Big Green, not little white, Lies

"The latest quarterly progress report by the Ontario Power Authority on electricity supply in Canada’s most populous province isn’t destined to be on the bedsides of millions of people. But what this dry, chart-heavy document reveals is the plain fact that starting in 2011 Ontario already had 4,125 MW of renewable energy projects operating and 6,255 MW under development thanks the Ontario’s feed-in tariff (FIT) program."

This statement is bullshit.

It comes from The transformative power of the feed-in tariff - Meet Ontario's Green Energy Act, which is written by David Dodge and Duncan Kinney.   David Dodge is "the former communicaitons director of the Pembina Institute."  Duncan Kinney is the "Editor/Production Manager for Green Energy Futures" ... that's "David Dodge's Green Energy Futures," which "is produced with the generous financial support of TD and Suncor Energy."

OPG Q4 2011 Progress Report, Page 5

This is big oily green... and big oily green is lying.

The 4125MW figure is the figure the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) provided as the amount of renewable generation it has contracted.  They categorize that procurement by the programs under which the contracts were offered.

The feed-in tariff program is indicated, by the OPA, as being responsible for 332MW of the 4125 MW, which is 8% of the total.

• 1556MW, or 38%, of the 4125MW was in service prior to being contracted by the OPA: hydroelectric facilities given contracts under the Hydroelectric Contract Initiative (HCI), and Hydroelectric Energy Supply Agreement (HESA) programs.
• 1549MW, or 38%, came from Renewable Energy Supply contracts: Request for Proposals for supply projects went out in  and in June 2004 and June 2005
• 615MW, or 15% of the 4125, is from the Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP), which started in November 2006.
• 246.4MW are Feed-In Tariff (FIT) projects, and 85.7MW are microFIT projects

The offensiveness of the FIT lie is that there is an enormous quantity of contracted supply under the FIT - but the existing figures show primarily what was achieved without the high rates and obliteration of community input of the FIT program.

David Dodge and Duncan Kinney (D and D'er) rhetorically ask how this 4125MW came to be and answer: "You can pin it down to a simple wunder-policy – the Green Energy Act. This bit of law acts like a German style feed-in tariff. Essentially everybody with an electricity bill pays a bit more every month so that renewable energy systems can get established."

That's one opinion

I've got another.

Neither my opinion nor D and D'er's can be relevant to the argument they built on a lie: that there is an existent 4125MW of renewable generation due to the feed-in tariff program.

On our 'green' earth coherent argument may not be particularly relevant.  The FIT program could be cited as the reason for any number of historical virgin births leading to any number of deities and a collection of scandalously credentialed idiots would spread the word.

D and D'er also erred at the start of the sentence I quoted to begin this entry. The "latest quarterly progress report by the Ontario Power Authority" isn't for Q4 2011, it's for Q1 2012.
The Q1 2012 report shows In-Service new capacity for renewables at 2,643MW.
The Q1 2012 report shows In-service new capacity for natural gas at 6,846MW.

Brought to you by Suncor, TD, and the Pembina Institute...
and maybe Gravol.