Ah the joy of Private Public partnerships. The irony here is that the Bruce Plant is also owned by public pensions funds, private interests and the Power Workers Union. Originally mothballed by the Harris government, it was sold to a consortium of public private interests to pay for the expensive repairs Bruce needed to get it back online.
Robin Jeffrey’s determination created the opportunity that spawned Bruce Power and has led to a revitalization of nuclear power in Canada. The Bruce Power transaction received a Gold Award from the Canadian Council for Public Private Partnerships for “Excellence and Innovation in Infrastructure” and received the Financial Times Global Energy Award for “Successful Investment Decision of the Year” of 2001.
Local support wasn't a given for Hawthorne when he first came to the Bruce station, in 2000, as part of a team of experts imported by British Energy, a U.K. utility that leased the plant from the Ontario government that year. The 1970s-era station — which consists of eight Canadian-made Candu nuclear reactors — had languished and faltered under public-sector management. The provincial government had decided to see if private managers could do a better job running a major part of the nuclear fleet that supplies almost half of Ontario's electricity. To lure experienced nuclear managers to the province, Ontario's Conservative finance minister at the time, Jim Flaherty, offered British Energy a 17-year lease on terms critics considered too sweet for an asset the public borrowed billions to build.
Financial concerns involving its operations outside of Canada led British Energy PLC to withdraw from Bruce Power in 2003. As a result, the Cameco Corporation increased its share of Bruce Power to 31.6%, while new partners TransCanada PipeLines and BPC Generation Infrastructure Trust (a trust owned by the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System [OMERS]) each acquired a 31.6% share. The facility’s two primary unions retained their original 5.2% share.
With the McGuinty government promise to eliminate coal fired plants, Bruce coming back online at 'any cost' was a priority. And the cost was of course to the taxpayers of Ontario.
Ontarians would have saved $1.5 billion on their hydro bills over the next 25 years had the government negotiated a smarter deal to refurbish the Bruce Power nuclear station, the provincial auditor general says.
Electricity generated by refurbished reactors at a privately operated nuclear station will cost hydro consumers in Ontario 44 per cent more than the going market rate as a result of the government's failure to drive the best deal possible, the province's auditor says. Auditor-General Jim McCarter said in a report released yesterday he recognizes that the province was not in a strong bargaining position when it cut the 2005 deal with Bruce Power, the privately owned consortium that operates the nuclear station on Lake Huron.
As a result, his report suggests, the government made too many financial concessions at the expense of electricity consumers.
The government will pay Bruce Power 7.1 cents a kilowatt hour for electricity produced from reactors the company plans to refurbish. This is significantly higher than the average market price of 4.9 cents consumers have paid over the past five years and experts' projections of future prices, the report says.
See:
nuclear power
Environment
Hydro
Energy Probe
CANDUFind blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:
McGuinty, electricityauditor general, Ontario hydronuclear, nuclear power, Ontario Power Workers Union, Bruce Nuclear Plant, Utilities, Bruce Power, Liberals, Conservatives, Government,
