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Monday, September 29, 2014

Another rebuttal to an Ontario Energy Board panel's decree of subsidy-free exports

“A wizard is never late ... nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to.”
Spoken by Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring -followed by laughter
The Ontario Energy Board (OEB) Market Surveillance Panel (MSP) last week released its Monitoring Report on the IESO-Administered Electricity Markets for the period from May 2013-October 2013. For the most part, the report is painfully boring and treats the irrelevant as if it's important, but it was interesting, to me, that for whatever reasons they spend time attempting to discredit claims that exports are subsidized, particularly as they site an example of those claims as an article by my friend, Parker Gallant.
Over the past year, the role of electricity exports in the Ontario market has been the subject of considerable commentary. Questions have arisen about the value that export transactions provide to Ontario consumers, and more specifically around the question of whether and the extent to which Ontario ratepayers are subsidizing export transactions (in other words, paying costs that are incurred as a result of export transactions). Two recent press reports have claimed that Ontarians paid over $1 billion to subsidize export transactions to neighbouring jurisdictions in 2013. The Panel considered the methodology that was used in arriving at this estimate, and examined in greater detail the costs that are triggered by exports to determine the extent to which those costs are not fully covered by the market price or by other charges paid by exporters.
I've added some emphasis to explain the premises required to fulfill the OEB MSP fantasy.

Over the past year professional sycophants may have taken direction from their government master to make something up to counter the reporting of Parker Gallantand the NDP, but it is closing in on 4 years since I wrote McGuinty Thinks This is Fun?
Re-reading that post now makes me hesitant to continue here - I rebutted this drivel 44 months ago.

Sunday, September 21, 2014

September 20th: Ontario electricity's cleanest day in my lifetime

Today is The People's Climate March day. Not being much for marching up and down the square, I thought I'd be better to write about the accomplishments and challenges in my province of Ontario, where this weekend may well be experiencing the lowest emissions from electricity generation in over half a century.

It's certainly the lowest emissions since I started capturing hourly data, which I have from September 1st, 2010. The reason is the scheduling off of non-utility generators, many of which are fueled by natural gas. Prior to yesterday the lowest value I'd seen for generation fueled by natural-gas was 291 megawatts; yesterday it dropped below that level in hour 3 and just rose above it as I write this (hour 8 of the 21st). I'm not certain the now closed Hearn and Lakeview generating stations would have operated at less than 200MW combined, so this really might be as low emission a day as Ontario saw in the past half a century.

The system operator (IESO) schedules curtailments of non-utility generators when Ontario is expected to have surplus supply for an extended period of time [2]. That is the case this weekend. Yesterday the IESO also required the curtailment of supply from Bruce Power's nuclear units after exporting as much as possible. [2]
My estimates of the supply Ontario ratepayers will pay for - including the curtailed supply