Daily Mail: Wind turbines ‘only lasting for half as long as previously thought’ as study shows they show signs of wearing out after just 12 years
Daily Mail: Wind turbines ‘only lasting for half as long as previously thought’ as study shows they show signs of wearing out after just 12 years
I understand many of the wind generators McSquinty just bought are sitting idle in maintenance already. I suspect they will have a similar short lifespan of these others. I wonder if the Ontario taxpayer will get a refund. Or maybe Dalton will be held personally accountable for the loss/waste/mismanagement.
Nawwww the political lass are insulated from accountability, the cops are too busy busting people for defending their homes, their life and exercising their rights.
What a political cesspool that province has become.
As our betters say, What difference does it make?
The gravy train of unlimited subsidies for leftist causes will cease as soon as the ponzi scheme by the US Fed causes the next depression. A depression such as the world has never seen.
Feel good bird blenders will be one of the first useless money burners to be jettisoned. There’s no way this scenario is going to take 12 years to come to fruition. They’re already mothballing these statist monuments in Europe.
Even when they claim to be telling the truth, they lie. It is a good idea to take any number they give and either inflate or deflate by a factor of 5. These Eco-crucifixes all require constant maintenance and are off-line far more than they are on. They need to be virtually rebuilt after only a few weeks in heavy wind and totally replaced within a year. Never mind that they spend most of their service life stationary, undergoing repairs or simply braked to keep it from wrecking the grid.
This is old news. The huge windfarm in California is an example that has been around for decades. Most of the turbines there free spin and don’t generate any power at all. They are mostly broken down and have been for more than ten years. Also, the rusting turbines in Hawaii are a cautionary tale of why not to get into the wind business. Decades of fraud have been an example of why to stay away from wind power but the left doesn’t learn. They keep making the same mistake over and over expecting different results each time.
This is good news – the sooner this visual blight is mopped up the better. Send the bill to McGuinty.
What, no warranty?
Further exploitation of the taxpayer by Big Wind.
As an Ontarian I’m looking forward to the day all those windmills start falling down.Hopefully, nobody gets hurt when they fall down. Furthermore, I hope the government of the day decides not to repair it and the contract with the landowner is then considered null and void.
In Britain, HM Government tilts at windmills.
Given the lack of change in climate in the last few years, maybe the various governments and NGOs should declare a victory, and get out of the windmill-subsidising business.
Presumably it is a good thing when a wind turbine fails, because then the more economical fossil-fuel generator cuts in.
Its difficult to use a warranty when the company that built the turbine goes bankrupt and no longer exists.
Hm, these giant bird blenders will last only 12 years in the moderate climate of Limeyville.
I must ask how long our own BC bred Gordon Campbell windmills stuck all over hills North of Tumbler Ridge,where the Winter temps regularly hit -25, are going to last. They told us 25 years,with hardly any maintenance at all.
Anyone who’s ever run heavy equipment in that climate knows how important regular maintenance is,and how extreme cold affects bearings.
Twelve years? I’d be astonished if they last five without a major rebuild.
Every night, under cover of darkness, a convoy carries another part of the Cape Scott Wind Travesty north from Duke Point along the island highway to Holberg, BC. Not one single protest from one of the nation’s most protest-prone populations. My guess is they’re all exhausted from their day jobs whining about pipelines and coal mines.
Here’s the source –
Wear and Tear Hits Wind Farm Output and Economic Lifetime
The Renewable Energy Foundation [1] today published a new study, The Performance of Wind Farms in the United Kingdom and Denmark,[2] showing that the economic life of onshore wind turbines is between 10 and 15 years, not the 20 to 25 years projected by the wind industry itself, and used for government projections.
http://www.ref.org.uk/press-releases/281-wearnandntearnhitsnwindnfarmnoutputnandneconomicnlifetime
25 years to 12 = 52% decrease check
Rated output = 100 MWH = actual of 25 MWH = 75% decrese check
Cost to build = 2.5 million = actual of 5 million = 100% increase check
Anybody else see a pattern here??
And as Phantom points,I think he may be pushing it at 5 Years.
Using green logic you just made a case to increase the subsidies so they can continue with the insanity.
Well, their actual purpose was to transfer money from middle class taxpayers to politician’s business class environmentalist buddies – not provide reliable, affordable power. In that respect, I think they have served their purpose quite well.
Now that the peasant energy customers and VIP cottage owners have started to organize in opposition to the cost, noise and ugliness, the enviro-cronies will cash in and move on to the next big idea. This bigger, better energy “breakthrough” technology will be sold to any politician that can be bought and the media will once again shamelessly promote what they do not understand.
