This article was written by Bob Berwyn and was published in Inside Climate News on January 28, 2024.
This article was written by Ajit Niranjan and was published in The Guardian on October 31, 2023.
This article was written by Damian Carrington, Nina Lakhani, Oliver Milman , Adam Morton, Ajit Niranjan, and Jonathan Watts, and was published in The Guardian on August 28, 2023.
This article was written by Matthew McClearn and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 9, 2023.
To identify and assess the relative performance of utilities, The Globe compiled key reliability statistics for 15 major Canadian utilities
When your power goes out, there could be any number of culprits. High winds may have brought trees and branches down over power lines. Equipment can fail due to corrosion or water infiltration. Perhaps, somewhere deep in the bowels of the nation’s electrical system, a squirrel has been fried to a crisp. Even weather in outer space – geomagnetic disturbances arising from the sun – have been known to knock out electricity transmission networks.
The darkest possibility is that your local utility skimped on maintaining its equipment. Pacific Gas and Electric Co., California’s largest utility, has become a poster child for this. Many of the state’s biggest fires in recent years have been linked to mishaps on its network: wires downed by failing hardware, aging towers collapsing and weakened trees blown onto power lines.
PG&E has been accused of pursuing profit at the expense of proper maintenance. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal said the utility didn’t know about the condition of much of its equipment, or even the age of many of its towers – things a well-managed utility ought to know.
Electricity is a critical service for most households, and with rising adoption of electric heating and vehicles, its importance is growing. So it would be helpful to identify Canadian utilities pursuing a “run-to-failure” philosophy, along with those that are investing in maintaining their networks or even improving reliability.
To that end, The Globe and Mail turned to arcane utility reliability benchmarking data. This data is available from utilities themselves, and regulators in some provinces also publish them. Of the utilities we studied, Saskatoon Light and Power stood alone in refusing to provide it. To our knowledge, this is the first time the data has been published nationally.
One of the most common benchmarks is known as the System Average Interruption Duration Index (SAIDI). It measures the total duration of outages experienced by the average customer during the year. There’s also the System Average Interruption Frequency Index (SAIFI), which represents the average number of outages customers experience each year. In both cases, lower numbers are desirable.
The Globe compiled SAIDI and SAIFI data for 15 major Canadian utilities. These statistics reveal that overall, Canadians enjoy reasonably reliable electricity service – and the situation hasn’t changed much for a decade.
Yet the performance of Canadian utilities is far from uniform. Customers of Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro suffer the most unreliable electricity service by a wide margin. They can only dream of the level of service enjoyed by citizens of major cities such as Calgary, Toronto, Ottawa and Edmonton.
The two metrics are influenced by many factors – some of which lie outside utilities’ control. For instance, they can’t deflect the tracks of hurricanes, nor govern how often lightning, ice storms or wildfire strike. For this reason, SAIDI and SAIFI figures reported by utilities often exclude “major events.”
There are also attacks from foreign actors. A report released in late June by North American Electricity Reliability Corp., a nonprofit based in Atlanta, warned that energy transmission networks face “growing attack surfaces” and an “ever-changing threat landscape.”
“Hostile nation-states persist in targeting North American critical infrastructure, constantly evolving their methods to compromise the grid’s reliability, resilience and security,” it noted.
Geography may help explain Newfoundland and Labrador Hydro’s poor showing. Francis Bradley, president and chief executive officer of Electricity Canada, which represents Canada’s utilities, said that province’s electricity systems are exposed to extreme conditions commonly found in Canada’s Far North.
“They probably get more ice loading on their systems than anywhere else in the country,” he noted.
Reliability stats from city utilities like Toronto Hydro and Calgary’s Enmax Corp. are invariably superior to utilities that serve entire provinces, such as Manitoba Hydro or New Brunswick Power. Studies have found a direct relationship between reliability and circuit length: unsurprisingly, longer circuits suffer more interruptions. Utilities that have large amounts of infrastructure in remote or mountainous terrain may face greater maintenance challenges, including restoring power after extreme events.
Providers with expansive networks have “a lot more exposure to potential tree contacts, or defective equipment, because they need a lot more equipment to serve these customers,” said Harneet Panesar, chief operating officer of the Ontario Energy Board.
