Brian Zinchuk is editor and owner of Pipeline Online
Great Plains Power Station, just outside of Moose Jaw, on its opening day, Dec. 17. Any new power stations like this built after Dec. 31 will only be able to run until 2035 before having crippling restrictions on them. Photo by Brian Zinchuk
Impossible to reach emissions goal still pegged for 2035
The newly updated federal Clean Electricity Regulations (CER) shift the deadline for reaching a “net zero” electrical grid from 2035 to 2050. At least that’s what the headlines all say. But digging into the regulations, it’s more of a bait and switch.
Pipeline Online dug through the finalized version of the regulations, posted here, and available here in PDF form: 2024 12 17 Clean Electricity Regulations CER_UnofficialVersionNonOfficielle
And the revisions might seem looser at first, until you realize there’s a poison pill right in the middle of them. They still include an emissions goal for 2035 that is, for all intents and purposes, unobtainable for any jurisdiction that relies on fossil fuels to generate power. And in Saskatchewan, on any given day up to 88 per cent of our power comes from fossil fuels, and in Alberta it’s as high as 93 per cent.
That target is 65 tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt-hour (GWh), dramatically lower than what is currently being achieved by the implementation of the one grid-scale carbon capture plant on a power station in Canada – SaskPower’s Boundary Dam 3. Without carbon capture dramatically more capable than the one installed on BD3, fossil fuel-fired power generation is certain to be offside the new 2035 emissions targets.
The announcement came on the last day of the fall parliamentary session, meaning there would be no opportunity to spend days in Question Period, picking apart the new regulations. And if implemented, these regulations will be some of the most impactful in recent Canadian history, utterly transforming our society and how it is powered.
Pipeline Online spoke to Crown Investments Corporation and SaskPower Minister Jeremy Harrison about Saskatchewan’s response, and it’s pretty simple: Saskatchewan rejects the new Clean Electricity Regulations, which, as now gazetted, are the law of the land.
But before getting into Saskatchewan’s arguments, here are the pertinent points of the new regulations.
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What’s new, what changed
The previous draft version of the CER said that all grid-scale fossil fueled power generation in Canada, including coal, natural gas, pet coke, etc., must shut down by 2035 unless equipped with very expensive carbon capture technology which would also use around over a quarter of the generator’s power just to operate (something called parasitic load). That’s in 10 years and 12 days from now.
The new version doesn’t expressly say that. Instead, it puts in place 2035 emissions standards that will be all but impossible to achieve.
The CER Regulatory Impact Analysis Statement states:
The Regulations will achieve emissions reductions by prohibiting emissions above an annual emissions limit (AEL) for electricity generating units, based on each unit’s electricity generation capacity (capacity). The Regulations include compliance flexibility mechanisms that adjust the scope of the prohibition to limit negative impacts on grid stability or disproportionately increasing compliance costs and therefore electricity prices.
The Regulations apply to electricity generating units that meet the applicability criteria. A unit means an assembly of equipment that is physically connected and operates together to generate electricity and must include at least a boiler or combustion engine and may include CCS systems.
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The statement says:
The AEL begins to apply on January 1, 2035, to all units that meet the application criteria on or after that date, with exceptions of a later date for certain units with an end of prescribed life. The AEL starts to apply on:
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January 1, 2035, for units that combust coal;
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January 1, 2035, for a unit that has increased its electricity generation capacity (based on its maximum continuous rating reported to its electricity system operator) by 15% or more since registration of the unit, or January 1 of the year following the capacity increase;
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January 1, 2035, for a unit commissioned on or after January 1, 2025, and which is not a planned unit; •
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January 1, 2050, for planned units; ….
There is a bit of allowance for projects, like SaskPower’s Aspen Power Station, which are in the works. The statement notes, “Some units that are planned (i.e., in-flight) prior to the Regulations coming into force are eligible for an end of prescribed life of December 31, 2049. For any unit commissioned between January 1, 2025 and December 31, 2034, the AEL will start to apply on January 1, 2035, except for planned units that meet the following criteria… (listing of critieria)
The key point here, with respect to Aspen, is that those new, impossible limits, will be imposed Jan. 1, 2035, effectively meaning it will need to shut down after less than a decade of operation.
