Powering Ontario's Growth: Sussex Summary & Analysis

Overview

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July 10, 2023: Ontario’s Minister of Energy announced Powering Ontario’s Growth – Ontario’s Plan for a Clean Energy Future. The report represents the Government of Ontario’s response to last year’s Independent Electricity System Operator (“IESO”) Pathways to Decarbonization (“P2D”) report and commits to significant actions designed to ensure the province is prepared to sustainably manage anticipated growth in energy demand.

Powering Ontario’s Growth is among the most comprehensive energy policy documents put forward by the Ministry of Energy, and reinforces the government’s pragmatic approach to system planning, decarbonization, procurement, and affordability. Recognizing the importance of near-term decision-making to enable immediate action, as well the necessity to start work on infrastructure requiring long development timelines that will form the foundation of Ontario’s future energy system, Ontario is committing to moving forward in several specific areas related to supply, transmission, distribution, conservation, and planning integration.

The report comes at a time when energy policy is in the spotlight at virtually every level of public discourse – municipal, provincial, federal and international. The government embraces energy expansion in response to sustained demand-growth trends. In doing so, the government has committed itself to executing on new and existing workstreams that will shape the energy system for decades to come.

Sector participants can expect significant activity to accelerate in the realm of policy execution, including through:

Electrification and Energy Transition Panel: Recommendations on processes to accelerate timelines, maintain cost controls and guarantee reliability. Review of regulatory processes, roles responsibilities & competencies, integrated planning.

Federal Incentive Attraction and Harmonization: Position Ontario as a high impact jurisdiction for the federal Investment Tax Credit program, Smart Renewables and Electrification Pathways program and Canada Infrastructure Bank funding. Reduce redundancies within federal/provincial permitting.  

Infrastructure Development: Call to Ontario’s developers to launch pre-development work, engage in permitting processes, secure supply chains, skilled labour & local support, in an aim to energize new bulk generation, transmission and other infrastructure while creating Ontario jobs and contributing to the provincial economy.

Local Considerations: Requirements for coalition building, community support and Indigenous partnerships.

Measured Transition: Seek to leverage existing assets and technology, including a prominent role for natural gas (bulk and local), to maintain reliability and affordability while reducing emissions.

Grid Modernization: Preparing Ontario’s distribution grid for the influx of new bulk supply and increased local demand with two-way flow, system operability characteristics at the local level and distributed energy resources.

Economic Electrification: Attracting new commercial and industrial load via: reliability assurance, clean energy credits, competitive pricing, new and bespoke programming, low comparative emissions profile to competing jurisdictions.

Innovation: Continue to encourage the development of new technologies, clean fuels and processes including hydrogen, energy efficiency, DERs.

Powering Ontario’s Growth is the culmination of several years of policy work and stakeholder engagement by the Ministry of Energy and its partners. It is neither the beginning nor the end, but rather the next phase of the government’s energy plan that began with its inaugural election in 2018 and will continue through at least 2026. While Powering Ontario’s Growth and its associated actions represent a new chapter in energy policy, it is something that will continue to grow, iterate, evolve, and adapt over time. What’s certain today is that things are moving fast in Ontario’s energy sector, and that pace is now primed to accelerate.

Read more for the full summary and analysis.‍