Green Is The Old White

News last week that The European Parliament cancelled their delegation to the UN's Rio+20 summit on sustainable development.  The reason being that the brutish Brazilians didn't know how to host a conference properly:

“The Brazilian government should have taken action to avoid hotels abusing their position. That's also part of the responsibility of hosting such a large conference,” said Dutch Liberal MEP Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, who was to lead the delegation.

The first Earth Summit, hosted in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 - with Maurice Strong as Conference Secretary General, is remembered for creating a couple of notable things, including; the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the fabled Agenda 21.
It is not remembered for the cost of hotels.

A Pale Blue Imitation of Ernie Eves

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012 saw 3 related events:

• former Premier Ernie Eves has his portrait hangedat Queen's Park
• the current government released the first accounting of the residual stranded debt since prior to Eves' Premiership
• the current PC party released a white paper, Paths to Prosperity: Affordable Energy, outlining directions for electricity policies in Ontario.

"Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it."

-Edmund Burke

Ernie Eves became Premier April 15, 2002, after winning the leadership of the PC Party of Ontario; some weeks later he'd win a by-election to gain a seat in the legislature.  The PC leadership campaign was quite divisive - with Eves running against Jim Flaherty (now Finance Minister federally); Flaherty referred to Eves as "a pale pink imitation of Dalton McGuinty," during that campaign.  The only general election contested with Eves leading the party was lost to current Premier McGuinty's Liberals.  Federally Ontario's PC Party would soon disappear, with it's membership primarily moving to the right with the new Conservative Party of Canada.

Not the News: The Toronto Star's Electricity Sector Coverage

On the day Ontario's official opposition party, Tim Hudak's Progressive Conservative Party, released a white paper on energy policy, the Toronto Star published, as front page news, a story that seemed to be about the expensive nuclear generation in Ontario – although it didn't actually provide a price figure. The Star report is structured as if it was built around the Power Advisory report cited in the article; a report created for the Ontario Energy Board. That report is dated April 20th, 2012 – and contains no information created after 2010.

The report provides figures for nuclear units operated by OPG for 2008-2010, and those figures show declining performance. The report does note that OPG's reporting had attributed the reduced performance factors in 2009 and 2010 to Vacuum Buildign Outages (VBO – 2009 at Darlington and 2010 at Pickering). The Power Advisory report didn't note that any idiot could confirm that ... nor did it confirm it.

Monthly Ontario Electricity Export Figures

Every month Ontario's Ministry of Energy puts out an offensively dishonest misinterpretation of our electricity export profit/loss ledger.
It is here for April now:

Electricity Exports Continue to Generate Revenue:

"Ontario's electricity market generated over $20 million in April by exporting electricity to other states and provinces, bringing total net export revenues to over $75 million this year.
This revenue helps Ontario:

• Keep costs down for families
• Build and maintain a clean, reliable and modern electricity system"

Here's a shorthand way to calculate how this absolutely does not "keep costs down for families."

Surplus Baseload Generation, and Supply Curtailment

Ontario's electricity supply challenges include curtailing supply when it is too abundant, and Ontario's Independent Electricity Supply Operator (IESO) has been working towards better management of the supply through better information.  This short post is a question for the IESO; readers of this blog may feel compelled to request similar information.

Dead for Left: Greenpeace has a new lie

"Nuclear Main Source of Increased Electricity Prices In Ontario" was posted to the Greenpeace Canada site yesterday, by Shawn-Patrick Stensil.  The piece was timed to defuse the news around price hikes effective May 1st, and coordinated with remarks by the formerly socialist NDP party's marginal leader Andrea Horwath.   Green Party leader Mike Schreiner was parroting the message, "OEB report reveals nuclear causing electricity rates" on Twitter, and Energy Probe's Norm Rubin was on one site bleating he was "impressed with SP Stensil's recent analysis of OEB reports showing OEB's nukes are responsible for way more of our rate increase than the FIT renewables."  It's a lot of support for an idiotic spin either done deliberately to deceive, or simply out of ignorance and a fear of big numbers.

The premise of Greenpeace's position is that the Global Adjustment (GA) is the increase in electricity bills - with a figure from the OEB's Market Surveillance Panel's latest report.  On page 59 the MSP report states 45% of the GA is attributable to nuclear units, and on the next page states 6 percent is attributable to 'renewable assets.'  Stensil stupidly opens with "Nuclear has been responsible for 45% of recent increases on your electricity bill. Meanwhile, the impact of renewables on your electricity bill has been minor – about 6%."