There’s a community in Ontario called Dutton which, right now, seems appropriate given the number of times Peter Dutton has name-checked the Canadian province over the last 12 months.
In dozens of media interviews and speeches, Dutton (the opposition leader, not the township) has said Ontarians are getting cheap electricity because of their 20 nuclear reactors.
The Coalition has announced it wants to lift Australia’s ban on nuclear electricity and put at least one reactor at seven sites around the country.
Last week, Dutton again deployed his favourite Canadian talking point, telling reporters: “We could be like Ontario, where they’ve got 60 or 70% nuclear in the mix, and they’re paying about a quarter of the price for electricity that we are here in Australia.”
Really cheaper?
So ubiquitous has Dutton’s talking point been that it has made its way to Prof Mark Winfield, a sustainable energy expert at Ontario’s York University. And he is puzzled.
“I have heard about this,” he told Temperature Check. “I must admit I find the notion of holding Ontario up as a model for electricity and climate policy more than a little bizarre.”
Winfield says Ontario’s electricity rates are not low by Canadian standards, but added “the situation is distorted by the [$8bn a year] subsidy the province provides out of general revenues”.
Those billions, Winfield says, would otherwise be spent on things like schools and hospitals, instead of “artificially” lowering electricity rates.
“That accounts for the bulk of the province’s annual deficit,” he says.
So does nuclear mean cheap power for Ontario?
First, let’s start with Ontario’s electricity mix. The province has 20 of Canada’s 22 nuclear reactors, providing about 59% of Ontario’s electricity.
But comparisons of electricity prices across Canada and North America don’t show that Ontario’s nuclear-heavy generation delivers particularly cheap power.
According to two analyses (here and here), Quebec, the province next door where almost all electricity comes from hydropower, gives the cheapest rates. British Columbia and Manitoba are also cheaper, and they’re also dominated by hydro.
Dutton has said Ontarians “pay around about 14 cents kWh. There are parts in Australia that will be paying up to 56 cents a kilowatt hour from July 1 this year.”
But making a fair comparison between Australian electricity prices and Ontario is almost impossible because – before we’ve even got to the subsidy – the structures and governance systems around electricity are very different.
Almost half of Ontario’s power generation is publicly owned and the prices people pay are set by a government board.
Ontarians pay for their electricity in a more sophisticated way than Australians – people can choose one of three price plans, and the price people pay for each kWh can depend, for example, on how much power they have used that month or what time of day they are using it. The cost to the customer per kWh can be as low as 3c/kWh and as high as 32c/kWh.
But Winfield says the $8bn annual subsidy that helps keep those costs down is also masking the cost of refurbishing Ontario’s existing fleet of reactors that were built between the 1970s and 1990s.
“Those projects have consistently run billions over budget and years behind schedule, and in some cases ended in write-offs,” Winfield says.
The provincial government wants to refurbish 10 of its reactors. Winfield says the cost of those refurbs isn’t known, but his own estimates stand at about $44bn.
Ontario’s government has a chequered recent history when it comes to energy policy.
Critics have pointed to the province’s “horrifically expensive” nuclear reactors that helped the collapse of the publicly owned generator in the 1990s with $42bn of debt, and ratepayers were asked to repay some of that with a charge they continued to pay until 2018.
In 2018, the provincial government cancelled 758 renewable projects, reportedly costing Ontarians about $250m.
Winfield says Ontario’s decision to sideline renewables and back nuclear will see the province relying more on gas, which he says will push up greenhouse gas emissions.
“The fundamental underlying problem, along with all of the other downsides with nuclear – waste management, major upstream impacts in terms of uranium mining and milling, security, catastrophic accident and weapons proliferation risks that just don’t exist in relation to other energy technologies – is that it hasn’t benefited from the kinds of learning curves you have seen with renewables and storage, where costs have fallen and performance improved,” he says.
“Rather, nuclear costs just keep rising.”
Wind myth lingers
The polling company Ipsos released its annual report this week examining Australians’ attitudes to climate change and the transition from fossil fuels.
They also asked Australians how “believable” they thought several pieces of misinformation, such as electric cars being as bad for the planet as fossil fuelled ones (they’re not).
The list of misinformation Australians thought “believable” included a classic of its genre – that wind turbines take more energy to make than they will ever generate.
Half of Australians thought this statement was either “somewhat believable” or “very believable” which, given how wrong it is, is unbelievable.
This myth is very old and there have been many studies that have debunked it.
In 2018 the IPCC looked at 20 studies of “energy payback time” for windfarms and found most had generated the energy it took to build them after three to eight months.
