Cold Air from Wordpress

The IESO is the organization now tasked with operating Ontario's electricity schemes. The lawyer tasked with heading the key engineering infrastructure had the audacity to say this in a recent speech to an industry organization : You may have heard me speak about the concept of public value in other venues, it is a concept that resonates with me and one that resonates with our employees … it guides what and why we do what we do. In the former IESO organization, our public value centred around our system and market responsibilities, managing those responsibilities to promote both reliability and efficiency that our customers could count on... let me give a project example – but a project that I also believe meets my public value objective. As you will know, we currently operate the smart meter data repository in our role as the Smart Meter Entity for the province of Ontario. Seriously? He's bringing up smart meters and the MDM/R as example of what "resonates with" him....

Ontario's environment commissioner is out with a report on conservation today, and from the press tweets I've seen thus far it's going to cause a brief bonanza of idiocy. Some realities Ontario reporters should know if they've written on the topic for more than a month - particularly if they're going to write on time-of-use electricity rates. Canada's latest National Inventory report submission to the UNFCC showed Ontario with 167,000kt CO2e for 2012 (167 Mt), down 10,000 from 1990. Emissions due to electricity were down more than the total over that time, from 25,500 to 14,500 kt CO2e. The emissions from electricity (and Heat) generation in Ontario in 2014 were less than half of 2012's low level: I'd estimate 6,000 kt, although an Ontario Energy Report produced for 2014's third quarter shows it may be slightly higher.

A little different topic, but Will Boisvert's Harmonic Distortion is a notable work from early in 2014: http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/journal/issue-4/harmonic-destruction

"Ontario ratepayers have given at least $1.7 billion in subsidies to wind developers since 2006, when the province first started subsidizing industrial wind farms. The study found that nearly 60% of all wind subsidies have gone to six companies with more than $10 billion in annual revenue and 82% to nine companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue. In total, 90% of wind subsidies have gone to just 11 companies, including Suncor, Enbridge and Samsung, among others. The study also finds that the amount of subsidies could grow to as much as $8 billion over the next decade and $13 billion over the next 20 years."

Just when the fools' Quebec as a solution to nuclear energy in Ontario meme seemed to be disappearing, the chief Liberal propagandist wades in with an article devoid of reporting . Martin Regg Cohn wants your perception of reality to include some interesting things. Writing for the paper that finds Toronto's lowest common denominator most successfully, Metro Martin drop some bon mots from a spritzer bistro After months of negotiations kicked off by Wynne and Couillard, the two provinces are set to sign a historic power-sharing agreement — electrical, not political. The goal is to backstop each other’s base load electricity during peak periods Base load refers to load that is always there (the base), and baseload supply refers to supply that is always there. Backstopping baseload is a stupid combination  of words This new approach will lead to ongoing power swaps without any money changing hands It's a pity Regg Cohn didn't ask for confirmation this wasn't already ...

Jennifer A. Dlouhy produced a column which supports my instinct that the U.S. will suffer along with, if not more than, Canada if Keystone XL isn't completed. German CEO: The world is watching US moves on Keystone XL WASHINGTON — Business leaders around the world are watching to see what the United States does with the Keystone XL pipeline, the CEO of engineering giant Siemens said Friday. ...Siemens AG CEO Joe Kaeser said that if the U.S. government ultimately rejects the project, it would be like “stopping halfway” — harvesting North American energy resources but failing to transport them to market. “It doesn’t do any good to have the greatest opportunity in the world to produce cheap, (reliable and sustainable) energy if you stop halfway through and don’t transport that blessing you folks have in this great country,” he said in an interview Friday. “If the project was held up, the signal would be they have all the opportunities, which everyone dies to have, and they didn’t take ...

I am writing on the very poor paper CanWEA paid for to debunk the Fraser study. My Cold Air study will support the criticisms made by McKitrick and Adams in "Hot air from the wind power lobby"