By ANDREW WAREING
More power to, or rather from, Kirkland Lake by next summer.
Kirkland Lake Power Corp. is in the environmental review process stage to develop a new gas-powered turbine to generate an additional 30 megawatts of power to add to Ontario’s power grid at peak periods. The facility already operates generators that put out 106 megawatts and are powered by natural gas and wood waste.
“The addition of the gas turbine will be to provide power to the province’s electricity grid during times of high demand,” says Kirkland Lake Power general manager Dan Raimondo.
He says the decision to build the power plant came last year from a request for proposals by the Ontario government, which was seeking power companies interested in developing extra power generators.
The anticipated cost to develop the project is $30 million. The target for going on-line onto the Ontario power grid is by August 2004. Parent company Northland Power Inc. will finance the project and, once built, the company will enter into a power purchase agreement with the Ontario Electricity Financial Corp., Raimondo says.
“Kirkland Lake Power was chosen because we have the existing co-generation plant that is already feeding power onto the Ontario grid,” says Raimondo. “It can handle the (new) plant.”
The company is currently undergoing an environmental assessment for the project.
“It’s a process that can take three to six months,” says Raimondo. “It’s mandatory for projects of this type. We have to go through a complete environmental assessment. We already held our public meetings on June 10 for the project as part of the environmental assessment screening.”
The company is looking at two possible engines to run the turbine, including one made by Rolls-Royce Ltd. and another by General Electric. The turbine utilizes “dry low emissions” to ensure that the turbine’s engine runs extremely clean, he says.
“The air-fuel mixture is trimmed to allow for more complete combustion,” he says. “It’s like comparing the old cars that used to belt out black smoke or jet engines that would kick out yellow smoke versus (engines today, which are) much cleaner.”
He says the community is responding favourably to the project, which has received full support from Kirkland Lake municipal government and the business community.
Tenders for the project will go out as soon as the environmental assessment receives approval.
“As far as the construction goes, we’re going to draw as much as we can from the local community,” he says. “We have to wait until we get through the environment review phase before we can really get into the construction phase of the project.
“We’ve done a lot of work to study (the project’s) impacts. We don’t foresee any problem to get our environmental requirements to run the facility,” says Raimondo.