A city utility, on the other hand, typically has a shorter drive to fix damaged infrastructure. And a greater proportion of electrical systems lie underground, shielding them from many hazards.
“Comparing reliability statistics amongst different companies is fraught, because there are no two companies that are the same,” said Mr. Bradley. “Simply because the geographic differences between companies are so enormous, to be able to find true peers is a challenge.”
Even so, in their public reporting, some companies acknowledge the obvious: If they fail to maintain their networks, equipment performance will suffer, which can compromise reliability and lead to service interruptions.
They can regularly service and upgrade substations. They can trim trees along rights-of-way. They can replace rotten poles.
They can install new technologies that enable rapid detection of outages and pinpoint their location, which can speed up service restoration.
Some utilities may be inclined to direct money to other priorities, such as lavish executive compensation and dividends to shareholders.
A utility that takes a “run to failure” approach with equipment may face declining reliability in the years ahead.
“We know that reliability and cost are the two main drivers for customer satisfaction,” Mr. Panesar said. “There’s the old saying that what gets what gets measured gets managed. We expect utilities to manage their reliability.”
Mr. Panesar, who supervises the OEB’s compliance and enforcement team, said worsening SAIDI and SAIFI can be early indicators of underinvestment in reliability. There’s no simple threshold that signals trouble, but declining performance could spark conversations about distribution system planning and the condition of assets, and trigger demands for maintenance records.
In 2021, the OEB inspected a licensed electricity distributor, E.L.K. Energy Inc., that provides power to the towns of Essex, Lakeshore and Kingsville in Ontario. The utility couldn’t provide records demonstrating that it had conducted regular inspections of its assets – because it didn’t have any. E.L.K. blamed this on its former management, vowed to improve and agreed to pay a $5,000 administrative penalty.
Though used internationally, reliability statistics are a Canadian strength. Roy Billinton, a professor who joined the University of Saskatchewan in the 1960s, specialized in power systems reliability and wrote volumes of influential books and papers on the subject.
“He really has been the fellow who laid all the academic foundation of how everybody around the world now measures and categorizes their reliability statistics,” Mr. Bradley said. “To people who work within the reliability statistics community, this guy’s a god.”
Publicly reported reliability stats typically are highly aggregated. There are exceptions: The OEB recently published a dashboard online that citizens can use to get more detailed data. For instance, users can see how much of a utility’s outages are caused by lightning, tree contacts, defective equipment and other causes. Mr. Panesar said SAIDI and SAIFI were intended for use within the industry, but there’s a need for more consumer-focused reporting as electricity reliability grows in importance.
Mr. Bradley said no Canadian utilities are likely to emulate PG&E’s behavior.
“I don’t see us going down that route,” he said. “If they did attempt to neglect their maintenance, pretty quickly the regulatory authorities in this country would be on top of it.”
This article was written by Matthew McClearn and was published in the Globe & Mail on October 3, 2023.
External experts looking into the unexpectedly rapid deterioration of key components in nuclear power reactors have concluded that the plants can operate safely, although they say it’s unclear what caused the problem in the first place.
The External Advisory Committee on Pressure Tubes was convened in the summer of 2021 to help the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission after the discovery of unexpectedly high levels of deuterium (an isotope of hydrogen) in pressure tubes at the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, violating the terms of its operating licence.
After two years, the committee agreed with all the conclusions previously arrived at by industry representatives and commission staff.
In a final report dated July 4 and published without fanfare last month, the committee declared that while “a great deal of work” remains to be done to understand the problem’s cause, “enough has been done by the licensees to definitively provide assurance that the plants can operate safely.”
The committee included Mark Daymond, a professor at Queen’s University’s engineering and physics departments, and Paul Spekkens, a former employee of Ontario Power Generation. (Its chair, John Luxat of McMaster University, withdrew for health reasons in January.) Their final report is a boon for Bruce Power, which has an application before the CNSC seeking to remove limits in its operating licence that its pressure tubes violated more than two years ago.
