Ottawa takes aim at coal-fired power plants

The federal government is planning sweeping new climate-change regulations for the nation's electricity sector that will phase out traditional coal-fired power.
Any new coal plants will have to include highly expensive -- and unproven -- technology to capture greenhouse-gas emissions and inject it underground for permanent storage, Environment Minister Jim Prentice said in an interview Tuesday.
Ottawa also plans to impose absolute emission caps on utilities' existing coal-fired power plants and establish a market-based system to allow them to buy credits to meet those targets, said Prentice, in Washington for a meeting of major emitting countries.
Electricity users in Alberta, Saskatchewan and Nova Scotia would be hit hard by the new rules, as their provinces rely on coal for more than 70 percent of their power. Alternatives will be costly.
"The approach that we've been working toward involves a cap-and-trade system relating to thermal coal, and the requirement of phasing out those facilities as they reach the end of their useful, fully amortized life," Prentice said. He added that coal would be an option if it produced near-zero greenhouse-gas emissions.
He said new regulations would be released well before November, when he's scheduled to travel to Copenhagen, Denmark, for negotiations on a new, global climate-change treaty.
The government already has adopted new emission standards for vehicles -- following the United States' lead -- and also will release regulations aimed at major industrial emitters, including Alberta's oil sands producers.
It has set a target of having a 90 percent emission-free electricity sector by 2025, a goal that will require increased use of nuclear, wind and hydroelectric power and other renewable sources. Given Canada's long dependence on hydro in Quebec and British Columbia, and nuclear and hydro in Ontario, the country already has one of the least emitting electricity sectors in the developed world.
Still, coal-fired electricity represents roughly 18 percent of Canada's current emissions, and eight of the country's 10 largest greenhouse-gas emitters are coal-fired power plants. They include Ontario's giant Nanticoke station on Lake Erie; the Liberal government has vowed to close it by 2014 in its effort to be coal-free.
Most of Canada's coal-fired power plants date to the 1970s and would likely be decommissioned between 2020 and 2025.
Both Alberta and Saskatchewan have forecast large increases in electricity demands, especially in Alberta where expected growth in oil sand production and refining would drive up industrial electricity demand. Both provinces have massive coal reserves and said they would continue to rely on it to power their grids.
Jason Chance, a spokesman for the Alberta Ministry of Energy, said the province is committed to developing carbon-capture-and-storage technology.
Pierre Guimond, president of the Canadian Electrical Association, warned that the new regulations would drive up electricity costs to customers in provinces that rely on coal. "It's going to be awfully expensive," he said.
He noted that the carbon-capture technology remains unproven and prohibitively expensive.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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