Recently the Ontario government and the City of Toronto agreed to study an expansion to the Cities aging transmission infrastructure (source). Planning is underway, to possibly add a third major transmission line to feed the growing city. Toronto’s electricity consumption is estimated to roughly double by 2050. Further, there is the Portlants gas plant, a 600 MW gas power station is becoming harder to justify (source), and may be retired in the coming decades. Could solar and batteries play a bigger role here?
Lets start with an overview of the problem. We need to get about 1 MW of electricity into the substations serving downtown Toronto. Leaside TS or the Portlands generating station (GS), near Cherry Beach. From the news release we have three items under consideration: Re-energize lines on existing corridor between Cherrywood transmission station, add new lines in said corridor, and add an underwater cable from Pickering nuclear station to the Portlands gas plant.
I must say when I first drafted this post, I was very skeptical that solar and batteries could play a role solving our 1MW transmission problem. Mostly it had to do with cost. I paid my installer about 3$/W peak, for ~ 10 kW array for my roof. OK, perhaps I went a bit premium, I do have a buddy in Thailand who claims to be able to do utility scale solar for $1/W peak. Even with some high quality Thai workmanship, it still comes to a cool $1B.
Compare that with what might be the cheapest option, re-energize existing lines. Recent work on transmission lines in the York region has figures ranging from less than 1M, to hundreds of millions (source). One option suggests 150 M for 25 km of overhead lines in an existing corridor, since we need about half that, lets round that off at 100 M, probably less if the idea is to use existing lines. I must confess I am liberally rounding here as there are many types of transmission lines, none of which are equal, but the point is 100 M is way less than my Thai solar buddy’s $1B guesstimate.
Somehow the government of Ontario went with, yup you guessed it, the most expensive option by far. Lets build an underwater cable for a cool $1.5B (source) for 900 MW transmission (source). Well now, that is $1.6 W/peak. All of a sudden my Thai solar buddy’s guesstimate is actually cheaper. Keep in mind the $1.5B is just to move the electricity around, not the cost for generating power, thats extra, currently about 10 times extra (source). Hence my residential solar contractor at about $3 W/peak, is probably cheaper.
Sure, my roof is just 10 kW, we need 900 MW, or about 9000 times my roof! Fear not, in fact a little shopping on google maps (satellite), shows many large buildings with lovely roofs near the Portlants power plant, just begging for some panels. At least Toronto Hydro which operates out of buildings in the area, put solar on their roof, but most of their neighbours did not not, why not nudge them? Also, Toronto includes over 1M households, many live in houses not too different from my own, that could support residential solar, together I am sure we could do solar for less.
So why is Dogie spending 10 times more money than necessary? Surely some of it might be a little NIMBYism, I get it, over the years, some studies have shown a link between adverse outcomes and transmission lines (source). But perhaps the bigger one is real-estate. That “existing corridor between Leaside TS and Cherrywood TS” has a whole lot of land underneath it which could be repurposed, perhaps via Dougies developer friends (source)?
Regardless of the governments reasons, such a large $1.5B spend, at a time when real concerns are being raised about electricity costs (source) is concerning. Costs become unreasonable when the powers that be do not care about them, you are effectively asking each and every one of Toronto’s 1M households to chip in at an average of $1500 each, when $150 would do! Perhaps there is the reason electricity costs are going up (source), mismanagement.
Electric car adventures 