well short of notional demand that stands at almost 28 gigawatts under normal conditions. Peak usage during the hot summer months of July and August exceeds 30 gigawatts, according to the Electricity Ministry. Demand will hit 42 gigawatts by 2030, Latif said.

The nuclear authority has picked 20 potential sites for the reactors and Latif suggested that the first contracts could be signed in the next year.

It won’t be Iraq’s first attempt to go nuclear. Four decades ago, an Israeli air strike destroyed a reactor under construction south of Baghdad. The Israelis alleged the facility, called Osirak, was aimed at producing nuclear weapons for use against them. Iraq suffered more than a decade of violence and upheaval after the 2003 U.S. invasion, which was also motivated by allegations that Iraq wanted to develop weapons.

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Solar-Wind-Water West Africa integrates hydropower with solar and wind to boost grid flexibility, clean electricity, and decarbonization, leveraging the West African Power Pool and climate data modeling reported in Nature Sustainability.

Key Points

A strategy using hydropower to balance solar and wind, enabling reliable, low-carbon electricity across West Africa.

✅ Hydropower dispatch covers solar and wind shortfalls.

✅ Regional interconnection via West African Power Pool.

✅ Cuts CO2 versus gas while limiting new dam projects.

Hydropower plants can support solar and wind power, rather unpredictable by nature, in a climate-friendly manner. A new study in the scientific journal Nature Sustainability has now mapped the potential for such "solar-wind-water" strategies for West Africa: an important region where the power sector is still under development, amid IEA investment needs for universal access, and where generation capacity and power grids will be greatly expanded in the coming years. "Countries in West Africa therefore now have the opportunity to plan this expansion according to strategies that rely on modern, climate-friendly energy generation," says Sebastian Sterl, energy and climate scientist at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and KU Leuven and lead author of the study. "A completely different situation from Europe, where power supply has been dependent on polluting power plants for many decades - which many countries now want to rid themselves of."

Solar and wind power generation is increasing worldwide and becoming cheaper and cheaper. This helps to keep climate targets in sight, but also poses challenges. For instance, critics often argue that these energy sources are too unpredictable and variable to be part of a reliable electricity mix on a large scale, though combining multiple resources can enhance project performance.

"Indeed, our electricity systems will have to become much more flexible if we are to feed large amounts of solar and wind power into the grid. Flexibility is currently mostly provided by gas power plants. Unfortunately, these cause a lot of CO2 emissions," says Sebastian Sterl, energy and climate expert at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and KU Leuven. "But in many countries, hydropower plants can be a fossil fuel-free alternative to support solar and wind energy. After all, hydropower plants can be dispatched at times when insufficient solar and wind power is available."

The research team, composed of experts from VUB, KU Leuven, the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA), and Climate Analytics, designed a new computer model for their study, running on detailed water, weather and climate data. They used this model to investigate how renewable power sources in West Africa could be exploited as effectively as possible for a reliable power supply, even without large-scale storage, in line with World Bank support for wind in developing countries. All this without losing sight of the environmental impact of large hydropower plants.

"This is far from trivial to calculate," says Prof. Wim Thiery, climate scientist at the VUB, who was also involved in the study. "Hydroelectric power stations in West Africa depend on the monsoon; in the dry season they run on their reserves. Both sun and wind, as well as power requirements, have their own typical hourly, daily and seasonal patterns. Solar, wind and hydropower all vary from year to year and may be impacted by climate change, including projections that wind resources shift southward in coming years. In addition, their potential is spatially very unevenly distributed."

West African Power Pool

The study demonstrates that it will be particularly important to create a "West African Power Pool", a regional interconnection of national power grids to serve as a path to universal electricity access across the region. Countries with a tropical climate, such as Ghana and the Ivory Coast, typically have a lot of potential for hydropower and quite high solar radiation, but hardly any wind. The drier and more desert-like countries, such as Senegal and Niger, hardly have any opportunities for hydropower, but receive more sunlight and more wind. The potential for reliable, clean power generation based on solar and wind power, supported by flexibly dispatched hydropower, increases by more than 30% when countries can share their potential regionally, the researchers discovered.

