The hydropower-from-Quebec fantasy resurfaces in Ontario gas-industry propaganda

“Just because a river is French Canadian and Catholic, it’s not absolutely necessary to put a dam on it.” This quote, from former Quiet Revolutionary (later Quebec premier) Jacques Parizeau, came during the storm of debate over the first James Bay hydroelectric project. This megaproject centred on the La Grande river on the east coast of James Bay, and involved submerging over 11,000 square kilometers of land. It cost, according to Sean McCutcheon in Electric Rivers, between $13 billion and $20 billion, at least double the original estimate (sound familiar, Ontario?), and gave Quebec over 7,700 megawatts of hydroelectric generating capacity. Subsequent development on the La Grande has given Quebec more than 17,000 megawatts of installed capacity, at the cost of submerging a land area the size of Belgium—30,230 square kilometers.

An early advocate of nuclear power in Quebec, Jacques Parizeau made good on that advocacy during his stint as Quebec finance minister with the construction of Quebec’s only nuclear reactor, the CANDU 6 known as Gentilly 2. The LSE-educated Parizeau was known at the time as Canada’s only professional finance minister. He knew what he was talking about.

Parizeau at the time of the above quote was in the Parti Québécois, a separatist opposition party. It opposed James Bay on economic and environmental grounds.

Parizeau favoured nuclear power, which like hydropower makes use of one of nature’s four fundamental physical forces (the strong nuclear force; hydropower uses gravity). Unlike hydropower though, nuclear involves land use that is, by comparison, barely noticeable. For example, Ontario’s 18 nuclear reactors occupy a total of 23.4 square kilometers (Darlington occupies 480 hectares, or 4.8 square km; Bruce occupies 9.3 square km; and Pickering, also 9.3.) Their total installed capacity is 12,530 megawatts. So the Ontario nuclear land-use footprint works out to 0.186 hectares—about a fifth of an average size city block—per installed megawatt.

Quebec’s hydropower land use footprint is 177.8 hectares per megawatt (30,230 km² is 3,023,000 hectares; divide that by 17,000 megawatts).

For every patch of land Ontario nuclear power requires, Quebec hydropower needs 952 times that. This, among other reasons, is why Parizeau favoured nuclear power.

I mention this because, every now and again, somebody floats the cockamamie idea that Ontario should start importing clean hydropower from Quebec. Some advocates of this fantasy are self-styled environmentalists who haven’t done their homework and crunched the easy numbers like I have done above. Because of an unexamined and comically off-base anti-nukery, they think that the Darlington nucelar station should be shut down and that its 25 billion annual kilowatt-hours of electrical energy output should come instead from the Belgium-sized man-made lake in northern Quebec.

Nor do they appear to have considered what it would take, engineering-wise, for the Quebec electric utility, Hydro Quebec, to wheel 25 billion annual kWh of energy into Ontario from that lake. Quebec already wheels huge amounts of that energy out-of-province: to the U.S. northeast. American customers are served with Quebec hydropower on long term contracts; that was why Quebec built the transmission lines to the U.S. in the first place. What about those customers?

None of the Ontario advocates of Quebec hydropower appears to have ever taken the matter up with… Hydro Quebec. I’m sure the utility might have interesting things to say.

No serious person believes Ontario will ever import such massive amounts of electric power from Quebec. So why the sudden spate of media articles taking it up?

Well, it’s all about money. Specifically, the money that can be made by the fossil fuel industry if Darlington, which is slated for refurbishment beginning in less than a year, is not refurbished.

The main cheerleader for Quebec-hydropower-to-Ontario is the Ontario Clean Air Alliance, a gas-industry lobby group. The OCAA’s aim is to replace Ontario zero-carbon nuclear plants with carbon-heavy gas-fired plants. Given that the current concentration of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the global atmosphere is just about 400 parts per million (see Item A1, above), you’d wonder why an organization allegedly advocating for clean air would want to add to those 400 ppm.

The OCAA knows full well that the Quebec-hydropower-to-Ontario fantasy is just that—a fantasy. The OCAA is not actually advocating for Quebec hydropower to Ontario. What it really wants is business for its gas-industry clients. And those clients will get plenty of business if Darlington does not get refurbished. So it is striving mightily, with the cooperation of a mainstream media that today finds ad revenue increasingly scarce and gas-industry ad revenue increasingly valuable, to get us Ontarians to actually believe this Quebec-hydropower-to-Ontario nonsense. That way, they hope, we will be more amenable to letting Darlington, an enormously valuable clean-energy centre—and revenue generator for the people of this province—go idle. Yesterday the OCAA wanted us to believe that windmills and solar panels could do it. Today it’s Quebec hydropower. Tomorrow, who knows. Maybe a perpetual motion machine.

Jacques Parizeau got to see an example of nuclear’s vastly superior land-use footprint, right in his own province, and under his watch as PQ finance minister. During that tenure, Hydro Quebec built and commissioned Gentilly 2, a 635-MW CANDU 6 reactor. It was, until its premature shut-down in late 2012 (by another PQ government, sans Parizeau), Hydro Quebec’s biggest single generator.

The premature shutdown of G2 was undertaken by, as I said, a Parizeau-less PQ government. Parizeau disagreed with much of that government’s policies. I wonder if he disagreed with the G2 decision also.