Cold Air from Wordpress

A good, important, column from Brady Yauch on a Hydro One sale being a side issue to OEB regulator strength

Good tips on identifying junk papers.

The IESO, operator of Ontario's electricity system, recently launched the first major contracting initiative for new industrial wind turbine (IWT) capacity in years, and the municipality of Chatham-Kent was quick to show support for projects within its borders. There are all sorts of messy issues involved in the Large Renewable Procurement (LRP)  beyond those of concentrating IWT's in one area, but they are relevant issues only if one is concerned about value; there's no evidence that the IESO is, but this post will review the value proposition of the projects proposed in Chatham-Kent. The proposed projects, as described by renews in  Thumbs-up for 200MW North Kent : The Municipality of Chatham-Kent has agreed to support the construction and operation of the two-phase North Kent proposal. The 40 to 50-turbine 100MW first phase will fulfill Samsung’s deal to build 1169MW of wind projects under the Korean company’s Green Energy Investment Agreement [ GEIA ] with the province,...

I received an e-mail last week requesting help responding to claims attributed to a wind-industry friendly administration in Ontario claiming that we were, at times, importing electricity. I've pulled some figures in response and thought I'd take a couple of minutes to post my comments. Of course we often have some imports into Ontario - because it's a market connected to other markets. However, the number of hours Ontario imports more than it exports dropped from market opening (in May 2002) to the recession of 2009/09.

Ontario's IESO has released reams of reporting today. My initial take is it communicates an organization is decline. The least credible claim I've picked up on so far is in the new Conservation Progress Report for the 4th quarter of 2014 . Here's how peaksaverPLUS is described : peaksaver PLUS is only activated on very hot summer days (from May 1st until September 30th) when demand is at a peak so..... couldn't possibly be any savings in Q4

This was first posted on my coldaircurrents site  - which I use for posting found items of interest. This post went beyond pointing out OPG's 2014 results, with enough of an edge I'm double posting it here. OPG's final 2014 results have been released and the net income they are reporting is, if my records are correct, the highest since 1998 [Toronto]: – Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG or Company) today reported income of $568 million, before extraordinary gain, for 2014 compared to $135 million for 2013. Net income, after extraordinary gain, for 2014 was $811 million, compared to $135 million in 2013. Let me tell you about extraordinary items. but first... There are new business segments for contracted generation (biomass, hydro and gas partnerships) and eliminated business segments (thermal, or fossil fuels, and non-regulated hydro). I've flipped through OPG's 2014  MANAGEMENT’S DISCUSSION AND ANALYSIS  and spotted some things of interest to me, relevant to man...

I live a little north of the commonly perceived end of Mississauaga's world (Barrie), but actually still within the orbit of the Toronto area. The first hint of trouble yesterday was in an e-mail I received at 5:22 pm yesterday originating in Scarborough: I have had four power outages so far today and am ready to strangle ... I'm not condoning the sentiment. heh heh heh Just after 7 the first phone call (south Etobicoke); with the request to see what's happening with their power situation because not only is their power out, the data wasn't working with the cell provider either. Hilarity ensues: nothing on Toronto Hydro outage map for the area, so I entered an outage form - which after entering saw the screen change to a screen telling me if I have a problem to fill out the form below - which did not exist. I gave the phone number for Toronto Hydro out to my caller, and wished them well.