Cold Air from Wordpress

The following is written by my father. I post it, in part, for my sons. It has been a while since David Foot introduced us to the boom babies (Canadians born 1946 to 1964) and the sociological, economic and other significant implications of this cohort. They are still significant. Only relatively recently have they exercised control over the biggest governments in Canada - the Federal Government, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. At the turn of the millennium all of these governments were headed by people born prior to the boom. During this millennium, four of the five jurisdictions have had governments led by boom babies. How have the boom babies been doing? It's difficult to say but one measure would be the change in the ratio of debt to gross domestic product during their administrations.

It took Steve Paikin 4 seconds to mislead the viewers of Ontario's public broadcaster last night. "Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk's year-end report found that Ontarians overpaid for electricity by 37 billion dollars. " -  podcast No, The Auditor General's year-end report stated, correctly: Global Adjustment fees, which are the excess payments to generators over the market price, amounted to $37 billion from 2006 to 2014 Should this confuse Mr. Paikin? The electricity issue is not a a new one in Ontario and the global adjustment, while complex in some respects, does essentially refer to the difference between what a generator is paid, by contract (say $100 per unit), and what the market valued that power at (say $20 per unit). ... "Joining us now to explore why rates keep rising and  other mysteries of the energy file..." Of a 3 person panel on Paikin's show, one has a history of distracting people from understanding Ontario's energy file, and anot...

I am going to be a wet blanket and explain, briefly, why Dr. Jacobson’s ideas, while visionary and incredibly appealing, are also simply not possible.Before I go much further I want to give a hat tip to physicist Dr. Jani-Petri Martikainen at the blog PassiiviIdentiteetti [I copy and pasted that name as I had no chance of spelling it correctly otherwise]. As readers of my blogs know I have already looked at Dr. Jacobson’s work in three previous blog postings:Deconstructing the 100% Fossil Fuel Free Wind, Water and Sunlight USA paper – Part I Why no nuclear power?,Deconstructing the 100% Fossil Fuel Free Wind, Water and Sunlight USA paper – Part II What about those pesky rare earth metals?, andDeconstructing the 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight scenarios – Part III Issues with energy storageIn those blog posts I looked at big picture features of the Jacobson model but I never dug down into the country-specific numbers. This week I was directed to a brilliant blog post by Dr. Martikainen Pa...

A 2015 year-end review of my hourly estimates indicate the curtailment of output from industrial wind turbines (IWTs) soared in 2015. I show total curtailment exceeding 1 million megawatt-hours, which I assume Ontario ratepayers paid ~$127 million for regardless. I show the potential supply curtailed rising to 10% from 6%.   The increase in curtailment in the Bruce region is galling as an examination of output from one IWT location there revealed that during the peak electricity demand of summer it was often a net consumer of grid power rather than a contributor to supply. Note in the above graphic that only the Northwest breaks a trend that sees higher curtailment equate to lower market valuation of the output of the zones' IWTs, with a doubling of curtailment in the Bruce region matched by a halving of market value of production.

Source: Part 1: Why does Mark Jacobson hate Finland?