Green energy production equals almost limitless taxpayer fleecing opportunities.
so how many people in here actually know anything about wind turbines? The turbines in Dawson Creek come with a 12 parts and labour warrenty with options to extend and operate normally in winter at below -40. Their main bearings can be replaced in an afternoon and not one has had a problem. The same model of turbine has already been operating all over the world for more then ten years. There is no gearbox and they operate in winds over 120km/h. The cattle that feed in the area between and under the turbines will scratch themselves on the entrance stairs. If you buy the right product (not the cheapest) and put them in the right area (i.e. not someones back yard) you’ll tend to have fewer problems. As for health issues , I have worked beside them for two years and enjoy doing so. As far as I’m concerned any turbine with a gearbox is a waste of money. Do your own research and come to your own conclusions. And as for small furry animals that fly, go put your cat down because they kill more then turbines do. I know where the kills are kept and they are far fewer then you think.
oh I forgot they have already paid themselves off. As for subsidies, tell me what subsidies did the turbines in Dawson Creek get? Your telling me no oil companies in energy production in Canada get subsidies? Explain fo me what is green about the Clean Energy Act of BC. The burning of fossil fuels for energy? That’s the green part? Or flooding 6000 hectacres for a dam that might not even stand up in the soil? Instead of selling power at a loss, maybe BC Hydro should take another look at pumped storage. You need to realize that Site C is nothing but a power plant for fracking in the Horn River. Because that’s clean energy too. Gotta love the liers we have in our governments. Everything is done based on money not value.
The turbines in Dawson Creek are maintaned everyday by a dedicated crew and monitored by Scada 24/7/365. The turbine has an issue it sends a text message to the crew in Dawson Creek, Nova Scotia and Germany. Most problems are solved within an hour. This includes grease levels, if the automatic grease pumps are low, have high/low pressure or lose power they are fixed within hours. The same turbines are in Antarctica and Diavik Mine. But you would know that you saw a rusty turbine in the USA and now your an expert. Because everything done in the US and Ontario is done right.
N60 is right to point out the source report. There are a couple of things important in this report which the Daily Mail barely touched on.
1. Denmark’s older machines are much smaller. Britain’s are newer and larger. The general trend is that the larger machines wear out more quickly. Not a surprise to any mechanical engineer.
2. The rate of performance deterioration is much higher for offshore than onshore wind turbines. This study only looked at Britain’s onshore wind farms, not the new offshore ones being built by Germany. What we already know is that maintenance and outage rates for them is much higher than for the onshore installations.
when was the last time a polictian developed a wind park using public funding?
It’s never happened, every single wind park in Canada has been privately developed.
Site C however…..is a waste of taxpayer money. It’s going the way of the Teton Dam. Down river. It’s only purpose is to supply power for fracking.the Horn River Basin. Which like how BC dealt with the soft lumber , is going to be good for BC. Because we here in BC give away lumber and gas on the cheap. We here in BC like getting screwed. If the government of BC didn’t lie about everything that comes out of their mouths maybe you would have a point. But you are misinformed.
“when was the last time a polictian developed a wind park using public funding?
It’s never happened, every single wind park in Canada has been privately developed.”
I see that you are unfamiliar with the concept of FIT (feed in tariff).
All wind generation enjoys a guaranteed rate that ensures them a guaranteed return on capital regardless of the marginal or base load cost of power. For purposes of an electrical grid, wind power is in practice virtually worthless because it cannot be dispatched.
Now about your claims of superior mechanical performance, you have as yet no basis to make that claim. What was built was 34 Enercon E-82 E3 3MW turbines. This technology is very new and with little maintenance history at this point. It remains to be seen whether or not the yaw drives, annular generators and blade adaptors are any more resistant to environmental damage than gearbox-driven turbines.
And naturally of course you say nothing at all about all the residents in Dawson’s Creek making health complaints.
Reminds me of a pot calling the kettle black. You claim that BC Hydro is foisting a scam on the public with Site C. You of course make no mention of you foisting a scam on the public through your preferential electricity rate, paid for by BC Hydro. Biting the hand that feeds you?
James, through green mandates, guarantees and FIT policies governments (taxpayers) are providing indirect subsidies to wind power companies. Some, like SaskPower, directly fund and build the wind farms. In addition, energy consumers are forced to pay higher prices because the prices for alternative energy are considerably higher than conventional power. The real kicker is that wind and solar has to be backed up 100% by conventional power because of the intermittent availability of wind (20-30% of rating) -so you end up with the cost of building conventional power plus green power. On top of all that you have the cost of building the power lines to connect widely dispersed power sources to the grid. I am sure I am missing additional costs of wind but I don’t think anything will convince you that their negatives outweigh their positives.
