A benefit of Electricity trade - and what's reducing it

I was wrong.

I've been broadcasting a couple of messages about Ontario's electricity exports: that only the IESO can accurately report on the revenues, and that exports at negative prices are not allowed under market rules. It now seems neither of those is correct. Not only can export revenues be calculated, the analysis of export volumes, and revenues over time reveals benefits of markets, and trade. It's not at all clear Ontario's electricity powers understand the benefits.

I was recently alerted to a claim that the export revenues could be calculated from Intertie Schedule and Realtime Market Price reports. If that sounds confusing it'll gets worse before I'll try to ease off the jargon. As the Intertie Flows reporting is hourly, and the Realtime Market Price reports in 5 minute intervals some data manipulation is required to match the data sets. The IESO has posted annual files (.csv) with values from each of these reports for 2010 through 2016. To dispatch with the technical talk in one confusing swoop, I'll simply note that averaging the "ENGY" rate by delivery hour for each control area in the Realtime Market Price reports, and multiplying that by the "OFFT" value in Intertie Flows report for the same control area does result in the annual figures the IESO has released either to the Office of the Auditor General or in response to Freedom of Information Requests.
I can now extend my work from a previous post to include 2016 data.

Having worked the data down to the hourly time-frame by control area I can additionally summarize revenues, and costs, by jurisdiction. The results have some important messages about trade - as each "control area" has a separate market control price.

I won't discuss imports much in this post because there's nothing new to discuss. Most imports into Ontario are now from Quebec (over 82% since 2012 began), and those are valued in the new analysis almost exactly as the typical Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) valued them.

Messages about trade from this analysis may be hidden by the realities of communicating summaries of very large data sets. I posted some graphics on hydro(electric) generation by river system, and I received an e-mail from somebody who likely wanted to pursue a story, asking if the data was public knowledge. It was every bit as much public knowledge as what I am writing on today - summarized from hourly data captured from IESO hourly reporting since 2010. However, as most can't process the hourly information, and an official source had not published a summary, it wasn't the basis of a story. I think publication of a summary by an official source is what is required to be considered "public available".

The IESO once summarized volumes and revenues for exports and imports on a web page at www.ieso.ca/imoweb/siteshared/imports_exports.asp (long since a dead link). These monthly totals were meaningfully publicly available as they were both available and summarized by a trusted figure. Remnants of the IESO summaries remains in old government press releases, such as this from May 2012:

"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.

That figure was, in hindsight, actually net exports ($28.6 million revenue from exporting less $8.1 million importing cost). In 2012 I noted:

[my] figures on export sales are estimates based only on the [Hourly Ontario Energy Price] ... in actuality export customers pay different rates. Because Ontario's market pricing is lower, sometimes much lower, than adjacent jurisdictions, it appears from both the ministry 'news' releases, and National Energy Board reporting, we generally export power about 10% above the HOEP  rates.

10% was the assumption I had when the IESO ceased summary reporting, but with the base data now summarized, I now know that assumption became wrong as they moved up and up, to nearly 70% above HOEP valuations by 2016.

Alberta. Bound.

The government of Alberta has a plan to "reduce carbon emissions."
Their plan restricts the ability of the province to efficiently minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

The three aspects of the Alberta's "Climate Leadership Plan" most relevant to the electricity sector are:

• implementing a new carbon price on greenhouse gas emissions
• ending pollution from coal-generated electricity by 2030
• developing more renewable energy

I've seen my province - Ontario - cited as an impediment to growing renewable energy in Alberta. This is understandable from a cost perspective, but if reducing emissions were the primary goal Ontario's example would be encouraging, as its emissions from generating electricity are a fraction of Alberta's.

I realize most Albertans are not awaiting opinions from Ontario, but I'll trust my analysis will be of interest to some in Alberta, and some elsewhere. Alberta is simply the sample case I'll use to argue specifically banning coal-fired electricity is unnecessary, and quotas for renewable sources to provide a fixed percentage of supply a little worse than that. This is not to argue for coal or little supply from renewables. Functionally, what I'll point to as better policy is likely to result in similar outcomes. I intend to demonstrate rules are being gamed to predetermine an unambitious outcome at the expense of achieving greater things.

A brief review of Albert's electricity system will be helpful prior to discussing the growth of renewables and elimination of coal. 

Figures are collected from AESO annual market statistic files (year 2013-2016) 

Available figures for Alberta's electricity generation include the percentage of electricity produced by generation technology. Unfortunately some categories change in 2010, but whether 2016 is compared to 2010 (the earliest year of the current categories) or 2004, coal has lost the greatest market share, and it has lost it to wind (probably the greatest change since 2004, natural gas (Combined Cycle gas turbines had the biggest 2010-2016 growth) and "Cogen" (for co-generation). Coal does continue to have 60% market share by this measure, so adding renewables until they have a 30% share seems doable - but it's more difficult depending on the definition of the market.