Shift in Ontario's power needs added stress to system

TORONTO -- Ontario used to send surplus power south across the border during the cooler Canadian summers, but warmer weather and stagnant local production now has it importing U.S. electricity when temperatures are hottest.

The new summer thirst from Canada's most populous and industrialized province is one more stress on the power system that crashed in North America's biggest blackout.

While no one blames the Ontario demand as the cause in last week's blackout, the shift in the traditional market pattern of the U.S.-Canadian power connection shows how power transmission needs have grown faster than the ability of plants to deliver.

"Last summer and this summer, we stretched that interconnection to the limit in terms of how much we can bring into Ontario," said Terry Young, spokesman for the Independent Electricity Marketing Operator that regulates Ontario's power system.

On Wednesday, the day before the blackout, Ontario imported 2,185 megawatts of electricity. Sources for imports are New York, Michigan and Minnesota in the United States, as well as Quebec and Manitoba provinces in Canada.

The IEMO was unable to immediately provide a breakdown for the Wednesday import figure or any details of imports on Thursday, when the blackout occurred.

Bruce Campbell, the agency's vice president, said the maximum import load is slightly over 4,000 megawatts for the province where demand averages 23,000 megawatts on an average summer working day.

Ontario used to buy power from south of the border in the frigid winters for heating and other energy needs, and sell its surplus in the summers. It was known as a winter peaking load, but that has changed, Campbell said.

"Now our highest loads occur over the summer months," he said.

Warmer summers due to what some call global warming is one reason, with Campbell noting a huge increase in air conditioning compared to past decades. Older homes that lacked air conditioning have been retrofitted, he said, while virtually all new homes have cooling systems.

"As a result, air condition load comes on in the summer when it's hottest, and that, in addition to a normal load growth, has taken us to a summer peaking system," he said.

Aborted deregulation

Others say it is not that simple. Critics of the Ontario government, headed by the Progressive Conservative party for the past decade, cite an aborted plan to deregulate the industry and sell off some of the provincial-owned power system for delaying needed projects to increase electricity production.

"Ontario has not had enough domestic generating capacity to meet peak summer and winter demand for more than five years," wrote Howard Hampton, leader of the leftist New Democratic Party, in Sunday's Toronto Star newspaper. He blamed a "chronic dependence on imported power" for exposing Ontario's transmission grid to the cascading blackout.

The deregulation program broke up Ontario Hydro, which had a virtual monopoly for decades, and the government planned to sell some of the resulting units. Last November, though, Premier Ernie Eves responded to ballooning energy costs for consumers by capping the price of electricity. Two months after that, he scrapped the privatization plan intended to bring $3.5 billion to government coffers, saying buyers rejected the government desire to maintain majority control.

Those moves wiped out any investor interest in funding capital projects to expand power production, with the four-year price cap meaning limited profits, critics charged.

In such confusing times, plans to restart generating units at two major nuclear plants have been delayed, further hindering Ontario's production capacity.

To Young of the IEMO, the benefits of dealing power across the border far exceed any problems.

"We've been part of an integrated system for a number of years and it's been almost 40 years since we've seen something like this," he said of the outage that affected tens of millions of people across southern Ontario and several U.S. states. "In that 40 years we've also seen a lot of benefits of being part of that interconnected system.

"Last week, we were buying power as part of that interconnected grid to help keep the lights on in Ontario."