another bad Ontario Energy Report

There’s an Ontario Energy Report (OER) that drips out quarterly.

It’s often got a mistake on the first page. Half of that page is static graphics. The other half is some simple data presented in big fonts.

The report could be useful as it contains data that is difficult to find elsewhere. The intent when it started, as I understood it, was to bring data from multiple sources together in a coherent fashion.  I suspect it was supposed to be definitive – to avoid people getting information from rogue sources such as Parker Gallant and I. The official data would be a good thing if it were credible – but the first page often reveals it is not.

This quarter the very first data set – the “Transmission Grid-Connected Generation Output (Q1)” –  has errors.

Ontario’s use of gas in generation electricity during the first quarter was very low. It was lower than it’s been in over 50 years. But it wasn’t this low.

I know this from uncorrupted IESO data – such as that cited in the spreadsheet accompanying the OER.

1.5 terawatt-hours of gas. 3.5 TWh of wind – not 1.2 and 3.7.

This small “gotcha” post would strike me as petty – as I write it – but this exact same mistake was made in the 2016 Q3 report (that time showing gas as 47.9 TWh instead of 4.79 TWh).

From a data perspective this tells me the report isn’t automated.

From an organizational perspective it tells me senior management don’t know their operations well enough to spot errors with a cursory review.

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The two reasons I check IESO quarterly reporting are for updated figures on embedded generation capacity and to check my own estimates against the reports figures.

The next graphic, with data filtered to display the first quarter, is from one tab of a web page of mine that updates daily – although the IESO data feeds don’t always update on that schedule. I offer some explanation of the tool in this Facebook post and this Youtube post.

The data is an IESO feed but their hourly reporting doesn’t add exactly to their monthly reporting (for what I understand are rational reason). They are close so the 2017 Q2 report will show – eventually – about 21.4 TWh from nuclear, 9.7 from hydro, 0.8 from gas, 0.1 from solar and biofuel, and 1.8 TWh from wind.

For wind it will be the 2nd consecutive year of declining output in the second quarter.

The Ontario Energy Report won’t explain why that is.

Rogue sources will.