Conservative MPPs have joined Clarington residents in asking for a stringent environmental review of a $270 million transformer station planned for a site on the Oak Ridges Moraine.

The project is currently being reviewed as a “minor transmission facility.”

But local residents fear the station, to be built on a 100-acre site, will threaten the groundwater in the moraine.

MPP Michael Harris (Kitchener-Conestoga) has asked the environment ministry for a full-scale assessment of the proposed station, which would be needed to supply much of the eastern GTA with power should the Pickering nuclear station close.

He’s supported by local MPP John O’Toole (Durham), who said the station with its five big transformers on a 16.5 hectare (41 acre) site merits scrutiny.

“My constituents have trouble putting up a birdhouse on the Oak Ridges Moraine,” O’Toole said in an interview.

The transmission station will occupy dozens of acres “of what we’d call pristine countryside,” he said.

Local residents have already written dozens of letters to the ministry asking for a full-scale environmental review.

Ontario Power Generation is seeking approval to extend the life of the aging nuclear plant past 2015, into the 2020s.

Harris and O’Toole have also set up a meeting with residents and Hydro One officials on Monday to discuss the planned station. Hydro One would build the big new transformer facility, if it’s approved.

“We hope Hydro One will listen to the concerns, as they have very much a right to be heard,” Harris said in an interview.

The environment ministry is still reviewing the request for increased scrutiny.

Hydro One wants a speedy environmental review, in order to get shovels in the ground this spring and have the station completed by 2015.

The residents and MPPs want a formal process with public hearings that would not allow a spring start.

Doug Taylor, one of the residents near the proposed site, said in an interview that the groundwater on the proposed site is just below the surface.

Foundations to support the massive transformers will go deep into the groundwater area, he said. That will be massively expensive, he argued, and will threaten the water supply of local wells and two nearby streams.

A proper environmental assessment will show that the transformer station shouldn’t be built there at all, he said:

“Go find a place where it’s safe. Get it off the Ridges.”

O’Toole says the transformer station could go on the site of the Pickering nuclear station.

Hydro One insists that the proposed site is the best, because it’s at the junction of existing power corridors.

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Putting the station elsewhere – including the Pickering nuclear site – would require building new power lines across existing communities, the company says.

Planners also say that they have to get the station built quickly, in case the life of the Pickering nuclear station can’t be extended and it is forced to close as early as 2015.

That would leave the area 750 megawatts short – the amount of power used by Pickering, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa and Clarington combined.

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