Regarding "Anger remains over power plant" — Sentinel, Jan. 21.

There are fair and legitimate questions that need to be answered by both the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) and Pristine Power with regards to the proposed peaking plant, its potential impacts on the community and the procurement process itself.

That said, it is endlessly frustrating and unproductive for anyone to continually distort the facts. How can members of MegaWHAT possibly say that there is "no scientific validity" to the proposed peaker or that "the need has not been determined" or "that council and citizens have not been properly briefed?"

Where have they been?

This issue has been discussed for years and has been supported by countless engineering reports and environmental assessment studies, not to mention endless public and private meetings. The OPA held 15 open houses just recently, they ran ads, sent letters and held meetings with town staff and councils, they held five full-day working group meetings in the summer of 2005, and this does not even include the studies done by local distribution companies, the Task Force, Hydro One, councils, the power company proponents, engineering and business associations.

The fact is that MegaWHAT has not proposed a single viable alternative to address the back-up supply needs identified. They continue to ignore the fact that this facility will emit a very small fraction of total local emissions already existing and there is more than sufficient scientific evidence that existing emissions from traffic, homes and businesses (not to mention coal power plants) have a far greater impact on the air quality of the community than the proposed peaking plant will. If emissions are the real concern and we want to ignore the significant environmental benefits of Ontario's "off coal" strategy, we might want to consider the potential positive implications of electric cars and the need for a more reliable and robust electrical network. The fact is that power planning engineers will all tell you that a supply mix that includes new and sustainable energy alternatives, as well as conservation and demand management programs and more traditional sources of power generation, also requires some form of fast response back up supply of power. This is simply smart and necessary network planning.

All of that said, there are legitimate concerns with regard to the conclussions reached and the level of transparency in the evaluation and selection process conducted by OPA. We don't know who was on the selection committee or the results of their evaluation process (no scoring results have been released). We don't know what due diligence was conducted by OPA. The transmission connection method proposed by Pristine may actually not be viable and if so, how will that impact the final costs and could Pristine have won the bid based on incorrect assumptions? Is there an appeal process and can OPA opt out of the contract if specific performance targets are not met? There are questions related to how proposed mitigation measures were weighted in the evaluation and selection process verses cost considerations. Based on the stated evaluation criteria, the conclusions do not seem to fit with the fact that Northland Power clearly conducted (from my perspective) a better public consultation process and were far more co-operative with the municipality than the winning proponent.

Some people have stated that the proposed site sits on a flood plain and if so, why was that not addressed in the environmental assessment report?

If even some of these questions turn out to raise valid concerns, I think we need to revisit our whole approach to public consultation and the weighting of the criteria used to arrive at the best possible conclusion. At the same time, I do not think for a second that the municipalities in northern York Region have done themselves or the region any favours by their level of understanding and engagement in this process over the past five years.

From where I sit, the misinformation and the lack of close scrutiny paid to the many misleading and factually wrong statements made by many different people throughout this process has resulted in unnecessary and unfortunate outcomes. The best possible solution may have eluded us. Good output requires good input as well as a fair and transparent process. At the end of the day too many people have ignored that the need has been identified and that a solution will be imposed out of necessity.

In closing, it should be noted that in the case of the transmission line fight that lead to a more full and complete review of alternatives, as was required by the Environmental Assessment Act all along, we sent in 653 "bump-up" letters to the Ministry of the Environment (MOE) and even then there has never been a successful bid to "bump-up" to an individual EA in power supply infrastructure cases. If any community is going to have its reasonable and wellsupported concerns addressed, they need to have facts behind them and they need to be engaged in the process. OPA and power company proponents have tired to engage the public and our elected officials in dialogue for years and the fact is that a lot of people adopted an adversarial approach to these issues before even getting all of the information necessary in order to explore potential impacts or viable alternatives.

I can only hope that we can learn from this experience, given that there is $60 billion in new power supply infrastructure in the works in Ontario and more than 75 per cent of our power grid needs to be replaced within the next 25 years. If you think that this power plant and this fight have been big, just wait until the proposed gas fired power plant in the western GTA moves forward. These issues are far from over, but unfortunately we need urgent and realistic solutions.

Richard Johnson,

Aurora