Environment & Energy

Yo_Mama

(8,303 posts) Wed Feb 27, 2013, 09:18 PM Feb 2013

Oddly enough, Ontario's renewables fee is close to Germany's fee

http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/02/26/surplus_wind_power_could_cost_ontario_ratepayers_up_to_200_million_ieso.html

When there’s more power than the system can handle, the IESO sells it to neighbouring provinces and states — sometimes at a loss, and sometimes actually paying them to take it.

Those losses are absorbed by ratepayers, and added to the electricity bill as the “global adjustment,” which now often exceeds the price of energy by a wide margin.

So far this month, for example, the market price for power has averaged 2.96 cents a kilowatt hour. The global adjustment has been 5.73 cents a kwh. Consumers pay delivery and debt.

There's a bunch of interesting points in this article about Ontario's grid power situation and the requested changes. Note that nuclear power is the absolute worst fit.

This particular battle is probably one to watch. There is a big expansion in wind power coming in the area, and this matter will be dealt with one way or another, because if the rate adjustment is already that high, tripling the inflow within another few years is going to force some kind of change. Retroactively changing the deal for those that invested with guarantees doesn't seem the best way to handle it.

Edit: I don't understand why their fee is so high. Here's the graph mix:

And here's a link to their page with a lot of this info. They have an awfully high percentage of nuclear, and with demand fluctuating like this and nuclear at close to 60%, they must have to boggle everything else:
http://www.ieso.ca/imoweb/siteShared/monthly_update.asp?sid=ic

Here's current demand graphs:
www.ieso.ca/imoweb/siteShared/monthly_update.asp?sid=ic

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Oddly enough, Ontario's renewables fee is close to Germany's fee (Original Post) Yo_Mama Feb 2013 OP

Nuclear is not the best fit for balancing wind power load wtmusic Feb 2013 #1

wtmusic

(39,166 posts)

1. Nuclear is not the best fit for balancing wind power load

Reply to Yo_Mama (Original post)

Wed Feb 27, 2013, 11:56 PM

Feb 2013

but it is (by far) the best fit for carbon-free consumer load following:

"Most of the modern (nuclear power plant) designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5%/minute.
Some designs are capable of extremely fast power modulations in primary or secondary frequency regulation modes with ramps of several percentage points of the rated power per second, but within a narrow band around the rated power level. "

http://www.oecd-nea.org/nea-news/2011/29-2/nea-news-29-2-load-following-e.pdf

Solution? Fuck the wind turbines. Not only would you not have to pay people to take the power they generate, but you could avoid the CO2 generated by the CCGT turbines they need to back them up.

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