The Decibel - How will Canada manage major energy demands in the next decade?

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

Canada’s ‘green energy’ transition has begun. By 2035, the federal government is aiming to achieve a net-zero electricity grid. But is it possible? And is one of the answers to help in that transition in front of us right now? With an expected increase in energy demands, how does the aging technology of hydroelectric power plants factor in and how essential are they now to keep everything running?The Globe’s environment data journalist, Matt McClearn, explains how important hydroelectricity is to Canada’s energy infrastructure and looks into whether the cost of keeping hydro dams in business is justified.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

When it comes to energy, we talk a lot about renewable options like wind and solar, and even technologies like battery storage. But in Canada, most of our energy still comes from hydroelectric dams. In fact, 60% of our electricity comes from hydropower plants. That's more than four times the global average. But each of those dams requires major maintenance every 25 to 40 years just to keep them operating. And those repairs come with massive price tags. Today, we're speaking with Matt McLaren,

a Globe journalist who focuses on energy, environment, and the electricity sector. He'll explain why this maintenance costs so much and why it's essential to keeping the country running. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Matt, great to have you here. It's good to be here. So Matt, you recently got the chance to visit one of these hydroelectric dams, the Saunders Dam, which is across the St. Lawrence. It straddles kind of between Ontario and New York. What was it like? Well, it's a massive concrete structure that spans the St. Lawrence River, which is a pretty sizable river.

I was standing mostly on the Canadian side near Cornwall. And it's just this large structure that stretches out as far as the eye can see almost over to New York State. It was built in the 1950s and it kind of shows that a little bit. And I haven't spent a ton of time at hydro dams. So I was particularly impressed by this one. It's probably one of the biggest I've seen. So I think people generally kind of understand how this works, but maybe we can just very quickly hit on the basics here. How does a hydroelectric dam actually create energy? Well, there's obviously a difference in water level between the reservoir. Most hydro dams have reservoirs. Ones that don't are called run of river, but there's a drop between the reservoir and the river downstream.

And you're basically using the water, you force it through a penstock, which is basically a tunnel. And you use that water to spin a large, at Saunders, it's kind of looks like a large ship's propeller, right? And the water is rushing past that and causing it to spin. And what they do is that propeller is hooked up to a turbine, which generates electricity. And then that electricity goes through some transformers and heads out to the grid in the form of electricity that we all use. And that being said, I understand that they're a particularly kind of useful source of energy because of the regulation, I guess, that can happen. Can you tell me about that?

Well, so every form of generation has its own particular assets. They all generate electricity, but they don't all do it in exactly the same way. So one thing that hydro can be quite good for is it can ramp up and down fairly quickly. If a dam has a reservoir, in a way, it's like a battery. It's storing energy. This particular dam, the Saunders Dam, I was told that its turbines can go from generating no electricity whatsoever to their full output in about five minutes. And not every generation technology can do that. I mean, obviously, like intermittent sources like wind and solar, you have much less control over the, you know, if the wind's blowing, they're generating electricity. If not, you know, a wind turbine is not going to generate electricity. Nuclear, typically large reactors, they are not meant to vary their output. Basically,

they provide what's called baseload power. So they're always putting out about the same amount of electricity, typically, when they're being operated. In electricity systems, you have to balance supply and demand on a moment-to-moment basis, basically. So if you think about your own consumption, most people are not consuming much electricity at four in the morning. But at some some point they wake up and they start turning on lights and perhaps they start turning on cooking appliances and various other things. And if everyone in a neighborhood's doing that, which is very common,

then electricity demand goes up and you have to have some way of balancing that. And certain types of electricity generation just are of no help for that. Hydro can do that. And so that's one example of a valuable service that hydro can provide that most technologies can't. There are some fossil fuel forms of generation like natural gas that can also help respond to these changing demand. But

because of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with natural gas, it's becoming increasingly unpopular politically. So how much do we actually rely on hydroelectricity in Canada? Do we know how much of our energy is actually supplied by these dams? A lot and much more than is the case in most other countries. So in Canada, we generate about 60% of our electricity using hydroelectric dams. And it varies a lot between provinces. So Ontario generates a significant amount of electricity. But Hydro-Quebec in Quebec is a huge hydroelectric utility.

