New Ontario Government cancels renewable energy contracts

The official news release includes:

TORONTO — Ontario ratepayers will benefit from $790 million in savings thanks to the Government of Ontario’s decision to cancel and wind down 758 renewable energy contracts, Minister of Energy, Northern Development and Mines Greg Rickford announced today…

All of the cancelled projects have not reached project development milestones. Terminating the projects at this early stage will maximize benefits for ratepayers.

Rickford also confirmed that the government intends to introduce a legislative amendment that, if passed, will protect hydro consumers from any costs incurred from the cancellation. Even after all costs are accounted for, ratepayers can expect to benefit from $790 million in savings from this one decision.

I thought a short post is in order as the incoming mainstream media reports are not informative or in any way helpful.

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American electricity data – for a perspective on Ontario costs

Electricity prices, and costs are aspects of a project I’m trudging through working with electricity data from the United States. I’ve developed a Power BI report which probably deserves a lot slicker interface, but time is limited. This post offers directions on controlling the reporting, and adds some Ontario context to the graphics.

My primary intent was to create imagery of average monthly electricity cost, by state, for residential consumers. Rates get a lot of discussion, even more so in recent weeks, but I’m not convinced an isolated rate analysis is useful.

A recent Scientific American article featured a smart BI report by Abhilash Kantamneni ( @akantamn on Twitter ).

Due to an exchange on Twitter I’d had with Abhilash a couple of weeks ago, I wanted to build a view that showed both rates, and average monthly consumer costs – because it turns out these are much different things.

OPG’s 2017 results grate

Yesterday Ontario Power Generation released their 2017 Financial Results:

Ontario Power Generation Inc. (OPG or Company) today reported net income attributable to the Shareholder of $860 million for 2017, compared to $436 million in 2016.

That must be considered a great number in the context of the income history at OPG as it’s the highest they’ve ever accomplished. The apparently excellent results may leave some wondering what critics commenting on the sector have been braying on about. I, a critic, have reviewed the results and found some things to bray about.

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.