OTTAWA — Nuclear power is at the core of the Ontario government’s planning for its energy needs and the provincial government needs to move fast if it’s going to build enough reactors quickly enough, Energy and Electrification Minister Stephen Lecce says.

Renewables and hydroelectricity are also important, he said in an interview with The Logic, but they’ll be supporting nuclear plants as Ontario’s grid faces increasing demands from electrified industry and transportation.

“It’s an all-of-the-above approach, but when it comes to really scaling up, nuclear energy will play a critical role,” Lecce said.

Other jurisdictions are reaching the same conclusion, he said, “including nations who turned away from nuclear, who are now coming back to it because they see it as the only viable option” to get that volume of emission-free generation.

Premier Doug Ford named Lecce to his new post at the beginning of June, after Lecce spent nearly five years as education minister. He has a big task: although Ontario has an ambitious (and expensive) plan to build all kinds of electricity generation, that plan will still leave the province tens of thousands of megawatts short of its projected needs by 2050.

Lecce said Ford has instructed him to find those megawatts and then some, so Ontario can be an electricity exporter.

“Government, working with our energy sector, is going to have to work quickly to build out a plan to beat that gap,” he said.

Ontario intends to add reactors to two of its three current major nuclear plants. Lecce would not say whether he thinks the province will need additional stations: “These will all be discussions, I think, for the future.”

Though there’s a lot to do, Ontario is laying good groundwork for a major nuclear power buildup, said George Christidis, the Canadian Nuclear Association’s vice-president of government relations and international affairs.

“The work is started and it’s happening. The province has taken a pretty strong leadership role in identifying what is needed,” Christidis said

The Ontario government has started work to add 4,800 megawatts of generating capacity to the existing Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, and multiple potential contractors are eager for the business. It’s in advanced preparations for a 300-megawatt small modular reactor at the Darlington station east of Toronto and is planning for three more there. And it’s in the middle of multibillion-dollar refurbishments of venerable Candu reactors that produce a steady 10,000 or so megawatts of baseload power around the clock these days.

Christidis spoke on the phone from an international nuclear conference in Greece. He told The Logic he’s hearing a lot of interest there in what Ontario is up to.

“You can tell, being here in the Balkans, energy security is very much top of mind,” he said.

Nevertheless, the province will need 17,800 additional megawatts of nuclear power by 2050, according to the arm’s-length authority for its energy grid. The Bruce expansion and the small reactors at Darlington would deliver 6,000 between them.

Building the rest will take extensive cooperation between the Ontario and federal government. The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission licenses reactors, and the projects will need federal supports and tax credits.

“I suspect Mr. Lecce is going to be fully engaged on that,” Christidis said.

Although Lecce expects new nuclear reactors will be the workhorses of a beefier, greener power grid in Ontario, “we will let the market dictate whatever is most affordable and reliable.”

That could include wind power, even though the Progressive Conservatives campaigned against numerous renewables projects in 2018 and even dismantled a wind farm that was approaching completion.

Lecce said two things are different now.

“We now have—soon coming online—storage capability to harness the energy, which we didn’t have five and seven years ago,” which means wind and solar power can be captured when they’re available and fed to the grid when they’re needed, he said.

Furthermore, he said, the Tories’ 2018 position wasn’t against renewables, but against the previous Liberal government’s Green Energy Act, which bulldozed local opposition to large installations of windmills and solar panels.

“We will always empower local communities to have a say, and they will dictate, fundamentally, if they want to have that type of energy infrastructure or not,” Lecce said.