Bruce Power says it wants to be part of the solution as the world faces "an energy trilemma" in an effort to balance affordability, decarbonization, and energy security.
James Scongack, Executive Vice President, Operational Services and Chief Development Officer, recently told Grey County Council the nuclear generating giant wants to tackle those challenges together with local municipalities.
"All countries around the world are really dealing with this this trilemma," he stressed. "It's often centred around affordability, economic considerations, the need to be decarbonized and fight climate change, but also the needs to have energy security and reliability."
Scongack told Grey County Council, Bruce Power generates a third of Ontario's Power today, and is ramping up to provide even more through the Major Component Replacement.
"Through the largest private investment in Canada's electricity infrastructure, we are looking to extend that to the 2060s and 2070's," he explained. "We're really going through our existing assets and making sure they can run through that period. Because if we think the energy … demand issues are a challenge now, in terms of what we have to build, can you imagine what they would be if we didn't have maintain what we have today?"
He said Bruce Power aims to maintain and extend existing assets through private investment, innovation, and new technology to secure power supply to 2060s.
"With the modern technology that we have around advanced manufacturing, when you look at our knowledge of these plants, we believe at Bruce Power, not only will we be able to secure our units to 2060 or 2070, but the output of our units will be higher," he promised. "We're going to be taking our site from what used to be, in policy space, 6300 megawatts round number, that's 6.3 million homes, to 7000 megawatts."
Scongack called it energy conservation on steroids.
"Because all a nuclear reactor is doing is making energy. It's making heat and you're transferring that heat to create electricity," Songack explained. "So if you can find ways of harvesting more of that, you can get more power. And that's a good thing. So, you know, the most important principle is you can look at whatever the future is, but everybody agrees we for sure need what we have today. And that's what Bruce Power is really focused on and that also includes life saving medical isotopes."
Scongack told Grey County Council they have a critical role to play as the region works to meet Ontario's growing demand for green energy. He said Bruce Power has begun the process of investigating a Bruce C nuclear generating station to provide even more clean power.
"The other component that's really important alongside that is working with our counties or municipalities, the provincial and the federal government," he added. "You can't just build a nuclear plant in isolation, what are all the things we need to do with our supply chain, with our services, with our infrastructure to support that? And so we really think taking the next three to five years to do that early planning. It allows us to focus on our core operations and our life extension program. But it allows us to move the ball forward."
Bruce Power is launching a federal impact assessment process to zone their facilities for future capacity expansion, with a potential 3-4 year process and partnership with unions and TC Energy.