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Here’s the formula, as presented in the gazetted December version of the CER:
Emission limit
9 (1) The responsible person for a unit must not emit from the unit in a calendar year a quantity of CO2, determined in accordance with section 12, that exceeds the limit, expressed in tonnes, determined by the formula
C × Iel × 8760 × 0.001
Where
C is the unit’s electricity generation capacity for the calendar year; and is the emissions intensity applicable to the calendar year and is
(a) 65 tonnes of CO2 emissions per GWh for the 2035 to 2049 calendar years, and
(b) 0 tonnes of CO2 emissions per GWh for the 2050 and subsequent calendar years.
That means there is a very low threshold for allowable emissions from 2035 to the end of 2050, and zero allowable emissions after Jan. 1, 2050. So when they say Net Zero, they really do mean zero emissions after Jan. 1, 2050.
For perspective, if the Boundary Dam Unit 3 Carbon Capture and Storage Project achieved its originally stated goal of capturing 1 million tonnes of CO2 per year, it would still be emitting 140 tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt-hour. That’s over double the new limit of 65 tonnes per GWh, and nearly five times the proposed allowable amount in the previous version of the regulations.
The Boundary Dam Unit 3 Carbon Capture and Storage capture plant, left, has never come anywhere close to the levels of performance the new Clean Electricity Regulations are imposing by 2035.
But even those numbers are not realistic. SaskPower provided Pipeline Online with data, published regularly on its blog, that states the current emissions intensity is 316 tonnes of CO2 per GWh. And that’s after 10 years of continual improvements in the operation of the carbon capture plant.
That’s an emissions level – with carbon capture enabled – 4.8 times the new allowable limit. So carbon capture on coal is effectively not good enough, as the revised regulations now stand.
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All things being equal, combined cycle natural gas, like the brand new Great Plains Power Station which opened at Moose Jaw on Tuesday, emit about half the carbon dioxide of a lignite coal plant. But even if the BD3 plant captured a similar fraction of CO2, the net result would still be grossly over the new allowable limit of 65 tonnes.
The more significant impact will be on natural gas – there are no grid-scale carbon capture units on a commercial natural gas-fired power station in Canada. Capital Power’s Genesee Power Station was going to be the first, but its $2.4 billion carbon capture project was cancelled in May. As SaskPower has been building large scale natural gas plants at Swift Current, Moose Jaw and Lanigan (now under construction), there is no carbon capture model to follow. And in Alberta, natural gas power plants number in the dozens.
Short life
The CER also incorporated a 25 year service life prescribed for generating units, as noted:
Date of end of prescribed life (3) For the purposes of subsection (1) but subject to section 11, a unit’s end of prescribed life is on
-
December 31 of the calendar year that is 25 years after the unit’s commissioning date, in the case of a unit referred to in paragraph (1)(a);
-
December 31, 2049, in the case of a planned unit; and
-
(c) December 31 of the calendar year before the prohibition set out in subsection 4(2) of the Regulations Limiting Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Natural Gas-fired Generation of Electricity would have applied to the unit, as determined under that subsection, in the case of a unit referred to in paragraph (1)(c).
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No more 450 hour limit
One of the most controversial points in the previous iteration of the CER was the allowance of “unabated” fossil fuel-fired power generation for only 450 hours per unit, per year (“unabated” is without carbon capture), basically in times that you really need it. That’s just 18.75 days, which means if you have a cold January, by Jan. 19, that allotment, for the year, could run out. It also meant that very expensive generating units, which require staffing and ongoing maintenance, would otherwise be forced to sit idle for 346.25 days per year.
This version of the CER does away with the 450 hour limit in a year. Instead, there are several pages of rules about what constitutes an “irresistible emergency event,’ notifying the federal minister, and deducting quantities of CO2 emissions and electricity generated during that time from allowances. The number “450” does not appear anywhere in the new document.
Pipeline Online asked SaskPower to confirm if that was their interpretation, and got this response by email, “Gazette One of the CER had a peaking unit limitation of 450 hours/year and was unit based, but the new CER gazette does not have a peaking provision. Under the new CER, regulated fossil fuel generating units must meet an annual emissions limit. Additional emissions would be permitted by transferring credits from under-emitting units or by purchasing offsets.”
