Road Salt and Power

Power We Can't Outsource: Cogeneration, Resilience, and Ottawa's Coming Energy Crunch

A case for building new combined heat-and-power generation in Ottawa — and using every megawatt-hour twice.

Peter Karwacki — Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe)

The problem isn't hypothetical anymore

In June 2026, Hydro Ottawa's CEO told city council something that should have made front-page news for a week: the utility is fielding connection requests from 34 large-load projects totalling 1,075 megawatts — about 86% of Hydro Ottawa's entire average system load last year. Roughly 60% of that demand is coming from data centres. Transformer lead times, once measured in months, now stretch up to four years. By the end of this year, total connection requests on the books are expected to exceed the electricity Ottawa's homes and businesses currently use, combined.

The CEO called it "extraordinary pressure." That's an understatement dressed up in utility-speak. What it actually means is this: Ottawa's electrical grid, built for a slower-growing, less digitized city, is now being asked to absorb a decade's worth of demand growth in a period of two or three years — and the infrastructure to serve it doesn't yet exist.

Hydro Ottawa's answer is to roughly double its capital investment in the grid over the next five years. That's necessary, but it's also slow, expensive, and entirely dependent on transmission and distribution upgrades that take years to permit and build. It does nothing to add actual generating capacity — it just moves electrons that already exist more efficiently. Ottawa needs both: a stronger grid, and more power flowing into it.

Why cogeneration, and why now

A conventional gas-fired power plant is a remarkably wasteful machine. Burn gas, spin a turbine, make electricity — and vent roughly half to two-thirds of the fuel's energy into the sky or a cooling tower as heat nobody uses. A cogeneration (or "combined heat and power") plant does the same combustion, generates the same electricity, but captures that waste heat and puts it to work: heating buildings, producing steam, warming water.

This isn't experimental technology. Ottawa already has one, quietly running near the hospital campus on Riverside Drive — a 74-megawatt combined-cycle facility that has, for years, supplied steam, hot water, and chilled water to the hospitals and institutions it serves, on top of generating power. Cities across North America and Europe have built entire district-heating networks around this same principle for over a century; Toledo, Ohio, was running hot-water district heat with sidewalk snowmelt as early as 1909.

The efficiency case is not a marginal one. A well-designed cogeneration plant can put 75-80% of the energy in the fuel to productive use, compared to 35-45% for electricity generation alone. That's the difference between burning gas once and getting one output, or burning gas once and getting two.

A new plant, built for resilience

I'm proposing the City and its federal partners examine a new combined heat-and-power facility on the site of the former RCMP national headquarters parking lot at 1200 Vanier Parkway — underused federal land on the Rideau River, close enough to serve nearby institutional and residential loads with both electricity and heat.

Three reasons this belongs on the table now:

1. Resilience the grid alone can't offer

A plant that generates its own power on-site keeps running when the wider grid doesn't. For hospitals, emergency services, and cold-weather-vulnerable residents, that's not a luxury — it's the difference between an inconvenience and a crisis during an ice storm or a major outage. On-site generation paired with a local heat loop is a genuine hedge against exactly the kind of grid strain Hydro Ottawa is now warning council about. It doesn't wait in the multi-year transformer queue with everyone else; it's a parallel source of supply, not another straw pulling on the same one.

2. Waste heat that does real work — starting with the salt problem

Ottawa Riverkeeper's five-year monitoring study is unambiguous: 90% of water samples collected from 45 local streams over five years contained chloride at toxic levels to aquatic life. Chloride doesn't break down. It doesn't wash away with the spring melt. Levels stay above the chronic toxicity threshold into September, months after the last truck spread salt on a road. Ottawa Riverkeeper's own top recommendation to municipalities is to develop — and actually follow — a real Road Salt Management Plan.

A hydronic snowmelt loop, built with the plant's captured waste heat and run under sidewalks and walkways near the site, is a concrete way to cut chloride at the source. No ice, no need to salt it. Holland, Michigan runs exactly this system today: waste heat from its municipal power plant circulates through 190 miles of tubing under the city's streets and sidewalks, melting an inch of snow an hour in freezing conditions — without a grain of salt.

