The Thousand Islands Energy Research Forum

By John Stewart
Director, Policy and Research
Canadian Nuclear Association

The Thousand Islands Energy Research Forum took place at the University of Ottawa this past weekend. CNA took advantage of this great opportunity to present the recent Hatch life cycle emission study, which had been launched on October 8 at our Toronto fall seminar.

TIERF, an annual academic event that mixes energy policy and technology, drew about 40 university, government and industry participants this year. They brought presentations and technical posters on energy technology research, ranging from shale gas to geothermal to nuclear.

CNA director of research and policy John Stewart delivered a summary of the Hatch study along with CNA’s key messages from it. While nuclear is roughly as clean-emitting as wind for power generation, wind cannot stand alone due to its intermittency, and any assessment of wind’s environmental effects must include the impact of managing that intermittency.

In Ontario today, new wind farms are only generating about 20% of their capacity, and when the wind fails to blow, the difference is generally made up by burning natural gas, a fossil fuel. This means that building new wind capacity means building in more, not less, GHG emissions to Ontario’s supply mix – undoing some of the benefits of the province’s successful exit from coal.

CNA’s presentation on October 25 was preceded by an excellent analysis by u of O’s Olayinka Willliams on “The Integration of Wind Power Generation with Hydroelectricity in an Electric Grid,” which expounded the many problems of bringing randomly intermittent wind power into a grid, even when hydro is available to back it up.

According to the Electric Power Research Institute, “the existing electric power grid, especially its distribution systems, was not designed to accommodate a high penetration of distributed energy resources while sustaining high levels of electric quality and reliability.” (“The Integrated Grid,” February 2014). Bollen and Hassan’s 2011 engineering text Integration of Distributed Generation in the Power System says the problems include increased risk of overload and increased losses; increased risk of overvoltages; increased levels of power-quality disturbances; and impacts on power-system stability and operation.