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Ontario Phases Out Coal-Fired Power

By the end of the year, Ontario will become the first jurisdiction in North America to shut down almost its entire coal fleet.

Yesterday, the province announced that its last two large coal units will close before 2014, making more than 99 percent of the province's electricity generated from non-coal sources. It is a major shift for Ontario, which fired 25 percent of its grid from coal a decade ago.

"Today, all Ontarians can breathe a little easier," said Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty in a statement.

The closings are a result of a McGuinty plan to fight smog and pollution via coal plant closures launched in 2003, the year of his election. With yesterday's announcement, 17 of 19 original coal-fired units will have been shut down, the government said.

The only remaining plant is a small backup generator, said Tim Weis, an analyst at the Pembina Institute, an environmental think tank. It will close in 2014, he said.

To prepare for the coal phaseout, McGuinty introduced an aggressive energy law in 2009 establishing energy efficiency programs and a feed-in tariff providing generous financial benefits to renewable developers. Those efficiency programs have helped make Ontario one of the few jurisdictions in the world where energy demand is declining, rather than increasing, Weis said.

"This shows it is possible to do this in a jurisdiction with big electricity consumption," he said.

Wind power has grown from 400 MW of provincial power six years ago to more than 2,000 MW now. By 2030, it is projected to provide roughly 10 percent of the province's electricity supply, despite having been a non-player in 2003.

According to the Pembina Institute, the greenhouse gas emissions from Ontario's electricity sector have fallen from 40 million tons to 10 million tons over the past decade because of the coal plant closings.

The Canadian national regulations go a step further than U.S. EPA rules in requiring existing coal plants to eventually match the greenhouse emissions profile of natural gas plants -- a requirement that can only be met via yet-to-be-proved carbon capture technology (ClimateWire, Sept. 6, 2012). More at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=ontario-phases-out-co
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