Wynne winding Ontario down

Today the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced "new tables and maps in the Electric Power Monthly provide detailed accounting of generator additions and retirements"
The statistics presented will provide no comfort to Ontario ratepayers smarting from 16-17% electricity price hikes in 2013 as they look to surviving 2014.

The EIA figure for planned capacity editions in next 12 months (as of November) is 2,091.8 megawatts (Table 6.1).

The latest 18-month Outlook from Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) indicated 1,884 megawatts of wind capacity due in 2014, but that is simply for generation on the IESO's direct grid.  Additional supply can be embedded within local distribution company grids.  The IESO's outlook notes:

Over the next 18 months, Ontario continues to expand its renewable resource capacity as more than 3,300 MW of wind, solar, hydroelectric and biomass capacity are expected be connected to the transmission grid. By May 2015, the total wind and solar generation connected both to the transmission and distribution networks in Ontario are expected to exceed 7,000 MW.

The EIA's figure for additional "Renewable Sources" to be added in its next 12 months in 5,566 MW.

This week's cold snap, accompanied by large exports to the United States, put an exclamation point on the stupidity statement that is Ontario's green energy waste.

Graphic from CCSAGE: Premier Wynnd's strategy on wind...

Ontario has received possibly the worst value in the world on its own contracting of supply from industrial wind turbines.
It employed the idiotic feed-in tariff mechanism as the best tool to acquire lots of supply that isn't needed, and despite the near universal death of that procurement scheme.

Ontario has failed to heed it's professional engineers correct diagnosis of wind and solar as as "displacement sources."  As demand peaked during this week's cold snap, it's 3000+ megawatts of wind and solar capacity was producing only about 266MW of electricity.  That performance from the wind/solar team, on the 22nd, was up from the output at peak on the 21st, which failed to outperform the province's sole remaining coal-fired generator in Thunder Bay.

The government could attribute this to a past mistake, but the mistakes continue as it refuses to acknowledge past errors while making new mistakes to ensure the full pain of past ones is foisted on the province's ratepayers.  The Wynne government is appealing projects that should never have existed, it is agreeing to pay contracted suppliers for curtailed power regardless of the signed contracts, and it is certifying projects to proceed to construction at a quickening pace.

This apparently due to a belief that doing something expensive and unnecessary will position the province to become exporters of something.

Perhaps it has.

Foolishness.