Christopher Hume wrote a column today on the rise of the Portlands Energy Centre, something the City and local residents fought the province over, but somehow has found a home on Toronto’s soon-to-be revitalized waterfront.
It is surely disappointing to see how any government, or arm’s length agency for that matter, can say that a 550 megawatt power plant can “fit in” with the planned neighbourhood. We did have a chance to debate this during the recent provincial election, but that never happened because the mainstream media seemed obsessed with religious school funding issue (which never had a chance of passing, even if the Tories got in).
From Hume’s column:
Welcome to Toronto’s beautiful new revitalized waterfront!
Complete with parks, public transit and housing for 100,000, it is an urban dream, a veritable city of the future. Designed by some of the world’s leading architects and landscape architects, these new communities will be sustainable, accessible and fully integrated, cosmopolitan even.
But wait, what’s that monstrous, multi-smokestacked industrial complex now under construction on Unwin Ave. in the heart of the docklands?
Oh, yes, that would be the Portlands Energy Centre, Premier Dalton McGuinty’s little gift to Toronto. Well, actually, it’s not so little. In fact, it’s a vast and obnoxious, misplaced and inappropriate project that will seriously damage plans for waterfront regeneration in Toronto.
Of course, McGuinty meant well; he always means well. But, sadly, we don’t live in a perfect world, and there’s only so much the poor man can do.
Too bad, then, that so much of what he does manage to do is so wrong-headed. Certainly, the energy centre is about as wrong-headed as a premier could get. It even flies in the face of his own government’s efforts to revitalize the waterfront, to make it a model 21st century community for Canada and the world.
photo by Ron Bull/Toronto Star
18 comments
there is one very hard truth that needs to be accepted about the portlands project. The biggest one is that the plant can be built there without the need for any expropriation of land, environmental assessment, whatever – specifically because it is already wired to the grid. Hydro right-of-ways that previously connected the Hearn now lead straight to the new project. Easy peasy. It’s not just about the specific place, it’s about all the infrastructure around the location that’s necessary to make it work. Not only this, power plants have to be put in specific places on the grid to ensure proper load balancing, etc – once again the Hearn’s location is predetermined to work.
Just imagine, for one moment, the amount of hassle and to-do that would occur in order to install the new plant in some other location? All the NIMBY’s would come out, people would be protesting left and right, no matter where it would be placed, the ROWs that would need to be cleared, all that. Installing the plant right next to the Hearn is probably the least of all evils the province would face.
No doubt you’re right, but it still goes against the wishes of the city and its own energy agency in Toronto Hydro. All of the power being generated there could have been done thru conservation. Amazingly short-sighted plan.
The PEC is also an on-demand plant, so the more we conserve, the less it gets used.
As the West Don gets built out one would like to think that the City will plumb in a facility to provide district heating from waste heat, since the PEC pointed out during the debate over its construction that there is not enough demand near enough to the PEC *at the moment* to justify implementing it.
Let’s face it–the city is likely as not to botch waterfront revitalization right now, with its budget crises, excessive deference to the automobile and general short-sightedness. The trouble with that is that once condos are built, they aren’t likely to go anywhere for a long, long time; screw up the site planning, and you’re stuck with it forever (just look around at all the 1960s towers-in-the-park that dot the GTA). The energy centre is a different story–how many years do we have before natural gas is too expensive to burn in excessive quantities? 20? We need things like this plant to protect at least part of the waterfront for the future, when we will, with luck, be better equipped to make decisions. And it’ll be a cool post-industrial relic when natural gas runs out. Maybe it will even be turned into a park someday, like the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord in Germany. That’d be a lot cooler than the condos that would otherwise be built there.
Is Christopher Hume a pessimist or a realist? The waterfront is nothing but a mirage, nothing will come out of it and even if it does I will be too old to enjoy it. Why is the Ontario government determined to constantly screw up Toronto? McGuinty probably means no harm, but he sure is a moron…
There is no need to build such a plant downtown. There are other solutions to supply power to the city, the problem is that this was probably the cheapest and most convenient way to do it. It is like when the guys building the old sewer system in Toronto decided to combine the waste water with the storm runoff into one system instead of making it into two separate infrastructures, they did it because it was cheaper and we are still paying for their short term thinking. You would think people would learn from past mistakes, but no! Now future generations will be paying for this short term cheap solution as well. Where is the leadership in this country? I find it hard to believe that people who make these decisions are this dumb.
Hume doesnt like it because it is not crystal shaped. This location makes the most sense if a plant needs to be built. Conservation is a great idea but we have soooooo far to go on that before we can start shutting plants down. I think cities should have industrial things in them so people can see and talk about them.
Rolling brownouts would certainly encourage conservation, but there are downsides to regular power outages. I recommend avoiding such things.
Too many Nimbys think that electricity is a gift from the gods, and it doesn’t have to be generated anywhere at all. The protest against this power plant was certainly overblown.
Personally, I would not mind living near this power plant; it will only operate during peak days anyways.
Wouldn’t debating this in the provincial election have been way too late with the PEC already under construction?
In any case, it’s hard to get people worked up to preserve the future potential of a site most of them have never seen. Google Earth doesn’t do it justice — you have to stand at the edge of the Turning Basin to realize just how huge it is. Done right, it could have one of the strongest senses of “place” in Toronto. With a neighbourhood power plant, even one that’s only used at peak, doing it right becomes nearly impossible.