The fact that wind towers are failing much sooner than expected is really just the bitter garnish on this particular shit sandwich.
I call BS on the house cats kill more birds than wind turbines propaganda.
Few cats are good birders-most are too fat, lazy and well fed to be bothered to do the hard work it takes to catch a healthy bird. Mice are much easier to catch. Where I live, the crows and ravens are the ones who pick on the cats.
I’ve cared for several cats during my lifetime-the last one was an outdoor cat, very agile, healthy and not over fed. During the twenty years we had him, he only managed to kill two birds-one being one of the crows that teased and picked on him daily, and the other was the injured Robin who kept forcefully flying into our window that dropped to the ground either stunned or dead (apparently there is a certain type of tic or parasite that causes birds to do this).
This last cat was a very effective mouser. Since his death, we’ve been having a deer mice problem-had to set up a bunch of traps-nowhere near as effective as the cat was. We haven’t replaced the cat because we figure it will be darn near impossible to find that good of a mouser again who also didn’t need a litter box-he preferred to spend his waking hours outdoors-you could say he was a cats cat. Sadly, this cat did catch and kill the squirrel that lived on our property-the squirrel was onto him and managed to dodge the cat successfully for several years. Our kids use to feed this squirrel, so was saddened by its demise.
Wind farms are a poor use of land and they are ugly-the large wind farms also impact the local climate. Also, it sounds as though the Dawson Creek wind farm requires much maintenance which doesn’t come cheaply. Even the grandfather of environmentalism-James Lovelock, is against wind farms and is currently fighting a proposed wind farm to be located in his village.
“I see that you are unfamiliar with the concept of FIT (feed in tariff).
All wind generation enjoys a guaranteed rate that ensures them a guaranteed return on capital regardless of the marginal or base load cost of power. For purposes of an electrical grid, wind power is in practice virtually worthless because it cannot be dispatched.”
IMO, that is your best post yet — I’ve read it now maybe eight times, and you really get to the heart of the matter with that one.
I happen to like bats, except when they’re flying around in the belfry (a little joke there), but I’m pretty certain, having parsed your words, that there are only about three people that I know who even remotely understand what you’re talking about — you, me and my wife (who is a psychiatric nurse — a good statement that has the added value of being true; normally, I have to get her a version with pictures).
Please explain, if you would, for the folks out there, why FIT rates are a cover story for the inherent inefficiency, unreliability and unpredictability of wind power, and why (the rest of the story) why dispatchability is so important (actually has massive value above cost, despite its, more or less, equal inefficiency versus wind, etc.), why green energy will never be dispatched against base load or marginal generation, and why you cannot connect a cursory source of generation to a distribution system that is designed to deliver electric power, rather than receive it.
Whack ’em. Hard. With a paddle. With nails. Please.
David,
You are asking for a tall order, but after thinking about it for a bit, here is my explanation. It will draw most heavily upon Ontario, as that is the jurisdiction with which I am familiar, but the principles are generally applicable everywhere.
A FIT is in principle very simple. The utility agrees to pay a generator a fixed sum of money for a given kWh of electricity. The payment is made for the kWh regardless of the time of day or date when it is delivered.
This constitutes the first form of subsidy. In the case of wind, the generator receives a fixed sum, approximately 14 cents/kWh. However, the price of electricity varies greatly from time to time, depending upon the time of day or the season. For example, electricity is usually very cheap in Ontario during the spring runoff. Same in BC or most other Canadian provinces with lots of hydro. So the price the utility charges its customers on the bulk power rate may average something like 5 cents.
So who pays the missing 9 cents? That depends on where you live. In Ontario, the government hides the difference in the blended power rate charged on your electrical bill. In simple language, it lets Ontario Power Generation collect a lot less for its electricity so that it can afford to pay more for wind and solar. As a result, OPG is being starved of capital by having a Return On Investment of only about 7.5%. A minimum standard for a regulated utility is about 10% to allow a utility to accumulate funds for new construction or to provide for maintenance on existing facilities.
In the case of Germany, two models have been adopted by the various states. Some states allow the utilities to directly pass on the excess costs of generation to customers. This is the main reason why Germany now has the second highest electricity rates in Europe. The second model means that the state requires the utility to pay the FIT rate and eat the difference itself. This is essentially what happened in California in 1998 when the state forced SCE and PG&E to buy very expensive power (Enron was gaming the system) and sell it for a lot less than they paid.