There is a considerable amount of language regarding offsets in the document.
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Credits here, credits there
Here are the calculations for Canadian offset credits:
35 tonnes of CO2 emissions per GWh for the 2035 to 2049 calendar years, and 42 tonnes of CO2 emissions per GWh for the 2050 and subsequent calendar years. Eligible systems for offset credits include:
(a) a system for pricing greenhouse gas emissions established under Division 1 of Part 2 of the Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act; and
(b) a provincial carbon pricing system that is subject to an agreement between the Minister and a province regarding the cross-recognition of Canadian offset credits and that is on the list published on the Department of the Environment’s website for the purposes of this section.
If a generating unit emits less than its allowed limit of greenhouse gases between 2035 and 2049, the difference can be accumulated as “compliance credits,” which are transferable (unless it combusts coal).
Carbon capture
Curiously, the CER makes reference to emissions from coal gasification systems, including ones that are in part located underground. Pipeline Online is unaware of any coal gasification in scale in North America except for the Dakota Gasification Plant at Beulah, North Dakota, which supplies the Weyburn Unit with more than half of its CO2.
The bulk of the published regulations are formulas for emissions calculations as well as reporting mechanisms.
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Carbon capture
There are allowances for carbon capture, utilization and storage, both just for storage and for enhanced oil recovery. The regulations state:
(2) For the purposes of determining the value for Eccs in subsections 12(1) and 27(1), a quantity of CO2 may only be claimed if it has been permanently stored in a storage project that meets the following conditions:
(a) the geological site into which the CO2 is injected is
(i) a deep saline aquifer into which the CO2 is injected for the sole purpose of storing it, or
(ii) a depleted oil reservoir into which the CO2 is injected for the purpose of enhanced oil recovery; and
(b) the CO2 stored for the purposes of the project is captured, transported and stored in accordance with the laws of Canada or a province or the laws of the United States or one of its states.
Minister of Crown Investments Corporation and SaskPower Jeremy Harrison is now the next possible candidate for carbon tax jail. Legislative Assembly of Saskatchewan
Saskatchewan responds
Harrison issued a press release on Dec. 18, rejecting the new Clean Electricity Regulations. Pipeline Online asked, “Are you rejecting it primarily because of the jurisdictional issue? Are you rejecting it because even their new rules, which are supposedly a lot more slack, really aren’t, or are you rejecting it because it’s simply impossible?”
Harrison said, “We are rejecting it for all of the above. And all of the above is jurisdictional, in that the Government of Canada very clearly has no jurisdiction to regulate and interfere and manage provincial electricity grids.
“It is crystal clear in the Constitution Act of 1867, which was amended as a part of the 1982 patriation of the Charter, explicitly added, at the insistence of Alberta and Saskatchewan, for very good reason, that there was a concern that the Government of Canada at some point in the future would seek to regulate inappropriately the operations of provincial electricity grids.
“Well, that day came with Justin Trudeau and Steven Guilbeault. So we are absolutely rejecting on a jurisdictional basis. And that’s not new. We said that right from the start.
“But in addition to that, these regulations are entirely unobtainable. They’re unaffordable. They have been made some very minor changes which really changed nothing of the substance of the regulations. You know, they tried to make somewhat I would characterize as very cosmetic changes for communications reasons. They don’t change the fact that if we were to embark on a new natural gas facility today, like the one we just opened officially yesterday, that plant would be illegal by 2035, the day it was opened. So we’re talking about having an asset in place for six, seven years. Well that is just not, that is just not acceptable to the public.”
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Harrison said, “Our position is very clear. I talked about it the other night in a speech I gave in the House, where our marching orders to SaskPower going forward are that reliability and affordability are going to be the two benchmarks by which we make decisions on the future of power generation here, in Saskatchewan.
“And we are going to be paying no heed to federal diktats from a government that’s, you know, very clearly in complete chaos and disarray. We are very, very much not going to be paying heed to those diktats over the course of the next number of months and years as we move forward.”
Sask First Act
While the government of Saskatchewan has for several years now said that 2035 was impossible to reach net zero, 2050 was a more realistic goal. Harrison explained that nuclear may play a large role in that.
