Twenty-five years after ice storms knocked out power in Ontario and Quebec, experts warn that a full shift from fossil fuels to electrification and renewables will leave Canadians more vulnerable to power disruptions, especially if extreme weather strikes, causing disasters.
On Jan. 4, 1998, freezing rain in eastern Ontario and Quebec took down hydro lines and trees. By the next day, 650,000 people had lost power, a number that later swelled to 1.5 million. Thirty-five people died and $1.44 billion of insurance claims ensued. Some rural residents near Ottawa were without power for 33 days.
Ian Madsen, senior policy analyst with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, said the Texas event illustrates how a bias against fossil fuels can make a bad weather event worse.
“Texas had abundant natural gas that they could have used, but the stupid regulatory authorities for greeny reasons insisted that the gas plants that feed into the pipelines be powered by electricity [from wind turbines, not directly by gas]. With all the wind power out, they didn’t have enough electricity, and there wasn’t enough gas fired-electricity because they didn’t have the electricity to run the gas plants,” Madsen said.
“It was a storm, a perfect storm, and a big disaster.”
Many Canadian utility companies are government-owned, something Madsen said only makes an over-reliance on them worse.
“When you put too much importance in any single thing, especially a Crown corporation, then you are setting yourself up for trouble, [particularly] if you don’t have sufficient competition, not just between utility companies, but on the source of their energy,” he said.
“If too many vehicles are electric, they perform much less well when it’s cold. They’re less efficient, and the batteries have a far lower range. And if more stuff is electrified, we will have more problems. If the electricity goes out, we could have people dying. I’m not exaggerating. More people worldwide are dying of cold- than heat-related problems every year.”
In 2019, favourable weather helped Germany buoy its renewable power to 43 percent of all production. However, the grid struggled to carry the surplus power and markets would only accept it for negative wholesale electricity prices. At other times, gloomy, windless days have severely cut production. The unreliability was one reason that a German wind turbine farm was dismantled in recent months to expand a coal mine to strengthen coal-fired power production.
“If you’re hamstringing and penalizing the oil and gas industry and making it more difficult to have more pipelines to ship the stuff, then you’re going to have a world of hurt,” Madsen said.
Severe Storm Events
Dan McTeague, president of Canadians for Affordable Energy, said Category Two storms that caused power outages in the Maritimes in recent years would have been worse without fossil fuels.“A lot of the transmission wires were knocked out, and were it not for propane and natural gas availability and diesel, a lot of people would have had some difficulty. Such an occurrence in the winter would be disruptive and catastrophic,” McTeague said.
Coronal mass ejections, a.k.a. solar storms, and electromagnetic pulse weapons could also cause electrical outages. In 1989, a geomagnetic storm took Hydro-Quebec’s electrical grid from normal operations to a province-wide blackout in 90 seconds. Power was out for nine hours.
McTeague said that it could happen again, and that U.S. emergency response agencies have consulted with him on scenarios such as coronal mass ejections, cyberattacks, and earthquakes. He said it’s “flirting with disaster” to have fewer energy options in an emergency.
“Every one of these scenarios here assumes that there’s alternatives, but [with decarbonization] you’ve basically foregone gasoline and diesel to back us up when there is a need. It’s a really bad situation where we basically put all our eggs in one basket,” he said.
‘High-Risk Strategy’
Ian Lee, a business professor at Carleton University, said eliminating fossil fuels to pursue full electrification, and especially renewables, is a “high-risk strategy” that could leave some without power even without any storm at all.“You’re putting all your eggs in one basket, and that is the electrical basket, the grid. If the grid goes down because your wind and solar goes down, then you really are up the creek,” Lee said in an interview.
“We’re going to have to build those huge high-voltage transmission lines that everybody hates across the country East-West. We’ve got to rebuild the grid completely to take the massive increase that it will need to get rid of all the other types of energy. It will be incredibly expensive and make us very vulnerable because everything is dependent on one power source.”
Rebuilding the grid would take 50 to 75 years, Lee estimates, and would cost “in the trillions, not the billions.”
A report in December by Ontario’s Independent System Electricity Operator, the province’s electricity system manager, said it would cost $400 billion over the next 25 years to decarbonize Ontario’s entire electricity grid by 2050 and eliminate gas-fired power generation.
A 2021 report by Royal Bank of Canada estimated that establishing net-zero emissions across Canada in all sectors would cost $2 trillion in the next 30 years heading toward 2050. In terms of electricity production, decarbonizing the existing grid could cost about $5.4 billion annually, which includes $1.8 billion for renewable power sources and $3.6 billion in batteries.
Lee points to California as an example of what could happen to Canadians. As the state struggled to meet the power demands of air conditioners during extreme heat in September 2022, it asked people to avoid charging their electric cars during the peak hours between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m.
“There’s very good evidence that we’re going to create brownouts and even blackouts, because the biggest single demand coming at us at 100 miles an hour is electric cars,“ Lee said. ”[Canada has] 34 million vehicles, and if we go and electrify all of them, we'll bring down the grid.”
