Ontario Premier Doug Ford has floated cutting off Canadian power to the U.S. in retaliation for President Trump’s trade war.
On Monday, Ford told The Associated Press that “everything is on the table,” including cutting off electricity to the U.S.
“We power 1.5 million homes and businesses,” he said. “Everything’s on the table. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
He made similar remarks during a Wednesday press conference, calling on other regions of Canada to join him.
“Everything’s on the table, but I can’t do it alone,” Ford said. “I’m not the only province that ships electricity down to the U.S. We need a Team Canada approach.”
In total, Canada supplied less than 1 percent of the total electricity used in the U.S. last year.
However, that’s not divided evenly among states, as some in the Northern U.S. get a more significant share of their power from the neighboring country.
“If we don’t receive the imports from Canada, we have to switch on more expensive plants, and we could get the power from those more expensive plants, but we would be then increasing our CO2 emissions, in addition to paying higher costs,” said John Parsons, a senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and researcher with its Center for Energy and Environmental Policy.
Doug Arent, global fellow at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy, said that Ontario on its own would not likely make a material difference, saying if Ford cut off power to the U.S. unilaterally, it would be more of a “symbolic gesture.”
However, if more provinces were involved, Arent said, Americans in the Northeast U.S. could see prices rise if a shutoff lasts more than a few days.”
“If it’s off for days or weeks, then in that month, there might be price impacts,” he said.