All measures taken together would allow roughly 60% of the current electricity demand in West Africa to be met with complementary renewable sources, despite concerns about slow greening of Africa's electricity, of which roughly half would be solar and wind power and the other half hydropower - without the need for large-scale battery or other storage plants. According to the study, within a few years, the cost of solar and wind power generation in West Africa is also expected to drop to such an extent that the proposed solar-wind-water strategies will provide cheaper electricity than gas-fired power plants, which currently still account for more than half of all electricity supply in West Africa.

Better ecological footprint

Hydropower plants can have a considerable negative impact on local ecology. In many developing countries, piles of controversial plans for new hydropower plants have been proposed. The study can help to make future investments in hydropower more sustainable. "By using existing and planned hydropower plants as optimally as possible to massively support solar and wind energy, one can at the same time make certain new dams superfluous," says Sterl. "This way two birds can be caught with one stone. Simultaneously, one avoids CO2 emissions from gas-fired power stations and the environmental impact of hydropower overexploitation."

Global relevance

The methods developed for the study are easily transferable to other regions, and the research has worldwide relevance, as shown by a US 80% study on high variable renewable shares. Sterl: "Nearly all regions with a lot of hydropower, or hydropower potential, could use it to compensate shortfalls in solar and wind power." Various European countries, with Norway at the front, have shown increased interest in recent years to deploy their hydropower to support solar and wind power in EU countries. Exporting Norwegian hydropower during times when other countries undergo solar and wind power shortfalls, the European energy transition can be advanced.

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Ukraine-ENTSO-E Grid Synchronization links Ukraine and Moldova to the European grid via secure interconnection, matching frequency for stability, resilience, and energy security, enabling cross-border support, islanding recovery, and coordinated load balancing during wartime disruptions.

Key Points

Rapid alignment of Ukraine and Moldova into the European grid to enable secure interconnection and system stability.

✅ Matches 50 Hz frequency across interconnected systems

✅ Enables cross-border support and electricity trading

✅ Improves resilience, stability, and energy security

On February 24 Ukraine’s electric grid operator disconnected the country’s power system from the larger Russian-operated network to which it had always been linked. The long-planned disconnection was meant to be a 72-hour trial proving that Ukraine could operate on its own and to protect electricity supply before winter as contingencies were tested. The test was a requirement for eventually linking with the European grid, which Ukraine had been working toward since 2017. But four hours after the exercise started, Russia invaded.

Ukraine’s connection to Europe—which was not supposed to occur until 2023—became urgent, and engineers aimed to safely achieve it in just a matter of weeks. On March 16 they reached the key milestone of synchronizing the two systems. It was “a year’s work in two weeks,” according to a statement by Kadri Simson, the European Union commissioner for energy. That is unusual in this field. “For [power grid operators] to move this quickly and with such agility is unprecedented,” says Paul Deane, an energy policy researcher at the University College Cork in Ireland. “No power system has ever synchronized this quickly before.”

Ukraine initiated the process of joining Europe’s grid in 2005 and began working toward that goal in earnest in 2017, as did Moldova. It was part of an ongoing effort to align with Europe, as seen in the Baltic states’ disconnection from the Russian grid, and decrease reliance on Russia, which had repeatedly threatened Ukraine’s sovereignty. “Ukraine simply wanted to decouple from Russian dominance in every sense of the word, and the grid is part of that,” says Suriya Jayanti, an Eastern European policy expert and former U.S. diplomat who served as energy chief at the U.S. embassy in Kyiv from 2018 to 2020.

After the late February trial period, Ukrenergo, the Ukrainian grid operator, had intended to temporarily rejoin the system that powers Russia and Belarus. But the Russian invasion made that untenable. “That left Ukraine in isolation mode, which would be incredibly dangerous from a power supply perspective,” Jayanti says. “It means that there’s nowhere for Ukraine to import electricity from. It’s an orphan.” That was a particularly precarious situation given Russian attacks on key energy infrastructure such as the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant and ongoing strikes on Ukraine’s power grid that posed continuing risks. (According to Jayanti, Ukraine’s grid was ultimately able to run alone for as long as it did because power demand dropped by about a third as Ukrainians fled the country.)

