Cold Air from Wordpress

Ontario Minister Chiarelli has emoted a letter responding to Brady Yauch's excellent piece on the province's gluttonous "conservation" spending. Chiarelli's letter is targeted to Ontarians with lower bills. They'll be difficult to find. "Over the past four years, Ontarians have done something remarkable" states Chiarelli, but the Annual Yearbook of Distributors demonstrates quite the opposite - Ontarians have been done something remarkable: In 2010 Ontario's distributors had "Power and Distribution Revenue" of $12.8 billion and delivered 121.1 terawatt-hours (TWh) In 2014 Ontario's distributors had "Power and Distribution Revenue" of $16.7 billion and delivered 119.8 terawatt-hours (TWh) That's an increase of 30.5% collected for less consumption but, apparently, having "conserved enough energy to power a city the size of London for two years or every hospital in the province for a year." I recently showed t...

Parker Gallant summarizes the electricity situation as of July 14th, but things got more complicated with the release of final July global adjustment figures on the 17th. New splits for global adjustment classes took effect July 1, and for the new 12-month period the "class A" scheme hasn't worked to shift cost away from large users nearly as well as it has in the past. Good. Industry can't handle higher prices, but it's high time the "stakeholders" turned their attention to actual cost controls - such as Spain's action on renewable energy contracts - instead of sleight of hand tricks to get preferential treatments for their sector.

Required reading: Brady Yauch on curtailing the insane spending in Ontario's electricity sector.

from Parker Gallant: In the past six months, reports from the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, the C.D. Howe Institute, the Association of Major Power Consumers of Ontario, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business and the Ontario Chamber of Commerce have all called for “competitive” electricity prices. A few of the members of some of those associations already benefit from absorption of some costs by residential and small business ratepayers, but still complain their electricity bills are too high and not competitive with competing jurisdictions in Canada and the U.S.! Ontario is cursed with probably the most complex electricity system in the world even though 80% of our electricity is generated by nuclear and hydro.  Both of those generation sources produce power at an average of about 6-7 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), yet Ontario’s delivered electricity prices are among the highest in North America.   Why? ... continue reading at Wind Concerns Ontario for 22 existing rea...

I just left a comment on an article at the Globe and Mail  with the topic of importing power to Ontario from Labrador- which I'll post below. Yesterday the National Post broke a story about Ontario looking to import electricity from Labrador . There are lots of ugly aspects to the tale, and some interesting ones - but it'd require a lot of time to examine a "promise of cheaper, cleaner power [that] is, in effect, nothing more than a distraction, a promise that will never be fulfilled" - as  Terence Corcoran aptly describes it. My comment in the Globe criticized the Minister of Energy's nonsense spin on saving money by not utilizing the natural gas fueled power plants contracted since the election of the Liberal party in 2003. If you believe Mr. Ciarelli is an honest man, it's not that he doesn't understand the system inherited, but that he doesn't know the system his government created. Thus:

"Greens" target every license renewal of every nuclear plant - here's the overview on the situation for California's last nuclear power plant

A good article for those who haven't been exposed to wind generation requiring redundant, firm, capacity. I think this makes valuation quite simple: the value of wind generation is the cost of the fuel it displaces - without a real price on the emissions created by utilizing the fuel, that's a very simple calculation. In Ontario, maybe 3 cents/kWh when it's anything (often it causes hydro to be spilled, nuclear units curtailed or is exported for nothing). When Mr. Wilson concludes "The benefits that result from the carbon dioxide emissions saved by wind farms are obvious" he is displaying a talent for perceiving the obvious that eludes me. The value of carbon reduction by building this always redundant supply compared to cleaning up existing plant and/or building newer more efficient plant are not obvious. Generally wind penetration is intended to displace high capital cost baseload plant (usually nuclear and hydro) while requiring twinning with dispatchable units...