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.
Energy rates in Ontario have climbed 100% in the last decade.
So-called “energy poverty” is getting worse in rural Ontario, a Global News investigation has found, with even small households paying hundreds of dollars a month to keep the lights on.
Officials, residents and experts are all sounding the alarm after electricity rates in the province rose 100 per cent in the past decade.
A range of factors are fueling the increases, including subsidies for clean energy, dealing with aging nuclear plants and maintaining and modernizing the province’s vast transmission and distribution system. But the problem is especially acute in rural Ontario, where steep delivery charges are the norm.
“The worst affected are customers in rural Ontario,” said energy analyst Tom Adams. “Compared to the ordinary urban household, the delivery charge alone is usually two to three times higher.”
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.
A study claims Polar Bears are swimming longer, tiring them out and that maybe cause them problems.
The Polar Bear Science Blog points out the obvious:
So, despite what may be implied during media moments, Beaufort Sea polar bears were not frantically trying to reach the sea ice from land so that they could attempt to keep feeding over the summer – most of their swimming was done during breakup in July and August from one bit of pack ice to another and they showed no evidence of harm from doing so.
What do you think? Do you think they swim like this (avoiding all ice floes):
Or like this (jumping on ice floes for a rest when they need it):
Ontario is importing “advanced biomass” wood pellets from Norway. See the post here is you are coming in late.
I was looking for total CO2 figures for the Atikokan plant. I haven’t found any yet. But I did find an OPG document showing CO2 production of 4 scenarios at Thunder Bay (which is also burning Norwegian Wood). One of those scenarios is a Natural Gas Combined Cycle power plant. It showed that plant producing a huge amount of CO2 compared to wood pellets. I know that isn’t true from this article.
Then I realized the the wood pellet CO2 numbers are based not on actual amount of CO2, but on the “net CO2” which is CO2 minus the fudge factor applied by the AGW cult to claims that since the trees are renewable most of the CO2 doesn’t really count. (page 10 and 11 here)
The key is where they use the term (net) as in “Green House Gas (GHG) Life Cycle Assessment (net)”
Anyway … back to comparing Ontario Wood Pellets to Norway Wood Pellets.
From this OPG document:
See all that CO2 produced by transporting all those pellets from Norway!
A new “study” blames climate change for making Polar Bears in the southern Hudson Bay population lose weight .
The world’s southernmost population of polar bears has already lost significant amounts of body weight after decades of shrinking sea ice with breeding females suffering the most, says new research from the Ontario government.
“They’re in poorer condition now than they were in the 1980s,” said Martyn Obbard, of the province’s natural resources department, one of the co-authors of the paper published by the National Research Council.
Maybe it isn’t climate change. Maybe the biggest polar bears are being shot.
Northern wildlife officials will meet in Quebec’s arctic region Wednesday to discuss quotas on the world’s last unregulated polar bear hunt.
Hunters who kill bears from the south Hudson Bay population, which includes Quebec, Ontario and Nunavut, have a voluntary limit of 60 bears a year.
But scientists say climate change is starting to affect the population’s health and that the region’s first official quotas should be lower.
None of the various aboriginal communities that hunt those bears say they’re willing to reduce their take.
According to the first report, there are “roughly 900 bears” in the southern Hudson Bay population. If you kill at least 60 (it is after all a voluntary quota) out of 900 and if you are selling those pelts you want the biggest and healthiest bears.
Maybe the survivors (after the biggest are killed for their pelts) are smaller.
Bids for what ended up being the dearest skin, a spotless white specimen that was also over 10 feet in length, started at $7,000 and didn’t stop until they’d reached $12,400—$1,400 more than last year’s top seller, a previous record. It went to Anna and Steve Gao, whose Mississauga, Ont.-based business, Canadian Intertrade JJ Ltd., ships furs to China and elsewhere.
Early this year, word spread that hunters from the northern Quebec community of Inukjuak had killed as many as 70 polar bears last season—an enormous jump over past years and an unsustainable harvest rate for the southern Hudson Bay polar bear population
The spike in kills around Inukjuak is thought to have begun when a buyer arrived in the region and announced he’d pay big money in advance for furs.
If you look at Canada as a whole 500 polar bears are being shot:
Each year, Aboriginal hunters and foreign sportsmen pursuing the animals alongside Aboriginal guides kill some 500 polar bears (there is no federal cap, and that number depends on shifts in geographic harvest quotas and on First Nations treaties). Many of the resulting polar bear skins find their way to market.
Ontario has shut down its coal power plants. One of those coal power plants was Atikokan. What OPG decided to do (because they needed dispatchable power) was to convert the plant to biomass. And that biomass was wood pellets. Not just any wood pellets. It was “Advanced Biomass”.
Advanced biomass has been treated to withstand exposure to rain, and has handling and storage properties similar to those of coal. It is still in the early stages of development, which is why OPG purchases advanced biomass fuel from Norway.
Before we get to CO2 and squandering hundreds of millions to change from one fuel you burn to anther fuel you burn …. you may ask yourself why you need to make wood pellets waterproof.
Wet biomass catches on fire. Or explodes.
Biomass fuel has a wide range of possible refuse items: pellets, chip logs, forestry, sewage sludge, methane, meat and bone, palm kernels, cereal, sawdust, bioenergy crops, or landfill gas. When a biomass fuel is stored in a pile, waiting for transport or use, the biomass can spontaneously heat through oxidation. In order for this to happen, three conditions must sync: rate of heat generation, air supply, and insulation properties of the immediate surroundings. With most biomass material, there is a high moisture content combined with air and/or bacterial fermentation – both of which can cause spontaneous combustion through oxidation.
Back to CO2. The study I have referenced before told us that wood pellets (especially those transported long distances like USA to UK) produce way more CO2 than coal. So I would assume that if you buy wood pellets from Norway, your power plant is producing more CO2 than if you had not spent 170 million and were still burning coal.
‘Green’ logic confuses me.Killing Norwegian forests and turning the wood into special waterproof pellets and then using a lot of fossil fuel to ship it to Ontario to burn in a closed down resurrected coal power plant seems crazy to me.
Ontario Canada is converting a 4,000MW coal power plant to a 44MMW solar farm.
“Through the IESO’s new Large Renewable Procurement program, solar providers will receive an average of 15.67 cents/kWh for their clean energy.”
“The province’s pivot toward renewables has not come without significant economic ramifications, however. On-peak power cost consumers 17.5 cents/kWh in Nov. of 2015, compared to just 9.7 cents/kWh in the same month of 2006, according to the Ontario Energy Board—an 80 per cent hike. For off-peak power, Ontarians paid 8.3 cents/kWh in 2015, relative to 3.4 cent/kWh in 2006—or 144 per cent more.”
There was no mention in the story how 44MW of intermittent power can replace 4,000MW of dispatchable power.
There was no mention in the story of how many jobs will be transferred to China or India.
sunshine hours 