Over 30% of Ontario electricity now generated from dirty fuels
Ford PCs have failed to plan for Ontario's energy demand and sovereignty, but it hasn't been much of a political liability.
Over 30 per cent of all Ontario’s electrical power was generated from dirty fuel sources in February, up from just eight per cent in February 2018, according to Statistics Canada data released Wednesday.
In that period, demand has increased 2.0 million megawatt hours and the amount generated by dirty fuel sources increased by 3.4 million MWh. That isn’t just a failure to plan for the future, it’s a past and on-going failure.
Delays in building generation capacity have been driven by indecision about Ontario’s nuclear direction. It’s an issue about a U.S. technology supplier, cost, and supply chain security. And about an incumbent domestic tech company that addresses a lot of those problems. But there seems to be international pressure.
The delay has forced Ontario back onto dirty fuels, which now generate more power than Ontario’s once-mighty hydro-electric sources.
In 2025 the Ford government announced a contract with U.S. company GE Hitachi to lead construction of four small nuclear reactors to boost Ontario’s capacity. Each BWRX-300 unit would produce 300 Megawatts at an estimated $20.9 billion project cost. The first unit would start flowing power to the Ontario grid in 2030. That’s still a while.
And an additional 1200 MW is far from addressing Ontario needs.
The PC government says it is currently “exploring” other expansions. And they sometimes point to several nuclear generation facilities currently being refurbished. But that work was scheduled literally decades ago. They didn’t plan.
Energy sovereignty and security concerns
Ford’s deal with GE Hitachi has also raised supply chain security concerns due to its need for uranium enrichment.
Ontario’s existing nuclear plants use CANDU technology, which can use uranium mined in Canada with no need for enrichment. Northern Saskatchewan supplies about 24 per cent of global demand and all of Canada’s needs.
Canada has no enrichment facilities — because Canadians designed a technology that didn’t need it. Our public sector developed, built and maintained power facilities using CANDU tech. That’s the technology used in all of Canada’s nuclear power stations. It’s the tech that has been delivering about of half of Ontario’s power needs for decades. They will continue to deliver a huge share into the future.
But now Ford is buying U.S. tech that requires enrichment. And it seems that’s because decision weren’t made on the required timeline. SMRs are to real power stations as portables are to real schools.
And due to lack of planning, while Canada used to be electricity sovereign, it will now depend on supply chains through the United States. Enrichment would happen at the Urenco enrichment facility in New Mexico, United States.
That supply chain concern has led to bandwagon efforts from lobby group MacDonald-Laurier Institute. From their pages have come arguments that to solve the problem Ford created, Carney should give billions in federal tax dollars should to building an enrichment facility in Canada.
The Ford PCs’ failure to plan for energy demand and sovereignty should be one more vulnerability for a government that doesn’t think ahead — to be happily captured by investor lobby groups who do the thinking for them.
But perhaps the greatest assistance to those lobby groups is the regular Ford scandal and stupidity, which leads the opposition to focus on the daily clown-show at the expense of developing ideas that can fix people’s problems.