Three days after the invasion, Ukrenergo sent a letter to the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity (ENTSO-E) requesting authorization to connect to the European grid early. Moldelectrica, the Moldovan operator, made the same request the following day. While European operators wanted to support Ukraine, they had to protect their own grids, amid renewed focus on protecting the U.S. power grid from Russian hacking, so the emergency connection process had to be done carefully. “Utilities and system operators are notoriously risk-averse because the job is to keep the lights on, to keep everyone safe,” says Laura Mehigan, an energy researcher at University College Cork.

An electric grid is a network of power-generating sources and transmission infrastructure that produces electricity and carries it from places such as power plants, wind farms and solar arrays to houses, hospitals and public transit systems. “You can’t just experiment with a power system and hope that it works,” Deane says. Getting power where it is it needed when it is needed is an intricate process, and there is little room for error, as incidents involving Russian hackers targeting U.S. utilities have highlighted for operators worldwide.

Crucial to this mission is grid interconnection. Linked systems can share electricity across vast areas, often using HVDC technology, so that a surplus of energy generated in one location can meet demand in another. “More interconnection means we can move power around more quickly, more efficiently, more cost effectively and take advantage of low-carbon or zero-carbon power sources,” says James Glynn, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. But connecting these massive networks with many moving parts is no small order.

One of the primary challenges of interconnecting grids is synchronizing them, which is what Ukrenergo, Moldelectrica and ENTSO-E accomplished last week. Synchronization is essential for sharing electricity. The task involves aligning the frequencies of every energy-generation facility in the connecting systems. Frequency is like the heartbeat of the electric grid. Across Europe, energy-generating turbines spin 50 times per second in near-perfect unison, and when disputes disrupt that balance, slow clocks across Europe can result, reminding operators of the stakes. For Ukraine and Moldova to join in, their systems had to be adjusted to match that rhythm. “We can’t stop the power system for an hour and then try to synchronize,” Deane says. “This has to be done while the system is operating.” It is like jumping onto a moving train or a spinning ride at the playground: the train or ride is not stopping, so you had better time the jump perfectly.

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London, Ontario Power Outage disrupts the electricity grid, causing a citywide blackout, stalled commuters, dark traffic signals, and closed businesses, as London Hydro crews race restoration after a transformer malfunction and infrastructure failures.

Key Points

A blackout caused by a transformer malfunction, disrupting commuters, businesses, and traffic across London, Ontario.

✅ Traffic signals dark; delays and congestion citywide

✅ London Hydro crews repairing malfunctioning transformer

✅ Businesses closed; transit routes delayed and rerouted

A widespread power outage early Monday morning left thousands of residents in London, Ontario, without electricity, causing significant disruption for commuters and businesses at the start of the workday. The outage, which affected several neighborhoods across the city, lasted for hours, creating a chaotic morning as residents scrambled to adjust to the unexpected interruption.

The Outage Strikes

The power failure was first reported at approximately 6:30 a.m., catching many off guard as they began their day. The affected areas included several busy neighborhoods, with power lines down and substations impacted, issues that windstorms often exacerbate for utilities. Early reports indicated that the outage was caused by a combination of issues, including technical failures and possible equipment malfunctions. London Hydro, the city's primary electricity provider, responded quickly to the situation, assuring residents that crews were dispatched to restore power as soon as possible.

"Crews are on site and working hard to restore power to those affected," a spokesperson for London Hydro said. "We understand the frustration this causes and are doing everything we can to get the power back on as soon as possible."

Impact on Commuters and Businesses

The power outage had an immediate impact on the morning commute. Traffic lights across the affected areas were down, leading to delays and rush-hour disruptions at major intersections. Drivers were forced to navigate through intersections without traffic control, creating an additional layer of complexity for those trying to get to work or school.

Public transit was also affected, with some bus routes delayed due to the power loss at key transit stations. The situation added further stress to commuters already dealing with the challenges of a typical Monday morning rush.

