Review of 2017 electricity supply in Ontario

You purchase a  full 9-unit container of energy .

The 3 men who deliver it pour out 2 units out while lecturing on consumption. 
They imply you should make more yourself as they leave.

A couple of months have passed since I last posted to the blog. This may be due to writer's block, or a lack of ambition - or maybe I was wisely waiting until I had something nice to say!

With growing knowledge, and curiosity, I seem to muddle all little issues into the broad themes I deem important - and not only for energy. In this post I'll touch on metrics from 2017 the reader may be looking to this blog to find, with hopes of connecting the data to bigger issues.

There are many possible headlines from an annual analysis:

• electricity "demand", as reported by the system operator was down, to levels not seen in decades
• supply generated from fossil fuels (natural gas) was sharply down too, and again to levels probably not seen in over over half a century
• prices for consumers on regulated price plans were sharply down in 2017 due to legislation and consequent debt (the [un]Fair Power Plan), but,
• total costs for supply declined in 2017, although average unit cost was up slightly (as demand declined more)
• nuclear supply was down as one unit (Darlington 2) was out of service for the entire year due to refurbishment, but the units remaining online largely took up the slack as Bruce Power had record output, as did the set of 9 units at Ontario Power Generation which operated during 2017, and
• for the first year since the system operator reported on their system's wind output, in 2006, it reported a decline (albeit a very slight one)

I didn't wish to dwell on numbers in this post. During 2017 I learned some new data reporting tools which I put on on a site where I invite data-gluttons to learn the filters and views to generate the typical year-end summary statistics, such as the total annual biomass generation for the past decade.
I do wish, in this post, to combine commentary to statistics to demonstrate very good figures from one perspective can have bad implications from a broader perspective. This is particularly important to note as the reasons rates didn't rise sharply in 2017 aren't sustainable.

Ontario appeals court upholds sentence of higher costs for ratepayers

The Ontario Court of appeal recently upheld a ruling adding over half a billion dollars to Ontario's electricity bills.[1] The case involved a number of electricity generators contracted between 1989 and 1994 challenging a 2011 change in the method of calculating a benchmark to which payments are indexed. Officially the generators' challenge is against the Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation (OEFC). Functionally, it is ratepayers that were punished. How ratepayers came to be guilty is a legal matter, but the failure in court is a result of the failures of the province's recent governments.

The generators were contracted during periods of Liberal (David Peterson) and New Democratic Party (NDP) rule. Neither party was positive on the public electricity entity, Ontario Hydro, and its concentration on nuclear power. Ontario Hydro was forced by the governments to contract supply from "non-utility generators" - now simply called NUG's.

The court documents reveal a group of NUGs contracted with pricing indexed to "Direct Industrial Customers ...whose average monthly maximum demand was 5 MW or greater." An additional and pertinent specification in the indexed model is "a 100% load factor, meaning a constant and consistent energy demand for all 8760 hours of a year."[2] 

The court's ruling, upheld on appeal, is that the NUGs getting paid based on,via indexing, a current industrial customer with monthly peak demand greater than 5 MW with, a 100% load factor, is unfair.

That's a suspect decision, but worse is the direction to revert to the previous methodology.