By: Sean Pearce

Rita Burditt asks: I’m just wondering what is being built at Dufferin Street and the Miller’s Sideroad? I can see it’s a Hydro One project. It’s not that peaker plant is it?

That’s a big negative on the peaker plant. While King, along with several other locales, is being eyed as a possible home for a $250-million 350 megawatt natural gas-fired power plant, it will be a long time before anyone sees any shovels in the ground on that one. That is, assuming, if it ever gets built at all.

The municipalities of King, Aurora, East Gwillimbury and Georgina have all said thanks, but no thanks to hosting the plant, so simply forging ahead and building the thing in secret would have proved quite the coup on the Ontario Power Authority’s part. Without resorting to covert construction methods, the OPA still has a lot of work ahead of it before it starts building a plant of any kind.

With that said, you should still get a jolt out of what is going on at Dufferin and the Miller’s Sideroad. The structure you are seeing built is not a power plant at all, but rather the Holland Transformer Station.

Now bear in mind we’re not talking about some sort of futuristic rest stop for shape-shifting robots in wooden shoes. Instead, the station’s purpose, according to Hydro One, is to improve the reliability of the electricity supply to Bradford and the municipalities that make up northern York Region.

As it stands, the infrastructure designed to keep the lights on in the area is limited to a single double-circuit 230 kilovolt transmission line and the Armitage transformer station. According to Hydro One, the demand of the Armitage Transformer Station reached 375 megawatts in 2005, which exceeds its capacity.

As a result, Hydro One, under the direction of the Ontario Energy Board, decided to build a new transformer station somewhere in northern York Region.

The area was also recommended through studies performed by the OPA that forecasted future demand in the area largely because of anticipated growth.

The OPA’s recommendations were to encourage conservation, create demand management initiatives and build a 230/44 kilovolt transformer station in the Holland Marsh.

The role of the two transformers that will be installed at the station will be to convert the 230 kilovolts of electricity travelling through the transmission lines down to 44 kilovolts so that it may be distributed to local homes and businesses.

For the record, construction began in February/March of this year and the facility is expected to be up and running by summer 2009.

Hopefully that answer empowers you, Rita, and, remember, you asked for it.

You asked for it spearce@yrmg.com