An energy plan for all Ontarians

AS the Province of Ontario rushes toward hoped-for new prosperity as a world clean energy leader, gaps are appearing in the plan. Two of them involve the Northwest.
Most people are now familiar with the relatively polite but clearly urgent message from Cliffs Natural Resources that, unless it can get a better electricity rate than is currently available here, it likely will build its big ferrochrome processing plant somewhere other than Ontario. The plant will process ore from the enormous Ring of Fire mineral deposit far north of Lake Superior.
Even if Cliffs and other major players manage to convince the province to compete with the lower energy prices in neighbouring Manitoba and Quebec, a more fundamental problem exists. Electricity infrastructure is woefully inadequate. The province has known about this inequity for many years, but steadfastly ignored it.
As outlined for two recent provincial panel visits to Thunder Bay, the Northwest is feeling like Ontario’s unwanted child. While the Ontario Power Authority manages a transmission system, Hydro One and a series of municipal systems manage distribution directly to customers. The two seem to work independent of each other.
Transmission is the bigger picture and it includes 230-kilovolt wires that were built in the 1970s to carry Manitoba power to southern Ontario where that is the standard. As part of the province’s supposedly all-inclusive 20-year Long-term Energy Plan, OPA is also preparing for 230-kv lines from Dryden to Pickle Lake and between Wawa and Nipigon. Neither of these have any correlation to the 115-kv distribution system of largely single-wire connections between communities to their customers.
As Common Voice Northwest, a municipal-business coalition said in a position statement on the province’s long-term plan, the region’s “transmission and distribution systems are so overloaded or in such a state of deterioration that the power is either not available at all for new or increased use, or where it is available to existing customers is unreliable in both quantity and quality.”
That’s the situation in what CVN calls the southern and lower-middle ranges of the region. Above that, “there is simply nothing that even remotely resembles a power system.” Over 40 First Nation communities rely on diesel generators.
It adds: “northern residential communities as well as the operating and planned resources industries of the middle and northern ranges . . . are left with a power supply system equivalent to that of a developing nation.”
Things are so bad that many people who signed up for the highly-touted microFIT program to install solar panels, feeding any excess back to the grid, have been told their major investments are on hold because the grid is not sufficient to take their overload.
Let’s ensure that the Long-Term Energy Plan is attentive to the needs of all Ontarians.