Pressure tubes – often referred to as the heart of Candus, the reactor design found in Canada’s nuclear power plants – deteriorate as they age. They gradually pick up deuterium, which in high concentrations can embrittle them. If ruptured, coolant would spill out, which could trigger a range of scenarios from a relatively minor incident that’s contained by the plant’s safety systems, to a catastrophe in which fuel overheats.
Deuterium levels are measured in parts per million of hydrogen equivalent concentration, or Heq for short. The Bruce Station’s licence, issued by the CNSC in 2018, allowed pressure tubes to continue operating up to a maximum level of 120 parts per million (PPM) Heq, a limit “judged to be adequate to assure the required fracture toughness.” To continue operating tubes beyond that limit, the utility was required to provide evidence it was safe to do so.
But in July, 2021, Bruce Power revealed that it had discovered Heq levels as high as 212 PPM in tubes. That prompted a frenzy of concern within the CNSC and across licensees, as the nuclear industry sought to grapple with a problem that could affect all Candus. Eventually, however, the CNSC set aside its former requirements and demanded that Bruce Power conduct research into the problem.
Last October, Bruce Power asked the CNSC to strike the 120 PPM limit from its licence. Its application received strong support from across the nuclear industry, including from the Canadian Nuclear Association, which pointed out that the CNSC had already allowed Bruce Units 3, 4, 5, 7 and 8 to operate with tubes exceeding the limit.
Ontario Power Generation, which operates 10 Candu reactors and also owns the Bruce units (Bruce Power leases them), also supported the change, as did the CANDU Owners Group, a non-profit that represents all Candu operators in Canada and abroad.
The external advisory committee’s report criticized nuclear industry participants for characterizing discoveries associated with the high Heq values as unsurprising. It pointed out high levels were discovered at both ends of pressure tubes.
“The fact is that nowhere had it been suggested ahead of time that anomalously high Heq values might exist at the top of pressure tubes near the inlet and outlet rolled joints,” the report noted. “This was a double surprise.”
Mark Winfield, a professor at York University who focuses on energy and environment policy issues, said the report’s main findings didn’t square up with concerns expressed by the committee about the quality of the information it received from industry representatives throughout the process.
“Basically what they’re describing is a lack of rigour, below what the accepted standard within the industry would be,” Prof. Winfield said.
“You really shouldn’t be making definitive statements that everything is okay, if you don’t have a full understanding of what is actually going on,” he said. “This is a fairly central issue of vulnerability around Candus. And the implications of a pressure tube failure are quite serious.”
The Saugeen Ojibway Nation, a body representing the Chippewas of Saugeen First Nation and Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation, issued a statement to the CNSC earlier this year that it regarded the existing licensing conditions as crucial for safety. Bruce Station lies within its territory.
“The industry’s inability to meet this safety threshold is not a justification for removing the condition” from the licence, it stated in a written submission.
“Allowing the Bruce [Station] to operate above the established safety limits to provide industry with the time to complete additional research to demonstrate it is safe to continue to do so is not sound or logical.”
CNSC spokesperson Braeson Holland said it expects to issue its decision on Bruce Power’s application “in the coming weeks.”
As research continues into deteriorating pressure tubes, most of the nation’s 19 reactors in service are in extended operation, meaning they are operating beyond their 30-year design lives. Ontario’s Bruce and Darlington stations are in the midst of extensive refurbishments, which include complete replacement of old pressure tubes. The provincial government is now considering whether to refurbish four reactors at Pickering station, its oldest operating nuclear plant. Hydro-Québec is considering restarting its Gentilly-2 reactor, which was shut down in 2012.
This article was written by Raymond Zhong and was published in the Globe & Mail on July 28, 2023.
Weeks of scorching summer heat in North America, Europe, Asia and elsewhere are putting July on track to be Earth’s warmest month on record, the European Union climate monitor said on Thursday, the latest milestone in what is emerging as an extraordinary year for global temperatures.
Last month, the planet experienced its hottest June since records began in 1850. July 6 was its hottest day. And the odds are rising that 2023 will end up displacing 2016 as the hottest year. At the moment, the eight warmest years on the books are the past eight.
“The extreme weather, which has affected many millions of people in July, is unfortunately the harsh reality of climate change and a foretaste of the future,” Petteri Taalas, the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, said in a statement. “The need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions is more urgent than ever before.”