Businesses in the affected neighborhoods faced a variety of challenges. Some were forced to close early or delay their opening hours due to a lack of electricity. Many shops and offices struggled with limited access to the internet and phone lines, which hindered their ability to process orders and serve customers. Local coffee shops, often a go-to for busy workers, were also unable to operate their coffee machines or provide basic services, forcing customers to go without their usual morning caffeine fix.

"For a lot of people, it's their first stop in the morning," said one local business owner. "It’s frustrating because we rely on power to function, and with no warning, we had to turn away customers."

The Response

As the hours ticked by, residents were left wondering when the power would return. London Hydro’s social media accounts were filled with updates, keeping residents informed about the restoration efforts, a practice echoed when BC Hydro crews responded during an atypical storm. The utility company urged those who were experiencing issues to report them online to help prioritize repair efforts.

"We are aware that many people are affected, and our teams are working tirelessly to restore power," the utility posted on Twitter. "Please stay safe, and we thank you for your patience."

Throughout the morning, the power was gradually restored to different areas of the city. However, some parts remained without electricity well into the afternoon, a situation reminiscent of extended outages that test city resilience. London Hydro confirmed that the outage was caused by a malfunctioning transformer, and the necessary repairs would take time to complete.

Long-Term Effects and Community Concerns

While the immediate effects of the outage were felt most acutely during the morning hours, some residents expressed concern about the potential long-term effects. The city’s reliance on a stable electricity grid became a focal point of discussion, with many wondering if similar outages could occur in the future, as seen in the North Seattle outage earlier this year.

"I understand that things break, but it’s frustrating that it took so long for power to come back," said a London resident. "This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and it makes me wonder about the reliability of our infrastructure."

City officials responded by reassuring residents that efforts are underway to upgrade the city's infrastructure to prevent such outages from happening in the future. A report released by London Hydro highlighted ongoing investments in upgrading transformers and other key components of the city's power grid. Province-wide, Hydro One restored power to more than 277,000 customers after damaging storms, underscoring the scale of upgrades needed. Despite these efforts, however, experts warn that older infrastructure in some areas may still be vulnerable to failure, especially during extreme weather events or other unforeseen circumstances.

The morning outage serves as a reminder of how reliant modern cities are on stable electricity networks. While the response from London Hydro was swift and effective in restoring power, it’s clear that these types of events can cause significant disruptions to daily life. As the city moves forward, many are calling for increased investment in infrastructure and proactive measures to prevent future outages, especially after Toronto outages persisted following a spring storm in the region.

In the meantime, Londoners have adapted, finding ways to go about their day as best they can. For some, it’s a reminder of the importance of preparedness in an increasingly unpredictable world. Whether it’s an extra flashlight or a backup power source, residents are learning to expect the unexpected and be ready for whatever the next workday might bring.

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Coinmint Plattsburgh Dispute spotlights cryptocurrency mining, hydropower electricity rates, a $1M security deposit, Public Service Commission rulings, municipal utility policies, and seasonal migration to Massena data centers as Bitcoin price volatility pressures operations.

Key Points

Legal and energy-cost dispute over crypto mining, a $1,019,503 deposit, and operations in Plattsburgh and Massena.

✅ PSC allows higher rates and requires large security deposits.

✅ Winter electricity spikes drove a $1M deposit calculation.

✅ Coinmint shifted capacity to Massena data centers.

A few years ago, there was a lot of buzz about the North Country becoming the next Silicon Valley of cryptocurrency, even as Maine debated a 145-mile line that could reshape regional power flows. One of the companies to flock here was Coinmint. The cryptomining company set up shop in Plattsburgh in 2017 and declared its intentions to be a good citizen.

Today, Coinmint is fighting a legal battle to avoid paying the city’s electric utility more than $1 million owed for a security deposit. In addition to that dispute, a local property manager says the firm was evicted from one of its Plattsburgh locations.

Companies like Coinmint chose to come to the North Country because of the relatively low electricity prices here, thanks in large part to the hydropower dam on the St. Lawrence River in Massena, and regionally, projects such as the disputed electricity corridor have drawn attention to transmission costs and access. Coinmint operates its North Country Data Center facilities in Plattsburgh and Massena. In both locations, racks of computer servers perform complex calculations to generate cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin.