This wouldn't replace salting citywide. It's not meant to. It's a targeted, provable use of heat that would otherwise be wasted, near a facility that would otherwise be venting it — and a real answer to a documented environmental harm, not a talking point.

3. Federal room to build has actually opened up

New gas generation in Canada is often assumed to be politically dead on arrival. That's outdated. In May 2026, the federal government announced a national electricity strategy that explicitly carves out a "strategic role" for natural gas generation and signalled it will loosen the Clean Electricity Regulations to allow new units in the near term. Even under the existing rules, a newly commissioned plant doesn't face binding emissions limits until 20 years after it's built — meaning a plant approved now wouldn't hit that wall until the mid-2040s, with a full decade-plus to plan for compliance through efficiency, carbon capture, or an emissions-offset pathway. Over a hundred other Canadian projects have already used a "planned unit" exemption process to get ahead of the rules entirely.

The federal appetite for new gas capacity, in other words, is heading in the opposite direction from where most people assume it is.

What still needs to be nailed down before this is a real proposal, not just a good idea:

• Land status. 1200 Vanier Parkway is federal Crown land, and as of 2026 it still shows at least some active federal use (RCMP pension services remains listed at the address). This isn't a City-owned lot the City can simply approve — it requires PSPC/Treasury Board engagement, not a council vote.
• Heritage designation. The main building on the site — the L.H. Nicholson Building — is a Recognized Federal Heritage Building. That constrains what happens to the building itself; it's a separate question from what happens to the parking lot, but any project on the campus will draw federal heritage review.
• Ward boundary. The site sits close to the line between Ward 12 (Rideau-Vanier) and Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe). I'm not going to claim this as "in my backyard" without confirming which ward it actually falls in — that gets verified before this goes further, not after.

What this doesn't solve — and shouldn't be sold as solving

I want to be direct about the limits of this idea, because overselling it would undercut everything else I've written about accountability in this campaign. A cogeneration plant at this scale adds meaningful local generation and heat capacity, but it is not, by itself, an answer to the 1,075 megawatts of data-centre demand now queued up at Hydro Ottawa. That volume of load needs provincial-scale supply and transmission investment — nuclear refurbishment, new renewables, storage, and grid reinforcement working together. No single new plant changes that math.

What a project like this does is add a resilient, efficient, locally-controlled increment of supply and heat — the kind of project that pays for itself twice, once in electrons and once in avoided waste, salt, and outage risk. That's a real contribution. It's not a silver bullet, and I won't pretend otherwise.

A path forward, in order:

1. Confirm the fundamentals first. Federal land status, heritage constraints, and ward boundary — verified through public records requests, not assumed.
2. Scope it as a pilot, not a mandate. Size the plant to serve a defined nearby institutional and residential load, with the heat loop and snowmelt application built in from day one rather than retrofitted later.
3. Attach a funding source to the proposal before it goes to any vote — consistent with the standard I've argued for on every major capital file this cycle. No project gets tabled without an answer to "who pays, and from what."
4. Build in measurement. Track chloride reduction in adjacent storm drains, outage performance during grid disturbances, and actual heat/power output against design targets — publish the results.
5. Put a sunset and review clause on it, the same structural discipline I've called for on every major liability decision this council makes: revisit the numbers on a fixed schedule, not on political convenience.

Ottawa is going to need more power, more resilience, and less salt in its rivers — all three problems are real, documented, and getting worse. This is one project that touches all three at once, on land that's currently sitting underused. It deserves a straight answer from the City and the federal government about whether it can actually happen — not because it's a silver bullet, but because it's the kind of structural, evidence-first idea this city keeps failing to even ask about.

Peter Karwacki is a candidate for Ward 13 (Rideau-Rockcliffe) in Ottawa's October 2026 municipal election.