insideTORONTO.com
Mike Adler
03/16/06
Hearn power plant bidder wants fair treatment from province.
Walking in a stiff wind, Bill Leedy keeps looking up at the massive red brick walls of the Richard L. Hearn Thermal Generating Station, searching for cracks.
In places, he acknowledged, the roof leaks and water dribbles through walls of the former coal-fired plant. Still, for a 60-year-old building that has sat idle since the 1980s, it looks solid, suggested Leedy, who for two years has been the Toronto point man for a Baltimore-based firm seeking to resurrect the Hearn with natural gas turbines.
But what chance does Leedy really have, a month after the province approved a rival bid by TransCanada Pipelines to build a new gas-fired plant next door to the Hearn on Unwin Avenue?
"I'm asked this question in Baltimore all the time. I honestly don't know," he said this week.
It won't be easy, but Leedy, executive director of generation plant development for Constellation Energy Generation Group, said he's encouraged by support his bid is getting from the city, the Toronto Waterfront Revitalization Corporation and many Riverdale residents.
"Governments change their minds, they alter their decisions," said Leedy, who thinks the Toronto-Danforth provincial byelection on March 30, in which Liberal candidate Ben Chin backs TransCanada's Portlands Energy Centre and New Democrat Peter Tabuns supports Constellation's plan, "will be a referendum on the two projects."
Constellation's partner Toronto Hydro has complained the province treated their bid unfairly and Leedy said he's frustrated by "misinformation" about it, including some comments from Energy Minister Donna Cansfield.
"I think the people of Toronto and the people of Ontario deserve to hear what the truth is. We are disappointed to the extent that inaccurate information has been propagated."
In an interview, Cansfield has said Constellation asked for an environmental assessment on its project to be waived and the Hearn site sold to its consortium for free. And although their bid was presented as cheaper than the PEC, Cansfield said Constellation "indicated they would have to spend $120 million in temporary generation" to make their plan work by 2008, when experts say the city will need more power to avoid blackouts.
"We never have and never will ask that property to be given to us at any price, let alone for nothing," Leedy responded this week, saying Constellation has offered "to step into the shoes" of Hearn lease-holder Studios of America.
The new plant would pay property taxes and rent - $24 million over next 20 years - to the site landlord Ontario Power Generation and spend "upwards of $10 million" restoring the Hearn, he added.
Constellation did ask for an assessment waiver, said Leedy, but wants one no longer. After seeing Cansfield give the PEC "certain financial assurances and cost-recovery mechanisms" that would allow its backers to accelerate approvals and otherwise speed up construction, Constellation only wants to be treated the same way, he said.
As for Cansfield's statement that the Hearn can't be made ready in time, Leedy said that's not accurate. What Cansfield described as $120-million worth of temporary generators is just her estimate on a contingency plan, he said.
And in any case, the Hearn project is coupled with a Toronto Hydro plan to save 200 megawatts by 2008 through conservation programs, which "buys us a year's worth of contingency," Leedy said.
Constellation, however, is still fending off swipes from the ministry about its proposal, which Cansfield has called incomplete.
"They have no designs, there's no environmental approvals, there's no site," added Neal Kelly, senior media advisor to Cansfield, who stuck to his boss's prediction this week.
"There's no question they'll be into temporary generation if they're the candidate selected."
In addition, there are "all kinds of questions about the structural integrity" of the Hearn, which would have to be substantially changed to put Constellation's turbines inside, Kelly said.
He also questioned the type of turbine Constellation is proposing to use, saying they are "not proven technology."
Leedy said Constellation already operates a power plant using those turbines. In a few weeks, the company will release drawings showing how they can be placed inside the Hearn.
Both bids now seem to offering benefits to the community on what is now a forlorn stretch of waterfront near the Leslie Street Spit.
Besides conserving space by putting a plant in the Hearn, Constellation is hoping to restore and rent out the plant's three-storey, 45,000-square-foot office wing. It would fund a $30-million trust, administered by "diverse and competing interests" which could, for instance, help the city build a running path around the Shipping Channel or a brick facade around the Hydro One switching station behind the Hearn.
Though its protected by a heritage designation, Kelly also suggested "something" would happen to the Hearn after the PEC was built.
"The Hearn could disappear, the Hearn could become a cultural centre," he said. "The building can still be used for something, just not a power plant again."
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If PEC is ever built, would it not make sense to tear down The Hearn and make this land available for open space uses and redevelopment.