And Manitoba generates a lot more than Ontario does as a proportion of their total consumption. And so does BC. And Newfoundland and Labrador are also big into that. Whereas there's other provinces like Prince Edward Island, for example, just by virtue of its geography. Hydroelectric is not a factor there. And some other provinces like Nova Scotia, for example, doesn't generate a lot of electricity. It does have some dams, but they're not big ones. And so when we say by virtue of its geography, basically it has rivers or waterways that would lend itself to this kind of thing then. That's right. That's right. And changes in elevation too, right?

Oh, yeah. Those are important. But just to give you a sense of perspective here, internationally, the hydroelectric only accounts for about 15% of total power generation. And as I said, 60% in Canada. So we are much more a hydroelectric nation than most countries. Because virtue of our geography, again, more waterways, I would imagine there. That's right. And so we've kind of been talking about this broken down by province. When we talk about energy supply and consumption, is that really whose responsibility it comes down to then? And especially when we're talking about these hydroelectric dams, does this fall to the

provinces then? Well, yes. In terms of jurisdiction, yeah, most energy issues and most electricity issues are provincially regulated. Okay. So when these dams need to be refurbished or repaired, it's going to fall to the province then to do that. What tends to be the average lifespan of a hydroelectric dam? Hydrodams can, if properly maintained, last a very long time. We're still using dams that were built in the 1800s. Wow. That's amazing. They can last quite a long time. And the concrete structures are sometimes the life-limiting factor. Eventually, the concrete can deteriorate.

But that takes a long time, especially if it's well taken care of. And even then, you can repair concrete. It's just very expensive. So there have been cases where a utility has decided, for example, okay, maybe we're going to take down this dam, but we're going to make a new one just like immediately upstream or downstream of it. So even if the dam is written off for whatever reason, it doesn't mean that it won't be replaced. But more so than other types of technology that we use to generate electricity, hydro dams tend to be long-lived, but they do require periodic maintenance and major overhauls. Yeah. So you mentioned off the top, the Saunders Dam was built in the 1950s. You mentioned we have other dams that date back to the 1800s. How frequently do they need to be repaired?

So the number I was given was between 25 and 40 years. And that number seems to be consistent among a lot of technologies. So for example, wind farms often 25, 30 years, they can remain in service. And after that, you have to start thinking about repowering them, perhaps taking turbines out or decommissioning them. Nuclear facilities here in Canada, the CANDU reactors were originally planned to last about 30 years. That was their estimated service life. So I don't know what it is about power machines, but around 30 years. They tend to break down after that time, yeah, or are in need of some attention. What about the money though? Because this has always got to be a question, right? When we're

talking about these massive projects, how much does it cost to repair a dam? Well, I wasn't able to find any real benchmarks for that when I was doing the research. I can tell you that the Saunders Dam, which I visited, I was told that the expected budget for that would be somewhere around half a billion dollars. And Ontario also has announced that it's going to spend about a billion dollars refurbishing the Sir Adam Beck complex, which is in the Niagara Falls area. Another dam. Yeah. But both of these are some of the larger dams in Ontario. There's many smaller dams that wouldn't have as many units, wouldn't have the same generation capacity, and it'd obviously be quite a bit cheaper to refurbish some of them. But looking past the sheer dollar amounts for this,

one observation you might make is that it does seem that hydroelectric refurbishments are a lot cheaper than say nuclear refurbishments. So just to put this in context, I think I said that Sir Adam Beck was going to cost about a billion dollars, a lot of money. But the nearly completed refurbishment of the Darlington facility, which is admittedly, you know, has a larger output, but that was almost $13 billion. $13 billion. $13 billion. So proportionally, actually, if you just go on like a megawatt per megawatt basis,

