Eco-Warriors are Strangling Energy Advances at a Cost to Consumers
Eco-Warriors are Strangling Energy Advances at a Cost to Consumers
COVID for Easter?
Easter, as other holidays where we commune indoors, can be a super-spreader. This year I see mixed indicators: more immunity, and likely a less virulent variant, should blunt impact.
2 years into a pandemic Ontario data collection, and reporting of such, aren’t much improved. Some thoughts as we enter another super-spreader event (a.k.a. holiday).Hospitalizations are increasing – but not by so much as most think
With testing availability altered/restricted at the end of hospital statistics should be best, but only since January 10th do we have data to distinguish…
Alberta’s shrinking electricity market already got a lot more costly
I’ve been looking at electricity in Alberta - as a healthy distraction to war in Ukraine and Europe trying to schedule an end to its addiction to Russia’s energy,. That might seem a strange choice but it may allow an examination of how jurisdictions’ decisions impact suppliers, how markets are manipulated or full-out faked (Ontario), and how market statistics need to be understood to provide meaningful information.
Most reports we see out of Alberta on electricity, such as recent reports on record demand, cite Alberta Internal Load (AIL) - which is strange as that number includes self-generation which isn’t sold and bought on the provincial operator’s market (AESO). Looking at annual summaries since 2006 AIL shows nearly 20% growth, but a far less frequently cited AESO figure, “System Load”, has barely budged.
I’ve been asked to respond to a report from a lobby group on Ontario’s electricity system, one that utilizes a 2017 baseline to make claims on the growth of greenhouse gas emissions in the sector appear for more significant than deserved.
2017 is not a baseline year.
Not by the conventions of climate change base years.
- The Kyoto Accords concluded late in 1997 had 1990 as a base year - because emissions were highest during the collapse of the coal-drenched USSR.
- The Copenhagen Accord concluded late in 2009 treated 2005 as the base year because emissions had retreated due to the economic crisis of 2008-09.
- The Paris Agreement had countries commit to producing Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) plans, and Canada’s maintains 2005 as the base in promising “to reduce emissions by 40-45%.”
The electricity system operator’s (IESO) forecast for emission in its 2021 Annual Planning Outlook is 66% below 2005 levels (and 54% below 1990’s emissions).
Playing with data at the Science Table
“There is a myth out there that it’s mild. We need to address this myth now” -Dr. Peter Jüni
I’ll show you a myth.
On December 16th the “Science Table: COVID-19 Advisory for Ontario” (the Table) released an “Update on COVID-19 Projections: Science Advisory and Modelling Consensus Tables” (the Update). If the mixture of “science” and “modelling consensus” didn’t alert you that this group might not be rigorously scientific, this key finding ought to have caught your attention:
“Although uncertainty persists, waiting for more information will eliminate the opportunity for action.”
I empathize with the desire to take action as cases skyrocket due to the omicron variant of COVID-19. This shouldn’t be surprising as I have an interest in politics - I even once received a degree in something called Political Science. However, in the ensuing decades, I took to working with data, and over the course of this pandemic have been more and more interested so many doctors find the time to murder data science while also setting policy.
The recent Update from the Table names “South Africa” 12 times, and “Denmark” 10. The omicron variant emerged to prominence in South Africa’s Gauteng region, and the Table provides some disconcerting graphs of increasing daily hospital statistics in that region, but only starting November 1st, 2021. If one looks more closely they’ll notice “Patients in ICU” and “Patients with Supplementary Oxygen” end about where they started, but deaths and hospitalization appear sharply up. On other graphs, separately, data for all of South Africa is shown but with the X-axis as “Days Since Beginning of the Wave”, with 4 waves shown: omicron is shown as increasing far more rapidly in cases, less so for hospital admission, and, only 28 days in, less quickly for deaths than previous variants’ waves.
I suggest a better visual guide to provide a more fulsome perspective is simply this: daily cases on the left Y-axis and daily deaths on the right - although clearly this would not currently be better at inciting fear.