When cryptomining began to take off in Plattsburgh, the cost of one bitcoin was skyrocketing. That brought hype around the possibility of big business and job creation in the North Country. But cryptomininers like Coinmint were using massive amounts of energy in the winter of 2017-2018, and that season, electric bills of everyday Plattsburgh residents spiked.

Many cryptomining firms operate in a state of flux, beholden to the price of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, even as the end to the 'war on coal' declaration did little to change utilities' choices. When the price of one bitcoin hit $20,000 in 2017, it fell by 30% just days later. That’s one reason why the price of electricity is so critical for companies like Coinmint to turn a profit. 

Plattsburgh puts the brakes on “cryptocurrency mining”
In early 2018, Plattsburgh passed a moratorium on cryptocurrency mining operations, after residents complained of higher-than-usual electric bills.

“Your electric bill’s $100, then it’s at $130. Why? It’s because these guys that are mining the bitcoins are riding into town, taking advantage of a situation,” said resident Andrew Golt during a 2018 public hearing.

Coinmint aimed to assuage the worries of residents and other businesses. “At the end of the day we want to be a good citizen in whatever communities we’re in,” Coinmint spokesman Kyle Carlton told NCPR at that 2018 meeting.

“We’re open to working with those communities to figure out whatever solutions are going to work.”

The ban was lifted in Feb. 2019. However, since it didn’t apply to companies that were already mining cryptocurrency in Plattsburgh, Coinmint has operated in the city all along.

Coinmint challenges attempt to protect ratepayers
New rules passed by the New York Public Service Commission in March 2018 allow municipal power authorities including Plattsburgh’s to charge big energy users such as Coinmint higher electricity rates, amid customer backlash in other utility deals. The new rules also require them to put down a security deposit to ensure their bills get paid.

But Coinmint disputes that deposit charge. The company has been embroiled in a legal fight for nearly a year against Plattsburgh Municipal Lighting Department (PMLD) in an attempt to avoid paying the electric utility’s security deposit bill of $1,019,503. That bill is based on an estimate of what would cover two months of electricity use if a company were to leave town without paying its electric bills.

Coinmint would not discuss the dispute on the record with NCPR. Legal documents show the firm argues the deposit charge is inflated, based on a flawed calculation resulting in a charge hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than what it should be.

“Essentially they’re arguing that they should only have to put up some average of their monthly bills without accounting for the fact that winter bills are significantly higher than the average,” said Ken Podolny, an attorney representing the Plattsburgh utility.

The company took legal action in February 2019 against PMLD in the hopes New York’s energy regulator, the Public Service Commission, would agree with Coinmint that the deposit charge was too high. An informal commission hearing officer disagreed, and ruled in October the charge was calculated correctly.

Coinmint appealed the ruling in November and a hearing on the appeal could come as soon as February.

Less than a week after Coinmint lost its initial challenge of the deposit charge, the company made a splashy announcement trumpeting its plans to “migrate its Plattsburgh, New York infrastructure to its Massena, New York location for the 2019-2020 winter season.”

The announcement made no mention of the appeal or the recent ruling against Coinmint. The company attributed its new plan to “exceptionally-high” electricity rates in Plattsburgh, as hydropower transmission projects elsewhere in New England faced their own controversies. 

"We recognize some in the Plattsburgh community have blamed our operation for pushing rates higher for everyone so, while we disagree with that assessment, we hope this seasonal migration will have a positive impact on rates for all our neighbors,” said Coinmint cofounder Prieur Leary in the press statement.

“In the event that doesn't happen, we trust the community will look for the real answers for these high costs." Prieur Leary has since been removed from the corporate team page on the company’s website.

The company still operates in Plattsburgh at one of its locations in the city. As for staff, while at least two Coinmint employees have moved from Plattsburgh to Massena, where the company operates a data center inside a former Alcoa aluminum plant, it is unclear how many people in total have made the move.

Coinmint left its second Plattsburgh location in 2019. The company would not discuss that move on the record, yet the circumstances of the departure are murky.

The local property manager of the industrial park site told NCPR, “I have no comment on our evicted tenant Coinmint.” The property owner, California’s Karex Property Management Services, also would not comment regarding the situation, noting that “all staff have been told to not discuss anything regarding our past tenant Coinmint.”