I like lots of those Towers in the Park. Lots of them in Toronto work just fine. Go see for yourself, and don’t be so anti-modernist.
hume’s unrelenting negativity week after week has pushed me completely away from reading his column. i’m sure the job of architecture critic in toronto can be a thankless task, but to my eyes hume seems increasingly shell-shocked by the experience. i’d like to hear him propose some alternatives or mention something positive for a change.
I understand that the PEC was designed based on a winning proposal submitted during an international competition. I am curious as to why we couldn’t have had something like Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s District Incineration and Heating plant, located smack in the middle of Vienna. See photos of it here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/damienblake/102316860/, or here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/damienblake/102316699/, or on Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Vena_22.jpg. Industrial buildings do not have to be ugly! The Fernwaerme Plant is quite an amazing sight to see, and has become somewhat of an attraction in its own right. Hundertwasser also designed a similar facility in Osaka (www.newcolonist.com/osaka_waste.html). Interestingly he was dead set against designing such a waste incineration facility based on environmental concerns, but changed his mind when he realized that it would be built with the strictest emission controls and would also be used to provide heat to the district heating system.
I don’t think you’re right, Nick. I’ve done lots of research on the portlands and I have never heard of a designn competition on the power plant.
I agree with Christopher Hume’s evaluation of the sad state of our approach to the rejuvenation of Toronto’s waterfront. His column focused on the Portlands Energy Centre, describing it as a “monstrous, multi-stacked industrial complex”.
I’d like to hear Mr. Hume’s comments about the Island Airport. The airport has a direct negative impact on over 20,000 people living on the waterfront. It limits the potential for our entire waterfront area in terms of tourism, the environment and livebility. The airport and its mainland terminal is essentially a bus terminal on one of the most prominant, valuable and potentially dramatic locations in the downtown area.
The airport has an area of about 215 acres. Think of the potential for a car-free community; affordable housing, parkland, or a special building. Several weeks ago, at the Waterfront Toronto’s AGM, the Key Note Speaker, Mr. Paul Goldberger, Architectural Critic, the New Yorker, said that if he could will away two obstacles on our waterfront, the first would be the Gardiner Expressway and the second would be the island airport. I agree with Mr. Goldberger, but not necessarily in that order.
If Mr. Hume actually visited the waterfront we could introduce him to kids and residents, a concerned local physician and some activists that protest every Friday night. We could buy him lunch at the top of the CN Tower so we can get a good view of the activity, and note the proximity of the airport to Little Norway Park, Ireland Park, The Music Garden, community centre and schools. We could invite the local councillor to get their views on the new road work leading up to the new (and expanding) terminal.
It is time to realize we’re running out of power. Yes, we should be shutting down the coal units. Most of our nuclear units are reaching middle or old age. It takes a long time to build new nuclear plants.
All the conservation and windmills you can possibly achieve is not going to make up for a large single nuclear reactor.
A gas plant is pretty low impact on the surroundings. It is replacing a coal-fired plant on the same site. You should be worried about the effect of the plant on the price of natural gas and stop whining about what it looks like. We are talking about a portlands area of man-made post-industrial wasteland. Get real.
I suspect that hume didn’t have a chance to see the rest of the waterfront that frankly is a big mess that will never be revitalized!But toronto is on its way to being the condo capital of the world.
Power?Demand?I fear there are very few people who realize the incredible thirst the gta has for electrical power.Unfortunately there really isn’t any significant movement at this moment for conservation by torontonians.A few energy saving bulbs doesn’t cut it.
Poor condos, they take all the flack.
Is it not also reasonable to suggest that the thousands on new housing units created by the waterfront revitalization will also require some amount of power to keep them going? Furthermore, as indications point to middle-class professionals and families as the likely occupants on the trendy new pads in the West Don Lands, Lower Don Lands and Portland, it’s probably also safe to assume that these gadget happy products of the new millennium will need an awful lot of power indeed.
I’m no fan of coal power, but I can’t help but applaud the Liberals for have the tenacity to weather the criticism for not closing the plants as promised. That being said, they lose one gold star for thinking they could close them in first place. Something has to power this province and I for one don’t hand over a quarter of my pay check every couple weeks to get brownouts. And that doesn’t make me blind to the environmental cause, it just means that I don’t believe in bad service to prove a point that no one will get.
This province was the energy darling of the world for so long, and our power generation became so entrenched in our provincial identity that it’s really no wonder that it’s going to take us longer than most to make the progressive changes necessary to move forward.
A power station is clearly not an ideal addition to the waterfront. But is this station going to have the same impact as the old Hearn? Definitely not. If only the methane emitted from the water treatment plant down the road could be converted into energy. It’s amazing that the NIMBYS can’t abide an energy plant, but have long ago grown accustomed to the other stink.
“All the conservation and windmills you can possibly achieve is not going to make up for a large single nuclear reactor.”
Dave, something to think about:
A typical nuclear reactor produces 1000-1500 megawatts
Germany was already producing 13,500 megawatts from wind in 2003. You can take it from here.
Everyone else can type “wind versus nuclear” into a search engine and do your own research.