Picturing science-y stuff
Data journalism was becoming a thing about the time I started blogging a little over a decade ago. One format for what once-novel data-driven journalism was presenting a single powerful graphic accompanied by text explaining the graphic in depth. Jump ahead 10 years and we see data hasn’t sparked the interest some of us hoped. Instead of building a narrative to explain data, it’s far more common…
Hurting Michigan
Parker Gallant has called for the Ontario government to “shutdown the intertie line with Michigan” – in an article that notes some of my work. I feel I should offer some support as Michigan is being a lousy neighbour and it would feel therapeutic, if nothing else, to respond.
I’ll try to stick to data.
The system operator in Ontario (IESO) data indicates the Michigan intertie is the most…
Red team, blue team, COVID-19
warning: dark humour.
Despite my best efforts to avoid such things a story from the United States has caught my attention.
This seems innocent enough: Biden taps Ezekiel Emanuel to coronavirus task force. This Emanuel is a brother of Rahm.
Rahm Emanuel is famous for a few things, but his most famous quote is from a 2008 interview:
You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that [is] it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.
Ezekiel Emanuel, the new member of the new COVID-19 task force being assembled by President-Elect Biden, wrote a column in 2014 titled, Why I Hope to Die at 75. A taste:
…here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.
I’m not sure the exact average age of those dead with COVID-19 in my province of Ontario is, but I do know more than two-thirds have been over 80 and 87% have been over the age of 70. 64% of all deaths have been residents of long term care facilities.
Maybe Biden is trying the ‘red team, blue team’ approach defeated President Trump couldn’t quite bring himself to implement on a different, significant, topic.
Thee to WE: the foundations of Canada’s Green Stimulus – part 2
Thee to WE: the foundations of Canada’s Green Stimulus – part 2
The following is the second section of a work I’ve been preparing for my main site. As rumours of the federal government proceeding with the externally-developed policy framework I have been researching, and because of the length the work has grown to, I decided to post the work in parts here as sections are completed. (Part 1)The May 19th announcement of the Task Force for a Resilient…
Thee to WE: the foundations of Canada’s Green Stimulus - part 1
Thee to WE: the foundations of Canada’s Green Stimulus – part 1
The following is the beginning of a work I’ve been preparing for my main site. As rumours of the federal government proceeding with the externally-developed policy framework I have been researching, and because of the length the work has grown to, I’ve decided to post the work in parts here as sections are completed.
2020 is throwing a lot at us.
The pandemic is the feature event for most, but…
The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor
The Case for Near-term Commercial Demonstration of the Integral Fast Reactor
This is a 2012 post from Barry Brook’s Brave New Climate, which was a tremendous blog but one that is no longer maintained – and was left with a presentation scheme that is illegible.
I’m currently in Dubai at the 2012 World Energy Forum, as part of a delegation from the Science Council for Global Initiatives. Tomorrow (24 Oct) we will run symposium on “New Nuclear”, which will be chaired by…
Ontario Government manufactured the highest electricity demand in years.
Each day from July 7th to July 10th saw an IESO “Ontario Demand” peak higher than any day since July 2013, and July 6th saw the 7th highest peak since 2013’s summer. The government had made some announcements that encouraged the higher peaks now experienced:
- On Saturday, May 30th, the government announced the suspension of time-of-use (TOU) electricity pricing, replacing it with a flat rate until the end of October, and,
- On the afternoon of Friday June 26th the government announced, “companies that participate in the Industrial Conservation Initiative (ICI) will not be required to reduce their electricity usage during peak hours”
The second of these announcements was the most impactful in spurring higher peak consumption.
A detailed study delivered to Ontario’s system operator (IESO) over 3 years concluded there was little load shifting accomplished by TOU rates, and that the impact had declined the longer TOU was implemented:
For the province as a whole there was a statistically significant reduction in usage during the EM&V peak of 2.11 percent in the pre-2012 period, 1.89 percent in 2012, 0.82 percent in 2013, and 0.73 percent in 2014 relative to what usage would have been in the absence of TOU.
