Niagara Fails

A quick post with commentary on a graphic.

I’ve been writing little but learning more recently. I’ve written multiple times on the inability of Ontario to fully utilize its water rights on the Niagara river, so that’s some data that I looked to learn some new data connections and summary techniques. Having advanced to where I can easily update to the latest available data I thought I’d share this view summarizing it – and offer some brief comments explaining the significance.

Ontario Wind: Worst value getting worser

A spreadsheet I regularly update with data on industrial wind turbine (IWT) generation in Ontario is cited in Parker Gallant’s recent, Wind: worst value for Ontario consumers. The same post cites the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) commentary on Ontario’s recently released Long Term-Energy Plan 2017, which included:

New wind energy provides the best value for consumers to meet growing demand for affordable non-emitting electricity.

Let’s examine the “value” as electricity – as there is no market in Ontario for any subset of that commodity, including “affordable non-emitting”.

Two definitions of “value” from the Oxford dictionary are pertinent:

1. “The regard that something is held to deserve; the importance, worth, or usefulness of something.”
2. “The worth of something compared to the price paid or asked for it.”

By the first definition wind is clearly the least valued generation type in Ontario. Using only very basic hourly data sets of Hourly summary totals of grid-connected (Tx) generation by type, valued at the Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP), value factor can be calculated. A value factor above 1 means more valuable than average, below 1 means less valuable, and the lowest number consistently means wind.

This graphic is captured from a page I created to view summaries of basic IESO data sources:

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.