More Wind Records For Ontario - Emissions Rise

Sunday November 13th saw record electricity production from Ontario's wind turbines.   No coal-fired generation was replaced, and emissions from electricity generation in Ontario increased over the comparable day from the previous year.


The initial IESO data shows 32,401MWh of generation this past Sunday, which would be a record. (endnote 1).
Hour 9 has 1426MW recorded, which is the highest hourly figure recorded.


Comparing production from Sunday November 13th, 2011, to the production from Sunday, November 14th, 2010 meets the expectations from my recent work in forecasting the impact of increased wind generation capacity in Ontario.  Specifically, wind can't replace coal, or gas, during the many points in time where there is no coal or gas generation to replace.  Wind frequently replaces nuclear and hydro.  This time it was nuclear.  While fewer nuclear units were operating in 2011 than during the comparable day in 2010, steam bypass procedures at Bruce B units were still utilized to curtail production during the morning hours.

	Nuclear	Hydro	Wind	Gas	Coal	Other
2010	242,776	76,693	15,006	39,482	3,098	2,280
2011	198,832	81,439	32,401	37,451	9,018	4,071
Variance	-43,944	4,746	17,395	-2,031	5,920	1,791

The comparison of this years high-wind output Sunday to the comparable Sunday last year, not only shows wind didn't replace coal, but coal use increased, despite demand being lower.

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Endnote 1:  That figure includes 4 locations that are not officially in service, and therefore seem to be reporting as 0 when the IESO produces it's weekly .csv file updates.
The previous record was Saturday, October 16th, which I noted here
Spreadsheet is here