OSPE - The Voice - September 2017 - 10

news

OsPe's energy Task Force finds Ontario wasted more
than $1 billion worth of Clean energy in 2016

- Enough to Power 760,000 Homes
On June 29, 2017, OSPE's President and Chair Jonathan Hack,
P.Eng., and energy expert and former President and Chair
Paul Acchione, P.Eng., appeared at Queen's Park to speak
to the importance of granting professional engineers more
independence in the planning and designing of provincial
energy systems.
In the media studio at Queen's Park, OSPE reported that
following a detailed analysis of year-end data issued by the
Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) and Ontario
Power Generation (OPG), the province wasted a total of 7.6
terawatt-hours (TWh) of clean electricity - an amount equal
to powering more than 760,000 homes for one year, or $1
billion at average retail prices. You can read the full details of
OSPE's release on the Society Notes blog at blog.ospe.on.ca.
OSPE's announcement was picked up by more than 12
mainstream media outlets across Ontario. Below are some
excerpts from select articles and interviews:

"The problem is that mother nature provides the energy sometimes
when people don't want to use electricity - for example, about 40%
of the wind comes at night, and not too many people are using
electricity at night. So if you have that surplus energy available,
or electricity available, you have to decide what to do with it. You
could try to sell it to your neighbours that have dirty grids, like in the
States, they have primarily gas and coal-fired grids, so, you can sell
some of it. And we did, we sold a fair bit of it to them at night. The
problem is, they [US utilities] are only willing to pay the fuel offset
price for natural gas, which is only about 3 cents a kilowatt hour.
They [US utilities] are going to save the fuel cost on either their
coal or their gas plant so that's why they're willing to pay for power
from Ontario. So, it's an open market, people are bidding prices
all the time. So if you try to sell your surplus clean power into that
market, they're going to offer a price - take it or leave it. So we
generally get a fair, low price for our clean energy when we sell it
outside the province. So that's one thing you could do so that you
don't waste it - you get a little bit of money back for it, you don't
[get paid] the full production cost for it, but at least you don't take
the full loss.
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The VOICe

September 2017

The other thing that happens though, is they [US utilities]
can only take so much. They still have to keep their fossil plants
running for the next day, they can't shut them down. So they can't
take all the power that we have available. And the rest of it, you've
got to get rid of it because if you don't get rid of it, it will cause a
blackout. So they [the Ontario grid operators] basically dump it.
The hydroelectric plants, they throw the water over the falls, at the
nuclear plants they steam off the excess steam to the condensers,
and the windmills [wind turbines], if you're down in southwestern
Ontario near Windsor, you'll sometimes see the windmills not
turning yet there's lots of wind, and you wonder, what's going on?
And what it is, is basically they [the Ontario grid operators] can't
use the power so they're telling the windmills to shut down.
Unfortunately, the way the market has been set up through the
various contracts, is they [the Ontario grid operators] have to pay
the producers not to produce. So last year on average, we paid
approximately $600 million for them to produce power that was
dumped - and that power that was dumped has an average retail
value in Ontario of about $1 billion.
Instead of throwing it away, let's make it available to industrial
and other consumers that are willing to voluntarily put in some
equipment to use this stuff to displace their natural gas. We're using
natural gas for producing hot water, steam, but we can even use
it to produce hydrogen for these new green vehicles - hydrogen
vehicles - at zero emissions. The hydrogen is being produced
from methane right now which is dirty. So rather than using dirty
hydrogen to fuel the new hydrogen vehicles, let's make it out of
clean surplus electricity, and then it's clean hydrogen.
So all of these applications can be made available if [the Ontario]
government is willing to establish essentially an interruptible
electricity market, where they say, if it's available you get it, if it's
not available you don't get it. And you'll get it at a low price. The
price on the market last year for clean surplus electricity was a
penny - one penny a kilowatt hour. But most people pay 17 cents in
the city and 27 in the country."
- paul Acchione, p.eng., CbC radio, July 10, 2017
http://blog.ospe.on.ca
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of OSPE - The Voice - September 2017
