Ontario to tap more water power

May 3--NIAGARA FALLS, Ont. -- Take away all the tourism, glitter and casinos, and Niagara Falls still packs a big punch.

There's power in the falls. Electrical power. And Canadians plan to use more of it.

Ontario Power Generation, a private company that manages electrical energy for the province, intends to draw 14 percent more water from the falls, divert it through a massive tunnel and help meet the growing demand for electricity that has come with Metro Toronto's population boom.

The tunnel is expected to open in 2009.

Too bad there's only one Niagara Falls, said John Earl, an Ontario Power Generation spokesman in Toronto. "We can't build another power source like that."

The world's largest hard rock-boring machine arrived in Niagara Falls, Ont., this week to begin digging a 7-mile-long tunnel beneath the Canadian city that will take enough water from the falls to provide electricity for 160,000 homes.

The tunnel will be 47.2 feet in diameter. Water that flows through it will create enough juice to power the equivalent of all the homes in both cities of Niagara Falls, as well as Lockport and North Tonawanda, for the next 90 years.

Most of the 20 million tourists who visit Niagara Falls each year won't notice a change in the flow over the falls themselves, power officials said, although some who stay on the top floors of hotels may see more exposed rocks during part of the year.

The $877 million (U.S.) project will begin in August and is scheduled to be completed in three years. Ontario will be the sole beneficiary of the new power.

A 1950 treaty between the United States and Canada equally divides water diverted from the Upper Niagara River to generate electricity.

During the peak tourist season, about half of the average 1.5 million gallons of water that would flow over the falls each second is diverted for power generation on the Canadian and American sides.

"The times that we will be taking the unutilized flow are in winter, when there are few tourists, or at night, when the flow isn't as visible," said Dean Norton, Ontario Power spokesman in Niagara Falls.

When the tunnel is completed and the maximum allowable amount of water is diverted from the river during off-tourist times, only 374,000 gallons per second would flow over the falls.

The new Niagara tunnel will bring the Canadians to the limit they can pull from the falls. The Americans reached their limit four decades ago.

Ontario faces a serious energy shortage, people in the power business agree.

New York State says it has power to spare.

"We try to have 18 percent more capacity than peak loads," said Kenneth Klapp, a spokesman for New York Independent System Operator, a not-for-profit outgrowth of the State Power Pool, which oversees the state's electricity supply and demand.

The Ontario tunnel is the first major endeavor since the Niagara Power Project on the American side of the border was completed in 1961.

The boring machine that will help create it was shipped and trucked in 100 separate parts from Europe and Japan.

The 2,866-ton machine will chew up the rock at about 50 feet a day and carve out 56.5 million cubic feet of rock, enough to fill Ralph Wilson Stadium to the height of a 30-story building.

Digging will begin at the Adam Beck generating stations, near the Lewiston-Queenston Bridge, where improvements have been made to turn the extra water into more electricity.

The tunnel's route will follow the path of Stanley Avenue, the main north-south downtown street, gradually rising at an 8 percent grade until it surfaces slightly more than a mile above the Horseshoe Falls in the Chippawa area.

As the boring machine moves forward, the excavated dirt and rock will be dumped onto a huge conveyer belt and carried back to the Adam Beck plants to be recycled for housing construction. About 90 percent of it will be made available to the building industry for the production of clay bricks, Norton said.

The trick with the falls lies in striking a balance between preserving their beauty as a tourist attraction and using their power as a source of electrical energy.

That balance was breached long ago, says one prominent area conservationist.

"The minute you divert one drop of water from the falls, you begin to diminish their natural condition," said Paul Gromosiak, a Niagara Falls historian who has written several books on the subject.

"The falls have evolved over 12,000 years and created the 7-mile-long Niagara Gorge," he said. "We should allow that natural evolution to continue and extend the gorge even further. There are other ways to produce power."

Not exactly, say the power people, and not in as environmentally friendly a way.

Sources are needed to generate electricity. Nuclear, coal and natural gas are among those sources, as are water, wind and solar power. Ontario plans to phase out coal-driven plants and already has revamped three nuclear plants.

Proposals call for building more nuclear plants, but these are long-range plans and extremely expensive.

To really wow tourists, Gromosiak suggests the power authorities on both sides of the border forget about generating electricity just a couple of days out of the year and let the falls flow at full bore.

"The thunder of the water would be completely awesome," he said. "The mist would rise up into the stratosphere, and if the sun is shining, there would be not one, not two, but three rainbows. Now that would be something to see."

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