The world has entered what forecasters warn could be a multiyear period of exceptional warmth, one in which the warming effects of humankind’s continuing emissions of heattrapping gases are compounded by El Nino, the recurring climate pattern typically associated with hotter conditions in many regions.
Even so, when global average temperatures shatter records by such large margins, as they have been doing since early June, it raises questions about whether the climate is also being shaped by other factors, said Karen A. McKinnon, a climate scientist and statistician at the University of California, Los Angeles. These elements might be less well understood than global warming and El Nino.
“Do we expect, given those two factors, the record to be broken by this much? Or is this a case where we don’t expect it?” Dr. McKinnon said. “Is there some other factor that we’re seeing come into play?”
Many parts of the world are continuing to swelter this week as July enters its final days. In the United States, a dangerous heat wave was taking shape on Thursday in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, the National Weather Service said, and high temperatures remained a concern in the southwest and central states. It’s been scorching in parts of North Africa, southeastern Europe and Turkey. Wildfires, amplified by heat and dryness, have raged in Canada and around the Mediterranean.
Researchers who analyzed this month’s punishing heat waves in the southwest United States, northern Mexico and southern Europe said this week that the temperatures observed in those regions, over a span of so many days, would have been “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-driven climate change.
Still, scientists will need to investigate further to fully understand the “alarming” extent to which the entire surface of the planet has, on average, been hotter than usual this summer, said Emily Becker, a climate scientist at the University of Miami.
Fossil-fuel emissions, which cause heat to build up near Earth’s surface, are certainly playing a role. Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have pumped 1.6 trillion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This has caused the world to be about 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than it was in the second half of the 19th century.
But the way this extra heat is distributed around the globe is still shaped by a complex brew of factors spanning land, sea and air, plus a certain amount of random chance – which is why untangling the specific factors behind this summer’s severe heat will take time, Dr. Becker said.
“There’s going to need to be quite a lot of research to understand it, and understand if we’re going to be seeing this again next year or 10 years from now,” she said.
One factor that probably hasn’t been very important so far this summer, at least not in North America, is El Nino, Dr. Becker said. The cyclical phenomenon emerges when the surface of the central tropical Pacific is hotter than normal. Its arrival, which this year occurred in late spring, triggers a cascade of changes to wind patterns and rainfall around the globe. But its most immediate effects are felt in the tropical and far western Pacific, in places such as Indonesia.
“In terms of North America, this El Nino is really just getting started,” said Dr. Becker, who contributes to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s El Nino and La Nina forecasts. Winter is when North America experiences El Nino’s most prominent effects, including wetter conditions in the U.S. South.
This summer’s record heat could still affect the way this El Nino plays out later this year and into 2024, Dr. Becker said. Large areas of the planet’s oceans have been warmer than average. If this continues into fall and winter, it could lead to even stronger storms, with even heavier rain, in places that typically receive more storms during El Nino, she said.
When it comes to factors besides global warming that may also be worsening heat waves, scientists have been examining potential changes in the jet streams, the rivers of air that influence weather systems around the planet.
In the Northern Hemisphere, the differences in temperature between the Arctic and the equator keep the subtropical jet stream moving. As humans warm the planet, those temperature differences are narrowing, which could be causing the jet stream to weaken and hot spells to last longer.
So far, however, the evidence for this is inconclusive, said Tim Woollings, a professor of physical climate science at the University of Oxford. “It’s really not clear that the jet has been getting weaker,” he said.
In a study published in April, Prof. Woollings and four other scientists found that humancaused warming might have shifted the jet streams in both hemispheres toward the poles in recent decades. More research is needed to understand this potential shift, he said. But if it continues, it could make subtropical regions susceptible to greater heat and drought, he said.
This was provided by AP/Reuters/UNTV/ANI/Instagram @grismediofotografia and was published in The Guardian on July 7, 2023.
The UN secretary general has said that ‘climate change is out of control’, as an unofficial analysis of data showed that average world temperatures in the seven days to Wednesday were the hottest week on record.
‘If we persist in delaying key measures that are needed, I think we are moving into a catastrophic situation,’ said António Guterres after reports emerged about the world temperature records being broken on Monday and Tuesday.
