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HomeWorldWindsor declared a ‘climate emergency.’ Now, it’s endorsed new gas plants

Windsor declared a ‘climate emergency.’ Now, it’s endorsed new gas plants


Despite having declared a climate emergency and called for a phase-out of natural gas-fired electricity generation, Windsor city council has now endorsed the construction of two new gas plants.

The decision came Monday night after a half-dozen citizen deputations urging the council to reject the new gas power plants. They will exacerbate climate change, increase local pollution levels and end up costing more, the intervenors said.

“The least we can expect from you is to do what you actually said you would do,” said Jana Jandal Alrifai, a member of the Windsor-Essex Youth Climate Council. “When councillors give their word, they should stick to that.”

“We’re not stuck between a rock and a hard place. We have other options. We don’t need to use gas. There are other renewable technologies out there.”

While the $200-million new gas plants aren’t a done deal, the council vote paves the way for the expansion of the East Windsor Cogeneration plant, more than doubling its generating capacity and potential emissions.

“This is bad for health, bad for climate and a short-sighted financial decision,” said Kiemia Rezagian, another member of the local Youth Climate Council.

Building more greenhouse gas-emitting electricity generators at a time when governments have committed to dramatically reducing emissions encapsulates the difficulty of transitioning the economy away from fossil fuels.

On the one hand, trading in old gasoline-powered cars and trucks for new electric vehicles, as well as swapping out natural gas furnaces for electric heat pumps, could cut Canada’s total emissions by up to one third.

On the other hand, this will require lots of new electricity, and at least some of it will likely be generated by burning fossil fuels — in the short term.

The trick will be ensuring the increased emissions from new electricity will be more than canceled out by greater reductions from getting gas-guzzlers off the roads and pulling furnaces out of basements.

Environmentalists warn, however, that building new fossil fuel infrastructure locks in emissions for decades, when the scale and urgency of climate change requires immediate reductions built on renewable energy sources that produce zero emissions.

Ontario currently generates 91 per cent of its electricity from emissions-free sources, but that number has been shrinking as growing demand increases the use of gas plants. Emissions from the grid are projected to rise 400 per cent in the next 20 years.

Windsor council has previously adopted progressive climate-change policies. In a series of decisions since 2017, it declared a climate emergency, adopted a plan to reduce emissions by 40 per cent by 2030, and called on the province to phase-out all natural gas electricity generation.

“The need to reduce overall emissions … are deemed to be high priorities … in all decisions of council,” reads the climate emergency declaration, passed in 2019.

“There are feasible, cost-effective alternatives to increasing gas-fired electricity generation without increasing greenhouse gas pollution,” reads the another motion passed in 2020, in which council asked the province to “develop and implement a plan to phase-out all gas-fired electricity generation by 2030 to help Ontario and the City of Windsor meet their climate targets.”

For its leadership, Windsor was designated an A list city by the Carbon Disclosure Project late last year.

Monday’s gas plant approval represents a shift in direction for Windsor council.

In an analysis endorsing the new gas plants, Windsor city staff wrote that because they are only turned on to meet peaking demand, the gas plants’ increased emissions are “not expected to be substantial.”

“Although natural gas generation has the potential to negatively impact Windsor’s efforts at GHG reduction,” the staff report stated, this is “beyond the influence of the City.”

Capital Power, which owns and operates the existing gas plant, told Windsor council that expansion will actually reduce overall emissions at the facility as the company electrifies its own operations.

The project would add two new gas-fired turbines and 100 megawatts of generation capacity to the current 92 megawatts produced in Windsor. They will be “hydrogen ready,” the company said, with the ability to use a fuel mix of up to 35 per cent hydrogen upon opening, and 100 per cent hydrogen by 2030.

Kelly Lail, Capital Power’s vice-president of business development, told the meeting there was no guarantee hydrogen would be available for use, or whether it could be produced using clean energy.

The new plants would, however, support the addition of more renewables onto the grid, he said.

“A peaking plant provides backup, for reliability and security of supply,” he said. If the wind isn’t blowing, they can be “called into service to keep the lights on.”

“The existing facility operates on average only two per cent of the time. We don’t believe the nature of the operation will change,” he added. “It serves as an insurance policy for the electricity system.”

The new turbines could be operational by December 2025, if the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) awards generating contracts to Capital Power. The IESO prefers bids with endorsement from local municipalities.

Last fall, the IESO issued a request for proposals for up to 1,500 megawatts of new gas plants to meet growing energy demand at the same time as the Pickering nuclear power plant is slated to be decommissioned.

But the new gas plants have put Ontario on a collision course with Ottawa, which is developing Clean Electricity Regulations that will largely ban gas-powered generation in 2035.

In order to convince companies to invest in new gas plants, the province has guaranteed payment, even in the case they have to shut down to comply with federal regulations.

“This may result in electricity ratepayers continuing to pay for stranded assets,” Windsor city staff noted in its analysis.

Dr. Mili Roy, chair of The Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment Ontario, urged council to reject the expansion, arguing that natural gas is almost as bad as coal, not only for causing global warming, but also for emitting pollutants hazardous to human health.

“Natural gas is not a benign ‘transitional’ energy source as it is sometimes misrepresented to be,” she said. “Global rates of premature death in 2020 due to burning of natural gas nearly equalled deaths due to coal.”

Last fall, Capital Power proposed building a 40 megawatt battery storage facility in Windsor that would charge up when there’s surplus renewable electricity and feed the power back into the grid when demand increases.

The company now says it will build either the new gas turbines or the battery storage facility, but not both.

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