Nanticoke Power Generation Station

Ontario Power Generation’s coal-fired thermal generating station in Nanticoke, Ontario is the largest of its kind in North America and one of the ten largest in the world. Located on the north shore of Lake Erie in Haldimand County, Ontario it has eight 500-MW generators produce a total of 4,000 MW of power. The station's annual production is in the range of 20 to 24 billion kilowatt-hours (kWh), enough electricity to run nearly 2.5 million households for a full year.

In 1995, Ontario Power Generation shut down several primary, base-load nuclear generating stations for a lengthy refurbishment program. The utility’s thermal generating stations - formerly used exclusively for peak load periods, to supplement the main nuclear and hydraulic stations – consequently became important for supplying base-load demand. When demand for electricity is high, all eight units are put into service and it produces approximately 15% of Ontario's electricity needs by itself.

This generating station is the largest polluter in Canada, and one of the largest in North America, emiting many pollutants, including sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, lead, other heavy metals and arsenic. The Government of Ontario plans to keep it open until early 2009. Closure of the plant at that date however, seems rather unlikely as viable energy options for the growing Ontario economy are becoming scarce.

Nuclear, Clean Coal, and Natural Gas-powered options as well as alternative energy sources are being considered to replace the massive energy output of the Nanticoke plant, however, to date no specific plan has been drawn up. In the same Nanticoke industrial park Esso maintains an oil refinery and Stelco has a steel production facility.

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USA-Canada / Canada-Ontario

Lat: 42° 48' 5.41" N
Long: 81° 4' 18.65" W

Elevation: 598 Ft.

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Precision is: High. Pinpoints the exact spot.

A Canon EOS 5D with a Canon 16-35mm L series lens set at the 16mm setting was used on a Manfrotto 303SPH head. The cubic panorama was stitched together with RealViz Stitcher V4. This panorama was shot with available light at 1/200 of a second @ f 5.6 in Raw mode with an ISO of 100 on the Canon EOS 5D. I processed all the images in the RAW conversion software Capture One Pro V3.7 from Phase. This software allows me to set the white point balance, drop the contrast, adjust the colour saturation, and fine tune the exposures before I create pixels. This process allows for a better workflow and cleaner files then correcting in PhotoShop. The images are then stitched together in RealViz Stitcher and the QuickTime panoramas are then converted from the flat tiff images