The average global air temperature was 17.18C on Tuesday, according to data collated by the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP), surpassing the record 17.01C reached on Monday
This article was written by Tonda MacCharles, Robert Benzie, and Rob Ferguson, and was published in the Toronto Star on July 7, 2023.
Carlos Tavares, the canny top executive of auto giant Stellantis, says weeks of crisis talks to salvage a Windsor EV battery plant taught him one thing: Canada’s negotiators move way too slowly in a global green industrial race that’s accelerating at warp speed.
“It was difficult to get this agreement inked at the end of the day,” Tavares said in an exclusive interview with the Star from Portugal, “but it was rewarding.”
Rewarding, no question. That’s because the province of Ontario signed onto an agreement with Ottawa that puts it on the hook for billions more than first agreed.
The turning point came Wednesday morning when the Ford government agreed to pay one-third the cost of landing both the Stellantis electric vehicle battery plant for Windsor and the previously announced Volkswagen battery “gigafactory” in St. Thomas.
It is a stunning turnaround for Premier Doug Ford, who said early this spring it was up to the Trudeau government to “step up” and match U.S. federal subsidies.
Now Ontario’s share of up to $28 billion in production subsidies for both plants could be as much as $9.3 billion depending on how many EV batteries are produced, say federal officials.
The Volkswagen project was never imperilled.
But the province’s enhanced share of billions more in tax breaks for the VW package is a surprise. Initially, Queen’s Park had agreed only to $500 million in capital construction support for each plant, for a total of $1 billion. Now Ontario will cover one-third of the VW tax breaks, which could cost the provincial treasury an additional $4.3 billion
This is the inside story of how a deal with Stellantis was finally reached after months of tense negotiations where jobs and investor confidence were on the line.
It’s part good news story — the Windsor EV battery plant and its 2,500 future jobs will not move to the United States — and part cautionary tale: if the money isn’t here, the projects won’t be either.
Ford and his economic development minister, Vic Fedeli, signed the federal-provincial agreement Wednesday as did Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne. Champagne immediately told Stellantis that Ottawa would sign off on a final agreement with the automaker. By late Wednesday afternoon, Stellantis came back to say it was a done deal.
Stellantis, maker of Chrysler, Dodge, Ram and Fiat among other brands, gave the federal and provincial governments only minutes’ notice before going public with the news.
Tavares said he had not been bluffing. Stellantis had a “Plan B” that would have seen it scrap the new facility in Windsor.
“We were prepared to do so,” he said, acknowledging the company’s Windsor and Brampton operations have a long history and “we appreciate enormously the work of our Canadian employees.”
But Tavares was characteristically blunt. “Yes, I was ready to pull the plug and use the alternative scenario that we always prepare for this kind of situation. It’s normal. That’s my job — to protect the company as a whole.”
The Portugal native, who is an auto industry veteran and an avid racing driver with more than 500 races under his belt, plays to win. His company was the world’s third-largest automaker in 2022.
At the same time it was negotiating with Ottawa this spring, Stellantis announced it would shut plants in the U.K. if the British government did not negotiate a new trade deal with Europe to protect its EV exports.
Champagne, Ottawa’s lead negotiator, publicly shrugged off the construction stoppage and his dealings with the company as all part of “normal” negotiations.
But Tavares said they were not. The minister was not “fully empowered” to make a deal at the table and did not have “the mandate to make decisions,” said the automaker CEO.
Stellantis was the lead negotiator for the joint venture, although LG Energy Solution holds 51 per cent of the project. Tavares said both companies empowered their executives to make quick decisions.
He said Champagne “had a very long process to go through to get the full alignment, not only between the federal and regional governments but perhaps even inside the federal government.”
A federal insider close to the Stellantis talks, speaking on a background-only basis, disagreed the Canadian negotiating side was “slow” but acknowledged it took time to work out details with Ontario.
Things were complicated because Canada was also negotiating deals last winter and spring with other companies including VW.
When Champagne’s team succeeded in what was once seen as a “long shot” — persuading Volkswagen to come to Canada — the insider said it was “crystal clear to us at that point, from a fiscal point of view, that if we wanted to do any further agreements, Ontario needed to be on board, and not just for capital, not at the levels that they were looking at.”
