Industrial Wind Turbines Once Again are Up to Their Old Tricks

Those IWT brought to Ontario by the McGuinty/Wynne led Ontario Liberals, during the time they governed the province, once again showed their ability to suck money from ratepayers and taxpayers pockets on December 12, 2021. 

The heavy winds arrived on December 11^th and caused power outages to 280,000 customers due to broken poles, fallen trees and hazardous road conditions as reported by Hydro One.  While the winds decreased somewhat, IESO data indicates they were more than sufficient to allow them to generate 73,849 MWh the following day (December 12^th) as well as what looks to be another 2,800 MWh of curtailed generation. The combined cost was approximately $10,306,000 and for 17 of the 24 hours they beat hydro generation.

Naturally, and as often occurs, we didn’t need the generation from those IWT so IESO were busy exporting surplus power for the full day and almost 52,000 MWh were sold to our neighbours in Michigan, NY and Quebec for the average price of $20.03/MWh (2 cents/kWh). What that tells us is we generated about $1,042,000 from the sale of those exports.

If one assumes (with a fair degree of confidence) those 52,000 MWh sold to our neighbours all came from the unneeded IWT generation for the day we basically gave away over $7 million of our ratepayer/taxpayer dollars and paid $388/MWh (38.8 cents/kWh) for the 23,849 MWh of IWT generation actually utilized in Ontario.  

I’m sure the owners of those IWT were delighted we Ontarians were so generous with the handouts we gave them instead of us giving gifts to those many families suffering from “energy poverty” throughout the province.

Perhaps the Ford led provincial government should have a serious look at how some of these wasted dollars could be recovered from the IWT owners to help those Ontario families and small businesses suffering from energy poverty caused by the intermittent and unreliable wind turbines.