Ontario is a province rich in water-power and poor in coal, the fuel of early thermal-electric power stations. Nevertheless, in the late 19th century, coal was the fuel used in the province's small, privately owned thermal-electric power stations. When the mayor of Buffalo opened the first hydroelectric generator at Niagara Falls, New York, in 1896, Ontario businessmen looked across the border with envy—which turned to frustration as the power franchises for the Canadian Falls were sold to private entrepreneurs, most of them American.
 

Despite the socialist overtones, the first call for government control came from small businessmen and municipal representatives, and the Ontario Hydro-Electric Power Commission, created in 1906, was the child of the newly elected Conservative government of James P. Whitney. The first chairman of the world's first publicly owned distributing system for hydroelectric power was Adam Beck, the former mayor of London, Ontario, and a gifted and flamboyant champion of cheap power.
 

1. The Entire Line Gang at the Guelph Light and Power Company, 1905. 2. Pickering B Hydro, Technicians at Work on the Calendria Face of Nuclear Reactor.

At first, the commission acted as a middleman, buying power for transmission to its municipal partners: 14 in 1910, 104 in 1914. By 1914 Beck, now Sir Adam the "Power Knight," had built his first generating station on the Severn River and had initiated a policy of buying out Ontario's private power companies.

Bolstered by a four-fold increase in demand during World War I, Beck won a province-wide plebiscite to give Hydro pride of place on the Niagara River with the largest generating station of its time, the Queenston-Chippawa station, since re-christened Sir Adam Beck-Niagara GS No. 1.

After World War II Robert Saunders, another strong-minded former mayor and Hydro chairman, pushed through a $352 million frequency standardization program. Starting in 1949, the obsolete 25-cycle system still flickering in many southern Ontario homes was updated to the modern 60 watt cycle.

By 1970 the whole province was joined in a single power grid. Ontario Hydro's operation area measures 650,000 square kilometers, but its reach is further still. Through an electrically synchronized, interconnecting grid involving most facilities in Canada, and most in the United States east of the Rockies, Hydro can exchange or sell power across the continent.

Despite the massive scale of the St. Lawrence Seaway development in the late 1950s, during the second half of the century demand outstripped Ontario's hydroelectric capacity. Expansion in the 1960s had three faces instead of one.

To meet it, hydroelectric development continued. Coal, gained a new importance and, in the enthusiastic words of Premier John Robarts, Ontario discovered a dozen new Niagaras with the use of the province's abundant supply of uranium to produce electricity by nuclear reaction. Ontario Hydro, the special statutory corporation that succeeded the Hydro commission in 1974, approaches the 1990's with more than half its output coming from nuclear power.