How did the U.S.’s IRA affect Canada?
The original agreement with Stellantis to build in Windsor was signed in March 2022, nearly six months before U.S. President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) into law in August 2022 — a $369-billion (U.S.) incentive package that was seen by Ottawa as a “game-changer” and a “bombshell.”
Still, Tavares said he was surprised Canada didn’t move faster to match the IRA. The company began almost immediately pressing Ottawa for a sweetened deal for Windsor.
The Biden Administration’s incentive package gives automakers between $2,700 to $4,500 for each EV battery manufactured in America.
It is driving a dog-eat-dog international competition to lure auto investments at what Tavares said is a pivotal time when lawmakers have imposed EV sales mandates on producers and encouraged consumers to switch to EVs.
“This is a very, very brutal industry,” Tavares said. “It’s all about competitiveness and quality competitiveness … I have been in this industry 42 years. I have never seen such a high level of competition.”
Tavares dealt directly with Champagne at the beginning, “then when things started to get shaky, this was handled by North American chief operating officer Mark Stewart.”
Yet Ottawa and Ontario agree the most contentious talks were between the federal and provincial government.
Ontario’s Fedeli said, “It wasn’t that Stellantis was looking for other things,” and that Stellantis “agreed right off the bat that if we could match the U.S., then things would go back to normal.”
But in an interview from Tokyo, where he met Japanese automakers about additional investments in Ontario, he described intense federal-provincial conversations that included high-level conference calls between Ford and Freeland that lasted until 2 a.m.
April 19 was a pivotal day for all sides. That’s the day the CEOs of Stellantis and LG Energy Solution wrote to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and said the Windsor plant was in jeopardy if he did not honour what they said was a promise “in five separate written documents to match the production incentives under the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act,” including a “mutually satisfactory special contribution agreement by your government” at the end of February this year.
It was a caucus day in Ottawa, but Freeland’s office tore up her schedule and diverted the deputy prime minister to Toronto to sit down with Ford in his Queen’s Park office.
At one point, a federal source said, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc was asked to give a letter to Ford, to give him “comfort” Ottawa would work closely with the Ford government on its Highway 413 plans.
LeBlanc has also worked closely with Ford, and reminded his colleagues how instrumental the premier was when it came to negotiating a healthcare deal with the provinces last winter, telling them Ottawa wouldn’t have gotten it done without Ford.
How did Freeland and Ford’s friendship come into play?
Several federal and provincial sources told the Star that Liberal cabinet dynamics were at issue throughout the past several months, with Champagne wanting to spend what it took to keep Stellantis, and Freeland pressing harder to hold the line.
Fedeli credits Ford for reaching an agreement with Freeland.
“The premier came through. He was relentless,” Fedeli said.
Two sources close to Freeland confirmed the premier made greater concessions to Ottawa than many had believed the province could afford.
“She had tremendous affection and respect for him from before, but I think she has even more now because she knew the (fiscal) sacrifices he had to make,” a Freeland confidant said.
Another insider, also speaking confidentially in order to recount private conversations, said the personal rapport between Freeland and Ford, forged in the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic three years ago, was instrumental to Ontario upping the ante.
The source said the tax breaks could mean the difference between Ford being able to balance Ontario’s budget before the 2026 election or remaining in deficit.
“But we had no choice.”
All along, Champagne publicly insisted Canada could compete with the U.S. because investors would come not for the money, but for the resources and a skilled workforce.
Tavares offered a different view, saying “we should not think that because we have an excellent workforce in Canada, that does not exist somewhere else.”
In the end, the deal Ottawa and Ontario agreed to with Volkswagen promised matching production subsidies ranging up to $13 billion. Ottawa provided $700 million and Ontario $500 million in upfront construction support.
The deal with Stellantis caps the production subsidies at $15 billion. Ottawa and Ontario have also agreed to $500 million each in upfront construction support, bringing the total Stellantis deal to $16 billion.
Without Ontario’s concession, no deal would have been possible, federal insiders said.
This article was written and published by Corporate Knights on April 19, 2023.
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