And he noted that Alberta’s response is very similar to Saskatchewan’s, regarding constitutional jurisdiction.
Harrison said, “This is up to the provinces, until this government came along with the idea and intention that they were going to intrude on basically every part of the nation’s life, quite to the detriment, frankly, of, as we see almost every day now, to people who live in this country and we are not prepared to accept that they are going to be intruding in this space at all. Period. End of story.”
Asked if the Saskatchewan First Act, with its Economic Assessment Tribunal report, and Alberta’s Sovereignty Act made a difference in the federal government’s revisions, Harrison said, “I can’t really speculate on what their internal deliberations were on these. I would suspect that the fact that it wasn’t just push back from Alberta and Saskatchewan, but there was push back from really across the stakeholder spectrum on these regulations, including probably people they thought would be allies on some of it. That pushed them back off of certain elements of it. But the actual fundamental problems with the clean electricity regulations have not changed. Like I said, I think they made some cosmetic changes or adjustments, but really on a substantive front, they are completely unacceptable.”
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Impossible targets
As for the impossible 2035 emissions targets, Harrison said, “The fact that they changed the actual date to 2050 really doesn’t change the fact that the unattainable component of all of this was predicated on 2035. That never changed in the regulations. So, the 2050, that’s why I say it was really a cosmetic change. It really doesn’t matter, because the part that was highly problematic is exactly the same.
“So, and the part that’s even more problematic around the jurisdictional part, there is no way they can address that other than by just saying, ‘Well, this is provincial jurisdiction, so we’re not going to regulate in this space.’”
Net Zero 2050
He noted, “Our very much expectation is that we are going to have a grid that is, if not Net Zero, very close to Net Zero by 2050, because our intention is to have very large, significant baseload power generation that is done through nuclear. And that is, we still have, and have, brought on a significant … amount of renewable power generation. So, coupled with nuclear, by the time we get to 2050 I think it’s a very real expectation that there would still be net zero in the grid, or close to it, anyway.”
Doing so would require a lot more than one or two small modular reactors at Estevan. In the summer of 2023, SaskPower signed a memorandum of understanding with reactor builder Westinghouse looking into future possible development of 1,200 megawatt AP1000 reactors. These are massive units, especially in comparison to the current Saskatchewan grid, but less so considering how much larger the grid is expected to grow in the coming decades.
Harrison would like to see Saskatchewan become a “powerhouse” and a net power exporter, as well as take part in the nuclear value-added supply chain.
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He spoke of nuclear aspirations saying, “I think that’s a realistic possibility. I want to have a value-added nuclear supply chain, or elements thereof, here, in Saskatchewan as well, something I think we missed the real opportunity on in the in the 1970s to have here.
“These are things that are objectives of the government. As far as kind of widespread nuclear deployment, we have to walk before we run. So, you know, I’m not making any formal announcement about deployment of 4,000 megawatts. What I’m saying is, I would love to get there.
“And there are a lot of things that have to go between now and then, including, you know, the initial decisions on SMR deployment. We’ve talked about that already. It’s in public documents around those things. But, from an aspirational perspective, I would love to see significant nuclear deployment here, in the province, even beyond what we are initially looking at. But we do have to walk before we run. So, I mean, don’t read into it that that is the formal position of SaskPower. That is where I hope to get, though, as an MLA and minister.”
One last thing
Premier Scott Moe has previously said Saskatchewan will continue to burn coal until nuclear is ready. In his year-end interview with Pipeline Online on Dec. 12, when asked about this, Moe said, “We need to ensure we have a reliable power grid. We need to ensure we have an affordable power grid and but it’s also power grid that we’re investing in lowering the emissions profile through time. That’s what we’re going to do. And if the federal government is, you know, feels that Saskatchewan is offside in this space, well, we’ll have to have that discussion as well at that point in time. But we, you know, we’re gonna do what we’re gonna do.”
If Saskatchewan does openly flaunt the Clean Electricity Regulations, it will totally blow away the 2035 emissions target of 65 tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt-hour. Lignite coal emissions, without carbon capture, run over 1000 tonnes of CO2 per gigawatt-hour.
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