Clarification of statement planned for council
Letter to the Editor

Through no fault of reporter, I feel compelled to correct the public record, this time about statements attributed to me in the June 25 edition of the sentinel.

As stated in the above noted article, I tried to delegate a prepared statement to York Region Council recently with regards to the power supply issue facing Northern York Region. I felt that 10 examples of misleading or inaccurate statements would serve to demonstrate the amount of misinformation that has been permitted to permeate these discussions and the last thing I wanted to do is to add to the confusion.

Firstly, it was noted in abbreviated form that I stated that there would be no real estate impact associated with the proposed peaking plant. While I can see how this might be considered to be an accurate simplification of my speaking notes, it does not actually capture what was written. My notes pointed out that the proposed peaking plant is less impacting than the proposed transmission alternative and in a number of instances there are few if any homes even within site of the proposed facility.

Furthermore, after reviewing the emission dispersion maps in detail, the worst-case scenario is essentially a non-event and makes me wonder how any educated person could be concerned at all with regard to potential emissions. More emissions come from living on a street with more than a few homes or from heavy traffic than would result in any one location during the very limited periods of operation of the peaking plant, in the worst case scenario over a five year period. In the very worst case scenario, which amounts to a potential few hours over a five-year period, more than 99 per cent of emissions will continue to come from existing sources, even if the proposed peaking plant were to hypothetically run well past its designed capacity (which it would never do in reality) and for a vast majority of time the impact would be negligible and would be non-existent alltogether for more than 90 to 95 per cent of the time.

Check out the proponents' emission dispersion maps with an engineer and decide for yourself how serious the emissions impact is and how this could possibly impact real estate values. Education is a funny thing; it answers a lot of questions if people take the time to get their facts straight and consider the implications accordingly.

Secondly, the quote that the proposed peaker is more efficient than a residential gas furnace jumped out at me. The actual sentence from my speaking notes reads as follows . . . "the fuel [natural gas] is cleaner than coal and the plant will be more efficient than residential gas furnaces." While this is an accurate quote, in hind sight it is not at all what I intended the meaning to be and I have to accept responsibility for that. The peaking plant burns fuel more efficiently in the sense that the emissions from the peaking plant are cleaner than your residential furnace. You can not reasonably compare burning gas for heat and burning gas for power generation, therefore the implied comparison was inadvertent.

The OPA recently submitted a position statement to the OEB in justification of its master power plan for Ontario (the IPSP) that states that peaking plants are more efficient than combined heat and power (CHP) plants when the intended purpose is to run the power plant less than 14 per cent of the time. This means that there are economic restrictions inherent for running peaking facilities for longer than their intended purpose. From a capital expenditure perspective as well as a power reliability perspective there is sound reasoning as to why the OPA has reached its 2005 Working Group conclusions. The proposed peaker is a more efficient use of our resources and meets the specific power reliability and back up requirements of Northern York Region.

Sorry for any confusion caused on my part.

A copy of my statement can be found at Aurora Power Update.com for anyone interested in learning more about my perspective.

Richard Johnson,

Aurora