hydro starts to look pretty competitive, just how much electricity or how much generation capacity you're getting for refurbishment versus, say, nuclear. Nuclear is just a lot more expensive. Yeah. And how about the length of time it would take to repair a hydroelectric dam? I guess I'm wondering, do things need to be shut down? Do we need to be worried about energy output during that repair time? Well, maybe Saunders is a good example here. So each unit there has about 67 megawatts of capacity. All right. So there's 16 of them on the Canadian side, and they're only doing one unit at the time. They may be taken out of service for short periods, but only one unit is out for a year, say, while it's being overhauled. So overall, the dam's output isn't dropping a lot. And that's a little different, too, from nuclear reactors, which typically are much bigger units and produce a lot more electricity. So when a large nuclear reactor is taken out of service for, say, three years for refurbishment, that has a bigger effect on the

grid than a small hydroelectric unit. So when this repair is happening, then there's no disruption. We don't have to worry about a brownout or anything while this is happening? I don't think so. But one thing we do have to keep in mind though is that Ontario, like many provinces across Canada, expects to see rapidly increasing demand in the years ahead, partly as a result of electrification of the economy. Part of it's just population growth as well, but the adoption of electric cars, for example, there's some forecast that suggests that electric cars could be adopted very rapidly in the years ahead. We're in the early days of that right now, but if a quarter of the population or half the population has EVs and they're charging them regularly,

that's going to imply significantly increased demand. So when that's your outlook, maybe it's a bigger problem, but I don't think hydroelectric is going to be the straw that breaks the camel's back here. We'll be back in a moment. Matt, let's talk a little bit more about this increase in demand for electricity, because this is something that we've been hearing about quite frequently now as we start to electrify more things, electric vehicles, as you said, moving away from natural gas and coal, all of those things as well. Do we know what kind of an increase in electricity we're going to be needing in years to come? All we have are projections. But if you look at some of the independent think tanks out there that opine on such matters, some of them say that electricity demand could go up by 200%, even 300%. Those would be huge increases. That would imply building a huge

amount of new capacity. But these are just projections and we don't actually know what's going to happen. It's very hard to guess what future demand is going to be like. We've seen previous episodes in history where people have predicted that there would be huge increases in electricity demand. And sometimes these huge increases never materialized. But right now, a lot of people expect that we do want to electrify a lot of our economy to reduce use of fossil fuels. And if we do that, that does imply increases in demand of a magnitude that we haven't seen in recent history. And I guess that's why we're talking about repairing these dams so that they can be up

and running and prepared for this potential then. I guess we should really address, though, the cleanliness of this energy because we talk about the term clean. But let's get into this. How environmentally friendly are hydroelectric dams? Hydroelectric dams, one of the benefits of them is that they don't produce very many greenhouse gases. With all the focus on climate change, this is considered a very good asset indeed. They are not zero emissions. No technology truly is. In the case of hydro dams, some of the focus has been on reservoirs sometimes actually give off methane gas, which is a powerful greenhouse gas.

But this is not like a natural gas-fired plant, for example, which is burning hydrocarbons and putting out significant amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. There's that dimension of it. But you have to remember that these structures are blocking rivers, right? Basically, we build them across rivers. That tends to introduce some significant changes into river ecosystems. And they can have big social impacts too. Now, the Saunders Dam was built in a different era. I think it's fair to say that it was easier for utilities to make dams back then. And they had powers that, or they could call upon powers that maybe don't exist now. So the Saunders Dam, when it was built, the reservoir flooded a bunch of villages,

which are known as the lost villages. People had to be moved out of those villages in the years prior to the reservoir being filled. And so today it's much harder to expropriate land on that kind of scale. There have been dams that have been built in the past in Canada that every form of electricity generation that we have today has some environmental impacts, has some social impacts, and they vary from technology to technology, even project to project. That term clean energy has a lot of politics around it. Yeah. Yeah, that's a very loaded political term too. Yeah. It is because it begs the question, what do you mean by clean?

