Ontario’s Industrial Wind Turbines dig Deep into Ratepayer’s & Taxpayer’s Pockets

May 7^th was a typical Spring Day in Ontario with a relatively mild but windy day and we should be pretty sure IWT (industrial wind turbines) owners loved it!

Ontario’s “peak demand” occurred at hour 20 (ending at 8 PM) reaching only 14,439 MW (megawatts) and that demand could have easily been supplied by nuclear and hydro which at hour 21 generated 14,353 MW.

Over the day the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) accepted 26,259 MW of wind generation and curtailed about 36,200 MW meaning the almost 4800 MW capacity of IWT could have delivered around 62,300 MW (54% of capacity).  Coincidentally the foregoing accepted and curtailed IWT generation was only slightly more than was sold off to export markets with about 34,500 MW to Michigan and the bulk of the remainder to NY and Quebec.

The buyers of that surplus generation got a great bargain as the average HOEP for the day was 0.50 cents/MWh meaning the total revenue generated from the sale of the 62,300 MW was a miserly $31K! The buyers know when the wind turbines are spinning and when to buy our very cheap surplus and unneeded power!

To put the foregoing in perspective let’s look at what it cost the Ontario ratepayers/taxpayers. What Michigan, NY and Quebec paid and what we received was rather shocking. Under the terms of those IWT contracts we pay IWT generators $135/MWh for accepted generation and $120/MWh for curtailed generation!  Effectively that means they received about $7,877,000 for the accepted and curtailed generation or $299.97/MWh yesterday for grid accepted generation which is 0.30 cents/KWh (kilowatt hour)!  So, we were billed the foregoing for unneeded IWT generation and the principal buyer of the surplus was Michigan who are dependent on fossil fuels for about 70% of their generation! So nice of us to help them out when their Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is actively trying to shut down Line 5 which provides us Ontarians and Quebecers with propane and other fossil fuels!

If IESO disclosed hydro spillage and the cost of idling gas generators (required to back up the unreliability of IWT and solar panel generation) rest assured the cost of the generation for May 7^th would be even higher than the cost noted in the above paragraph!  

It sure would be nice if the buyers of our surplus generation at those bargain basement prices rewarded us with “Clean Energy Credits” (CEC) so we could recover a little bit of the costs. We should assume seeking CEC for subsidization of sales of Ontario’s clean surplus power to our neighbours would entail our politicians doing some serious negotiations to help stop the impact on our continually climbing energy costs.

We shouldn’t count on the foregoing to happen with the present government in Ontario or the other two main parties running in opposition to them!