Assessment of IESO’s Pathways to Decarbonization Study - From the Perspective of

The report identifies challenges such as the time lag between project initiation and generation (10-15 years for major projects), the need for a much larger workforce, the engagement of communities and First Nations, the fact that some technologies such as low-carbon fuels and small modular reactors (SMRs) are still in development, the latency of the regulatory system and the challenge of rising c. [...] These misalignments stem from differences in how the decarbonization challenge is framed and the electricity system is perceived, from the different mandates and objectives of the IESO and Ontario municipalities, and from differences in the information and data on which the analyses are based. [...] The success of Ontario’s climate change response and the future of the electric power system could not be more interdependent; municipal efforts to decarbonize will have significant impacts on the bulk power system, and the prospects for municipal decarbonization strategies to succeed depend largely on the investments and initiatives taken by the IESO. [...] Given the demonstrated inadequacy of the long-range forecast methodology to see into the local dynamics of electricity demand and anticipate how it will change over time, and given the stakes, there is a need for much more thorough and integrated analysis of how Ontario can make the transition to a zero-carbon economy than that provided with the flawed methods and limited scope of the IESO PDS. [...] In each of the scenarios that NREL evaluated, health benefits12 generally equal the system costs and the benefits of avoided climate damage significantly exceed the system costs so that the scenarios generate net benefits that exceed the value of the system costs.