Poor Ontario. An energy policy created by green activists is a grotesquely expensive mess that consumers will be paying for …. for the rest of their lives.
Read and weep here. Unfortunately Canada now has a pretty Prime Minister who will drag us down the same road and commit economic suicide.
Massive revenue guarantees for a handful of lucky wind power generators, but no appreciable environmental benefit from Ontario’s energy policies says economics professor Ross McKitrick
You may be surprised to learn that electricity is now cheaper to generate in Ontario than it has been for decades. The wholesale price, called the Hourly Ontario Electricity Price or HOEP, used to bounce around between five and eight cents per kilowatt hour (kWh), but over the last decade, thanks in large part to the shale gas revolution, it has trended down to below three cents, and on a typical day is now as low as two cents per kWh. Good news, right?
It would be, except that this is Ontario. A hidden tax on Ontario’s electricity has pushed the actual purchase price in the opposite direction, to the highest it’s ever been. The tax, called the Global Adjustment (GA), is levied on electricity purchases to cover a massive provincial slush fund for green energy, conservation programs, nuclear plant repairs and other central planning boondoggles. As these spending commitments soar, so does the GA.
In the latter part of the last decade when the HOEP was around five cents per kWh and the government had not yet begun tinkering, the GA was negligible, so it hardly affected the price. In 2009, when the Green Energy Act kicked in with massive revenue guarantees for wind and solar generators, the GA jumped to about 3.5 cents per kWh, and has been trending up since — now it is regularly above 9.5 cents.
In April it even topped 11 cents, triple the average HOEP.
So while the marginal production cost for generation is the lowest in decades, electricity bills have never been higher. And the way the system is structured, costs will keep rising.
Read more here
Go to Ron Clutz’s Page and follow the links. Horrible things are happening in Ontario!
The energy mix in Ontario’s electrical sector is dominated by hydro and nuclear, so getting off coal seemed doable. But in the provincial government’s drive to reduce CO2 emissions and join the California Emissions Trading Scheme, they have hardwired costly energy contracts that Ontarians will pay for through their noses for decades. Meet the Global Adjustment Fee (covering a multitude of sins and mismanagement).
Lets say its June 13th 2016 10am or so in Ontario and there is about 16GW of demand.
Nuclear+Hydro+Gas keeps the lights and heat on.
Biofuel+Wind+Solar are just posturing. And they cost a fortune.
Ontario plans to decarbonize deindustrialize.
The latest news out of Queen’s Park is that Kathleen Wynne’s Liberals plan to deindustrialize Ontario. Of course they don’t call it that; they prefer the term “decarbonize.” But for an industrial economy, the government’s new climate action plan, leaked to reporters this week, amounts to the same thing.
The proposed scheme beggars belief. Having phased out coal-fired power, the province now plans to phase out natural gas, the only reliable alternative for non-baseload generation. Despite electric cars being extremely costly and unpopular, more than one in 10 new car sales will need to be electric, and every two-car household will have to own at least one electric car. All homes listed for sale will require a costly energy audit. Home renovations will have to be geared around energy efficiency as the government defines it, not what the homeowner wants.
Around the time that today’s high-school students are readying to buy their first home, it will be illegal for builders to install heating systems that use fossil fuels, in particular natural gas. Having already tripled the price of power, Queen’s Park will make it all but mandatory to rely on electricity for heating.
There will be new mandates and subsidies for biofuels, electric buses for schools, extensive new bike lanes to accommodate all those bicycles Ontario commuters will be riding all winter, mandatory electric recharging stations on all new buildings, and many other Soviet-style command-and-control directives.
Read more here.
The climate file has pushed deranged extremism into mainstream policy planning. Perhaps the would-be opponents in cabinet of this disastrous proposal self-censor out of fear of being labeled — gasp! — deniers. But realism is the opposite of denialism, and what is needed now is a huge, cold blast of realism.
Idiots are running Ontario. (Ruining … running … same difference)
Ontario continues its buy-high, sell-low policy for electricity by wasting cheap hydro in favour of expensive, intermittent wind. And the government is contracting for more, says Parker Gallant.
Calculations are:
Wind generation cost @ $133/MWh (1.7 TWh @ $133 million per TWh = $226 million)
+ gas generation backup of 330 MW (assuming an average of $12,500 per MW per month and 60% capacity generation per MW) = $150 million
+ the cost of spilled hydro @ $44 million per TWh = $75 million for 1.7 TWh.
The total cost (without inclusion of steamed-off nuclear, cost of solar power, losses of revenue for exports, etc.) is
$451 million for the 1.7 TWh OPG spilled.
Cost to Ontario ratepayers for the 1.7 TWh OPG spilled cost ($451 million/1.7 TWh) = an average of 26.5 cents per kWh.
What this means: the Green Energy Act and its many flaws has created a situation where publicly and privately owned generators suffer no consequences from producing power “out of sync” with demand, and as a result, electricity ratepayers are penalized by paying six times the actual cost for a kilowatt of electricity (including a built-in profit).
Sky high electricity costs for Ontario consumers and businesses. Cheap electricity to the USA and Quebec.
Insanity.
Steve McIntyre tweeted: “Ontario lost $400 million in Q4 2015 alone in wind power. Dumped to neighbors for $5 M.”
This is the article he is referring to:
The 3,434,750 MWh is estimated to have cost ratepayers approximately $460 million. The 3 TWh of electricity IWT delivered to the grid cost about $405 million and the curtailed cost was almost $55 million. During the quarter, the HOEP1. averaged $1.50/MWh, meaning if all of generated and curtailed wind was a part of the 5.4 TWh exported, it would have generated only a shade over $5 million —that would have reduced the cost to ratepayers to $455 million. With 92 days in the last quarter of 2015, the money paid by Ontario ratepayers averaged daily was almost $5 million.
I found another one for June. With a good explanation of the stupidity.
Electricity watchdog Parker Gallant keeps a wary eye on energy prices in this province.
In a recent post on the website www.windconcerns.ca, Gallant points out the government paid $200 million in June to dump electricity at a loss.
Gallant, vice-president of Wind Concerns, estimates 1.9 terawatts (TWh) of Ontario’s electricity production (15.2% of Ontario’s demand of 10.6 TWh) was exported to Michigan, New York and Quebec, in June.
Ontario was paid $29.1 million for those exports. Unfortunately, it cost provincial ratepayers $249.9 million to produce that same electricity.
Here’s the math: Ontario exported the power at the Hourly Ontario Electricity Price (HOEP) of $15.31/megawatt hour (MWh) or 1.53 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for $29.1 million. However, the cost to produce and transmit that 1.9 TWh, was $131.43/MWh (13.14 cents/kWh) — or $249.9 million.
“Most of that wound up in the big (and growing) pot referred to as the Global Adjustment (GA),” Gallant reports.
“So Ontario’s electricity ratepayers picked up the difference of $221 million, which when added to our export losses for the prior five months of 2015, brought costs to almost $1.1 billion for the first six months of 2015,” Gallant said.
Lets say its April 7th 2016 3am or so in Ontario and there is about 15GW of demand.
Nuclear+Hydro+Gas keeps the lights and heat on.
Biofuel+Wind+Solar are just posturing. And they cost a fortune.
sunshine hours 