Aging power plants slated for cleanup

Toronto Star - September 15, 2000
by Richard Brennan and Brian McAndrew

Ontario Power Generation will spend more than $250 million over three years to reduce emissions at three coal-fired plants in response to growing concerns over air pollution.

"We are committed to environmental leadership and reducing our impacts on air quality," Ron Osborne, president and chief executive officer of the former Ontario Hydro, told a Mississauga Board of Trade luncheon yesterday.

The measures will reduce nitrogen oxide (NOx) emissions, an ingredient of smog, by 13,000 tonnes annually from the current levels of about 50,000 tonnes.

Osborne said catalytic reduction equipment will be installed on two of the eight coal-fired units at the Nanticoke Generating Station near Simcoe and on two of four units at the Lambton generating station near Sarnia. In addition, he said, the remaining two of the four operating units at the Lakeview Generating Station in Mississauga that don't have them will be outfitted with low Nox burners, which will result in the fuel burning cleaner. Nitrogen oxide emissions at the Lakeview station will be reduced by 50 per cent, Osborne said.

A spokesperson for Environment Minister Dan Newman said the minister applauded the improvements.

But a moratorium announced earlier this year on the sale of any of the coal-fired plants remains in place until a review of alternative sources of fuel is completed.

Environmental critics say the money would be better spent converting the Lakeview, Lambton and Nanticoke plants to cleaner natural gas. "It's a quarter of a billion dollars that we could see invested in new state-of-the art, clean, natural-gas technology," Lois Corbett, executive director of the Toronto Environmental Alliance, said.

According to OPG figures, it could cost up to $5 billion to convert Ontario's five coal-fired plants to natural gas.

"They are throwing $250 million away. That's like putting a brand new shiny engine in a rusty, broken car. Natural gas is what is going to improve the competitive reliability of OPG in the long run, not old dirty coal plants with shiny new technical fixes," she said.

"It's like sending a dinosaur to a job-retraining program when what you really need to do is create a new beast," added Dan McDermott, director of the Sierra Club of Eastern Canada.

But Osborne defended the investment saying it makes good sense, since converting the plants to natural gas isn't something that could happen overnight. "Even if somebody told us tomorrow to convert all of these to gas as quickly as you can, we're going to be burning coal in at least four of these units seven, eight, nine years from now," Osborne told Canadian Press.

"Anything beyond a couple of years means that it's imperative that we clean up our act on this stuff, and we're going to do that."

Opposition critics, the Ontario Medical Association and environmentalists have been demanding for years that all five of Ontario's coal-fired power plants be converted to natural gas.

The medical association says about 1,900 people in Ontario die prematurely each year from the effects of air pollution. Toronto's public health department estimated 1,000 of them were within the city.

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