Most of these impacts then it sounds like happened during the construction or the immediate after there. So when we're talking about repairing a dam, we're kind of then keeping up the status quo of what's been established for decades or something already. Yeah. Well, once you've built a dam on the landscape, it's kind of a fact on the landscape. And eventually, people tend to forget about them, you know, and they get used to what the impacts are. And as the generations pass, they, you know, people can't even remember what existed previous to the dam being put in place. So sometimes the environmental impacts perhaps fade into the background in people in the public consciousness. But when they're being built, they can generate a fair amount of controversy. So on the topic of environmentally friendly sources here,

how do dams compare to other forms of energy that we use? It's very difficult to make direct comparisons between the two. I mean, if you want to look at something like greenhouse gases discreetly, you could say, well, a hydro dam would release a lot less greenhouse gases than say, a natural gas fired plant or certainly a coal fired plant, right? If you want to look at nuclear power, which we use extensively here in Ontario, it has entirely different set of environmental impacts. So with nuclear power, once again, it's low carbon emissions, which is, again, a benefit. But nuclear reactors produce nuclear waste, which is very difficult to deal with. But even, you know, you want to look at renewables like wind and solar.

Well, they do have their own impacts, right? They do change the landscape. You know, after 25 or 30 years, often these things have to be decommissioned. There's waste being generated by that. So if you're decommissioning a wind farm, there are things that have to go to landfill. So to repair these dams, we're talking about a lot of money, not as much as to repair nuclear facilities, but still a lot of money and government money too, because this is the province paying for it. I guess the

big question, Matt, is like, is it really worth it to repair these dams? Is it putting the money towards other things like wind and solar? Is that not a better option? Well, that is something that could be subject to hot debate. I think with hydroelectric dams, there doesn't seem to be a lot of opposition to refurbishments though, political opposition. New dams are often political hot potatoes, but existing ones, there doesn't seem to be a lot of debate around this. And I will say that one of the things about hydro dams is once they're up and running, people tend to forget about them. And so they just don't generate a ton of public opposition. There are some about them. And so they just don't generate a ton of public opposition. There are some people who are opponents, but you don't hear a ton about these

things. And utilities that rely heavily on hydroelectric dams often have some of the cheapest electricity. So that's true of like in Manitoba, for example, or in Quebec in particular, some of the cheapest rates for electricity in the country. So financially, it often is seen as making a lot of sense to keep these facilities running for another 20, 30 years. Even if the price tag seems steep, at the end of the day, it could be a good deal as compared to, say, building a whole bunch of wind turbines to replace that capacity. But when it comes to hydro dams, for example, I asked Ontario Power Generation, do you have any plans to close any of your dams? They said, no. And the IESO here, the Independent Electricity System Operator,

they're responsible for managing the electricity system or large swaths of it anyway. They just, in some of their planning documents, they assume that no matter who owns the dam or how old it is, it's going to continue operating. And that's because it's not too often that you hear of a major hydroelectric facility being decommissioned and being removed. Because it sounds like it plays such a vital role in our energy supply. Would that be why then? Well, I also think that it's economics too. It's easier to justify spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to refurbish these things than it might be for other technologies. If you think about nuclear, for example, nuclear refurbishments are much more

expensive. They're tens of billions of dollars sometimes. People pay more attention when those decisions are made for that reason. And they tend to be quite political, actually. Here in Ontario, the government recently announced that it was going to refurbish the Pickering B facility, not far from where we're sitting now. That's got four nuclear reactors. We don't have a price tag for that yet, but it will probably be at least as expensive as the Darlington refurbishment was. And as I mentioned, that was $13 billion. So by comparison, hydro seems pretty cheap. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. It's my pleasure.

That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Our interns are Aja Sauter and Kelsey Arnett. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you soon.