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CEA in the News

Local environmentalists sounding alarm over provincial plan to fire up gas plants

Julie Kotsis • Windsor Star / July 18, 2020

The Ford government will reverse years of progress cleaning up Ontario’s electricity sector if a plan to fire up gas plants — including Windsor’s Brighton Beach power plant — goes forward, says the head of a local environmental group.

Derek Coronado, executive director of Citizens Environmental Alliance, said 29 groups, including Windsor’s, are working to convince the public and elected officials that there are alternatives to the use of electricity generated by burning fossil fuel.

Coronado said Ontario is planning on using its 30 gas-fired plants to meet future electricity demand partly due to the aging of nuclear power plants, many of which are being refurbished.

“(Windsor’s Brighton Beach power plant) will be ramping up production and of course releasing pollutants as it does that along the way,” Coronado said.

The environmental groups are sounding the alarm because they say the province’s plan will increase climate-damaging emissions by more than 300 per cent and lead to a tripling of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the next five years, with emissions more than quadrupling by 2040.

Coronado said those figures come directly from independent electricity operators.

“We’re not making these numbers up,” he said. “What we need to see are alternatives to this plan and we’re proposing alternatives.”

Natural gas is a fossil fuel and when any fossil fuel is burned it creates greenhouse gas emission. Those human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are the main driver of the climate crisis, Coronado said.

Windsor and Essex County councils late last year passed climate emergency declarations.

“So the municipalities in the region are now focused on being more aggressive on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and doing it faster because we’re in an emergency situation according to the latest science,” he said.

“Municipalities will be working in their jurisdictions to reduce emissions and meanwhile the province with its plans will blow those emissions out of the water because of the huge ramp up in emissions from gas plants across the province.”

The environmental groups propose more “responsible electricity supply options” for Ontario including purchasing electricity from Quebec, which has a large surplus of GHG-free water-power that it is willing to sell to Ontario at half the price of nuclear.