Portlands gas plant operators mum on usage increase in tightly controlled online public meeting

This article was written by Marco Chown Oved and was published in the Toronto Star on October 7, 2023.

After its proposed upgrade, the Portlands gas plant will produce fewer emissions to generate the same amount of electricity, people were told at a public meeting Thursday evening.

But Atura, the publicly-owned company that operates the downtown Toronto plant, could not say whether it would be fired up more often in the future, cancelling out those efficiency upgrades.

“We take direction from the (Independent Electricity System Operator) to run the plant,” said Don Tiffney, plant manager at the Portlands Energy Centre.

“The upgrade is more for efficiency,” he said. “The way the plant operates will not change going forward just based on the expansion of our capacity. It will still be dictated by the supply and demand balance.”

The IESO’s projections, however, show gas plant use more than tripling in the next three years, which will produce far more greenhouse gas emissions and local air pollution, despite the 9 per cent increase in efficiency the Portlands plant is proposing.

Last weekend, the Star published an investigation that revealed the Portlands gas plant, which is a “peaker plant” and is only supposed to run when electricity demand peaks, actually ran almost 21 hours a day this summer.

Along with the Halton Hills Generating Station and the Goreway Power Station in Brampton, the three gas plants in the GTA are all running more than 14 hours a day this year, producing air pollution that has been shown to cause adverse health effects in the densest urban area in the country, the investigation found.

To meet growing demand for electricity, and compensate for nuclear facilities offline for refurbishment, the province has put out a call for 4,000 megawatts of more peaking power, to be met with grid-scale batteries and additional gas-fired generation.

Local consent is required to build a new gas plant, which has proved difficult to obtain. But upgrading existing gas plants can go ahead even if the host community votes against it, as Toronto City Council did earlier this year.

Atura, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Ontario Power Generation, runs four gas plants in the province and is planning upgrades at all of them. As part of the Environmental Assessment Act, Atura must hold public meetings and consult widely before it can start work. The company held what it calls “virtual public meetings” for the Halton Hills upgrade in June and the Portlands plant this week.

The tightly controlled online exercise Thursday evening bore little resemblance to public meetings pre-pandemic. Attendees could not see each other or talk. To ask a question, people had to type it into the chat, where a moderator would approve it before it was visible to others. The only voices allowed were those of people who work for Atura.

The Portlands upgrade will involve swapping out parts of the gas turbines with new ones made from materials more resistant to heat, which will allow more of that heat to be converted into electricity.

“That will result in a 50 megawatt increase in output capacity. That’s about 9 per cent,” said Darius Sokal, senior communications adviser at Atura.

“I’d like to stress that this project is not an expansion of the Portland Energy Center. It is simply the replacement of its existing turbine parts with newer upgraded parts. There’s no physical change to the size of the facility.”

Many of the questions typed in by the public concerned potential increases in air pollution, carbon emissions and runtime. Asked why burning more gas during a climate crisis was a good idea, Stephen Smith, an environmental specialist with Atura, responded:

“Portlands upgrade project is critical in supporting Ontario’s environmental targets and electricity needs as the economy, businesses and individuals invest in electrification in support of net zero emissions. Additionally, our planned project will improve the efficiency of the plant and as a result, the gas consumption rates per unit of electricity will be reduced after the upgrade.”

The current contract for the Portlands plant ends in April 2034, several months before the federal government’s Clean Electricity Regulations come into effect. The regulations, currently in draft form, would limit gas plants to operating 450 hours a year.

This year, the Portlands plant ran more than that in the first three weeks of July alone.

Attendees could not see each other or talk. To ask a question, people had to type it into the chat, where a moderator would approve it before it was visible to others