Ontario is conserving little energy – even less sanity

In the past 48 months Ontario has been a net exporter of enough electricity to power the province’s libraries for 437 years … or so one could claim based on the misleading claims in an official tweet linking to the latest obnoxious irrelevant claim from the Ontario’s government saveonenergy site:

Over the past four years, you, and Ontarians like you, have done something remarkable. You’ve helped to make Ontario a province of energy savers. You’ve saved enough to power:

A city the size of London for almost two years or
Every hospital and social service centre in the province for almost one year or
Ontario’s libraries for 50 years or
Ontario’s community centres and public cultural facilities for more than 18 years
That’s a lot to be proud of.

Thank you for making energy conservation a priority and for doing what you can to save electricity. Whether it’s switching to energy-efficient lighting, purchasing energy-efficient appliances and equipment, or retrofitting your home or business, it all adds up to six terawatt-hours [TWh] in electricity savings.

so where is this “saved” electricity?

Saved isn’t an appropriate term for the reduction in demand accompanying the 1.6 TWh of wind and nuclear supply curtailed in 2014, along with “OPG’s 3.2 TWh of lost [hydro] generation due to SBG [surplus baseload generation] conditions” – a steep increase from the1.7 TWh of potential hydro OPG curtailed in 2013.

The situation is worse than simply having curtailed public hydro supply, and other essentially emissions free supply at a level far exceeding claims of “saving” or “conservation.” A great deal of generation Ontario committed to purchase has been dumped to exporters.

Since July 2011 Ontario has been a net exporter of 52.5 TWh – which is almost equal to the annual consumption of all Ontario’s Regulated Price Plan (RPP) consumers.

Every household – and many small businesses too.

The average market valuation (HOEP) of those net exports was a little over 2.1 cents/kilowatt-hour (kWh).

RPP consumers are paying 2.9 cents/kWh more for their electricity than they did 48 months ago (just the commodity portion of the bill). In the past four years our RPP bills have increased up by close to 50% more than the total paid by exporters.

Ontarian’s have been ripped off by “conservation” programming that begins with illiterate messaging and grows to a vile ignorance oblivious to rates skyrocketing as they have the past 4 months.

“Saved” isn’t word that’s ever going to be applicable to the architects of the province’s wasteful electricity sector spending.

graphic from saveonenergy.ca post