Today, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are worth a fraction of what they were back in 2017 when Coinmint came to the North Country, and now, amid a debate over Bitcoin's electricity use shaping market sentiment, the future of the entire industry here remains uncertain.

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Ontario Electricity Transition faces surging demand, GHG targets, and federal regulations, balancing natural gas, renewables, battery storage, and grid reliability while pursuing net-zero by 2035 and cost-effective decarbonization for industry, EVs, and growing populations.

Key Points

Ontario Electricity Transition is the province's shift to a reliable, low-GHG grid via renewables, storage, and policy.

✅ Demand up 75% by 2050; procurement adds 4,000 MW capacity.

✅ Gas use rises to 25% by 2030, challenging GHG goals.

✅ Tripling wind and solar with storage can cut costs and emissions.

Ontario's electricity sector stands at a pivotal crossroads. Once a leader in clean energy, the province now faces the dual challenge of meeting surging demand while adhering to stringent greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction targets. Recent developments, including the expansion of natural gas infrastructure and proposed federal regulations, have intensified debates about the future of Ontario's energy landscape, as this analysis explains in detail.

Rising Demand and the Need for Expansion

Ontario's electricity demand is projected to increase by 75% by 2050, equivalent to adding four and a half cities the size of Toronto to the grid. This surge is driven by factors such as industrial electrification, population growth, and the transition to electric vehicles. In response, as Ontario confronts a looming shortfall in the coming years, the provincial government has initiated its most ambitious energy procurement plan to date, aiming to secure an additional 4,000 megawatts of capacity by 2030. This includes investments in battery storage and natural gas generation to ensure grid reliability during peak demand periods.

The Role of Natural Gas: A Controversial Bridge

Natural gas has become a cornerstone of Ontario's strategy to meet immediate energy needs. However, this reliance comes with environmental costs. The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) projects that by 2030, natural gas will account for 25% of Ontario's electricity supply, up from 4% in 2017. This shift raises concerns about the province's ability to meet its GHG reduction targets and to embrace clean power in practice. 

The expansion of gas-fired plants, including broader plans for new gas capacity, such as the Portlands Energy Centre in Toronto, has sparked public outcry. Environmental groups argue that these expansions could undermine local emissions reduction goals and exacerbate health issues related to air quality. For instance, emissions from the Portlands plant have surged from 188,000 tonnes in 2017 to over 600,000 tonnes in 2021, with projections indicating a potential increase to 1.65 million tonnes if the expansion proceeds as planned. 

Federal Regulations and Economic Implications

The federal government's proposed clean electricity regulations aim to achieve a net-zero electricity sector by 2035. However, Ontario's government has expressed concerns that these regulations could impose significant financial burdens. An analysis by the IESO suggests that complying with the new rules would require doubling the province's electricity generation capacity, potentially adding $35 billion in costs by 2050, while other estimates suggest that greening Ontario's grid could cost $400 billion over time. This could result in higher residential electricity bills, ranging from $132 to $168 annually starting in 2033.

Pathways to a Sustainable Future

Experts advocate for a diversified approach to decarbonization that balances environmental goals with economic feasibility. Investments in renewable energy sources, such as new wind and solar resources, along with advancements in energy storage technologies, are seen as critical components of a sustainable energy strategy. Additionally, implementing energy efficiency measures and modernizing grid infrastructure can enhance system resilience and reduce emissions. 

The Ontario Clean Air Alliance proposes phasing out gas power by 2035 through a combination of tripling wind and solar capacity and investing in energy efficiency and storage solutions. This approach not only aims to reduce emissions but also offers potential cost savings compared to continued reliance on gas-fired generation. 

Ontario's journey toward a decarbonized electricity grid is fraught with challenges, including balancing reliability, clean, affordable electricity, and environmental sustainability. While natural gas currently plays a significant role in meeting the province's energy needs, its long-term viability as a bridge fuel remains contentious. The path forward will require careful consideration of technological innovations, regulatory frameworks, and public engagement to ensure a clean, reliable, and economically viable energy future for all Ontarians.

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