It would be very hard to spot a difference of a couple of gigawatt-hours in comparing demand profiles on different days of different years. It’s also hard to spot a reason the government would reintroduce TOU rates as the default pricing option in November. Critical Peak Pricing - which would charge much higher rates only for hours where demand threatened to exceed supply - deserves more serious concern than TOU does.
It is very easy to spot the impact of suspending the requirement for Industrial Conservation Initiative consumers to reduce consumption during the five highest daily peak hours in order to reduce their future global adjustment charges. Two days with similar demand profiles from 6-11 am, and after 9 pm, are July 5th, 2018 and July 10th, 2020: on the day in 2018 Class A consumers enrolled in the Industrial Conservation Initiative were curtailing their demand from the grid to avoid global adjustment charges the following year, but that incentive was negated for those consumers two weeks before July 10th, 2020.
The demand reduction at peak appears to be, from this comparison, a little over 1500 megawatt-hours (MWh) at the usual peak hour, which should be expected due to claims made by the IESO in its Annual Planning Outlook:
In 2018, the ICI delivered an average demand reduction of approximately 1,600 MWh in the top 10 demand hours, and a maximum ICI reduction of 1,717 MW. The maximum ICI reduction on the peak demand day, and during the peak demand hour, was 1,347 MW and 1,330 MW, respectively.
The good news is there’s evidence the ICI did reduce peak demand by what the system people said it did - but the system performing well without Class A consumers reducing consumption at peak should also be an indictment of the high cost of a program suddenly deemed unnecessary.
Rants about Ontario’s electricity system
Rants about Ontario’s electricity system
“I personally hope those of you who read this will forgive my rants and start ranting with me and the others who do the same!”
I particularly enjoyed Parker’s first point, and the last two sections.
Ontario with only hydro and nuclear electricity
A friend of mine asked me last month if the data I’ve collected would allow me to calculate “how many hours nuclear and hydro could have fully supplied demand”?
Yes - although I note my fallibility could impair the calculations, and that more meaningful reporting requires estimating curtailment (of nuclear and hydro facilities), and estimating production (of embedded generators).
OPG’s financial reporting informs us that more potential hydroelectric generation is foregone due to supply surplus than any other source, so not compensating for that curtailment being omitted from the system operator’s (IESO’s) hourly generator output reporting would understate the number of hours nuclear and hydro could provide all the electricity Ontario’s consumers demand. On the other hand, embedded generation reduces the IESO’s reporting of “Ontario Demand”,and most solar generation, along with a not insignificant amount of industrial wind capacity, is embedded in distribution networks.
I ran three queries:
- Ontario Demand compared to Nuclear and Hydro (N+H) generator output
- Ontario Demand compared to reported and estimated curtailed N+H
- Ontario Demand to N+H with curtailed less estimated embedded wind and solar (W+S) output.
It turns out the simple scenario yields a similar count of hours, annually, as the most complex one. Since Bruce nuclear units 1 and 2 re-entered commercial operation in the second half of 2012 the percentage of annual hours nuclear and hydro facilities in Ontario have met Ontario demand has ranged from 25% to 40%.
But this can vary greatly by season - and year.
Wind, loss and ignorance
My memory was aroused today and I suddenly recalled an argument I’d made about selling off Ontario’s contracts with industrial wind turbine (IWT) facilities.
I don’t know if it was another bad column pretending there will be an incremental cost to the Ford government cancelling contracts, or just another ludicrous day for the so-called Independent Ontario Electricity System Operator. In hour 8 (8-9 am) wind output was 434 megawatt-hours (MWh) on a forecast of only 454, and only 6 hours later output was 1,926 MWh on a forecast of 3,158 MWh - which means wind could have grown output by 2,700 MW but 1,100-1,200 was curtailed due to excess supply. Exports also grew 700 MW - also due to excess supply, which is also the reason the Hourly Ontario Energy Price (HOEP) is stuck at $0 per any-unit-that-tickles-your-fancy. Hydro output shrunk 900 MWh over the 6 hours, and if you’re keeping track that means all the potential wind growth either caused curtailment or got dumped on outside markets for nothing.
