As that gas comes to them from Alberta, it is driving up my heating costs as Ontario also gets its gas from Alberta.
For comparison, Ontario gets 51 percent of its electricity using CANDU low temperature unenriched uranium reactors, 19 percent using coal, 23 percent using renewables (mostly hydro with a tiny percentage of wind), 19 percent using coal an 7 percent using gas.
When the current McGuinty Liberal government took over, it ordered the shutdown of all coal plants by 2009 pursuant to an election promise. He was forced to cancel this order because even sweetheart deals with consortiums (including California based Calpine Corp.) would not have produced enough gas powered generating capacity to replace the coal stations' output.
The current plan is to work toward changing the mix to 50 percent nuclear, 43 percent renewables, 6 percent gas and 1 percent gasification.
There has been a cultural change recently that is more accepting of nuclear power so stations will be built or rebuilt to maintain nuke's percentage in the supply of Ontario's increasing demand. Nuke stations are more expensive to bring on line than gas.
Despite being a supporter of Canadian technology, given the CANDU reactors' history of failing to meet (by a long shot) their uptime percentages and the expensive repairs and refits they've required to keep running, I would prefer that any future nuclear reactors be of a proven LWR design, as used in France or Japan where a large percentage of their power is nuclear generated. Even better, how about breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing facilities, like in Japan?
Thanks for the ping.