Now comes the second form of subsidy. Wind generators under FIT get paid the same rate regardless of time of day or season. Electrical demand varies greatly during the day. In Ontario, the demand during the night is typically about 12,000-15,000 MW for the entire province. During the day, it may peak at about 22-24,000 MW. The fiirst increment of power is called base load, that portion of electricity which is in demand 100% of the time. The second, that above 15,000 MW or so, is called peak demand.
All generating technologies have two kinds of characteristics: 1. Their ability to produce electricity on a constant basis, which we call baseload, and 2. Their ability to be turned on quickly to meet new demand which just came on the grid, i.e. during the morning startup of coffee pots, heating plants, lighting systems etc.
What you want for baseload is very low cost electricity from plants that run at a constant level all the time. In Ontario, the best baseload comes from nuclear and hydro.
For peaking plants, what you want are plants that can start up quickly on demand. That’s best done by gas-fired turbines, which can be cold-started in minutes. But their operating power tends to be expensive, which is why they are the last units loaded on the system and the first ones released from it. The great advantage of gas plants is that their dispatchability (ability to turn them on quickly) is very high.
So here’s the second subsidy. Renewable generators get paid a very high rate (considerably above the usual peaking rate) regardless of when they produce their power. You cannot turn on a wind turbine. You can only make electricity when the wind blows.
And their rate of power varies enormously by the cube of the wind speed. That means if the wind drops by half its velocity within say a five minute period the electricity produced drops to 1/8 the previous production. This means very high fluctuations in their output.
This variation in output means they are not baseload either, as there’s no constant production from wind turbines. There’s no constant output from solar either, as it drops by 75 % under cloud cover. So intermittent sun and cloud means solar varies wildly minute by minute.
The third large subsidy is that the Green Energy Act gives priority to renewables. This means that renewable electricity with all of its variability is required to displace regular baseload and peak load generators from the grid, even though they are lower cost and much more reliable.
A fourth and final large subsidy is that renewables must be hooked to the grid for free by Hydro One. Hydro One must recover these costs out of all the other revenues they receive from other generators.
David,
An addendum to the above.
1. Not mentioned is that all renewable generation requires backup. This means that to compensate for renewable generation fluttering up and down, you have to have a backup generator. This generator must be turned on but not producing anything except to make up for drops in renewable output. This is expensive, because the generator isn’t producing all that much in kWh to make up for its construction cost in the first place. Remember, generators only get paid for the kWh they make.
Because its power levels will be fluctuating all over the place, this beats up on the equipment very quickly. Mechanical devices don’t ever respond well to thermal shocks. This cost also is not borne by the renewables.
2. Displacement of baseload generation is extremely damaging to the power system grid. Nuclear plants are designed to be turned on and left on at full nominal power for months or years continuously until they are taken off line for maintenance. Ontario’s renewables have been forcing hundreds of “reactor maneuvers” by Ontario’s nuclear generators on a monthly basis.
Nuclear plants can be designed for load following. This is in fact done in France, but in Ontario, all plants were configured for base load operation. At a certain point, about 60 % capacity factor, the nuclear plant has to be shut down; it cannot operate at a lower capacity factor. And once shut down, it can’t be restarted for several days to allow the built-up xenon to decay.
When displacing hydro, and it’s happened in Ontario many times since renewables, it means having to spill water rather than make electricity from it. Electricity which is essentially free of cost at that point.
The costs of spilled water and lost nuclear base load generation are also not borne by the renewable generators, nor is the higher maintenance costs that result from base load generators having to vary their output. Again, mechanical devices run best at a constant nominal level.
3. Please note that this is not a comprehensive list of the unnatural financial support that renewables receive. This is only the direct implications of the FIT. Other subsidies they receive can and usually do include:
a) government supported capital loans at preferential rates (in Germany it’s essentially interest-free),
b) freedom from environmental assessment requirements, licencing processes and local zoning regulations, and
c) omission of any decommisioning obligations on the generator.
Unfortunately my cat is an excellent hunter. She’s extirpated all the mice in my yard and, when I was away on holidays, the next door neighbors borrowed her to clean out the mice in their house. When she runs out of mice, it’s birds. She’s also smart enough to know that I don’t approve of her hunting birds and so all I find are piles of feathers in out of the way places and the occasional vomited up avian carcass on the lawn. With mice, she’ll come to ask me for help in getting a mouse she’s cornered out of a spot where 2 predators are necessary to catch the mouse. She’s also an outdoor cat and can’t wait for winter to end so she can resume her true role as chief predator in the yard.
What seems to have been forgotten in this whole wind power scam is that economy of power production is the primary factor deciding whether a particular plant is built. I can generate power by installing piezoelectric devices in my shoes which will produce a burst of energy every time I take a step. This can be captured by a power conversion circuit and used to charge a battery or ultracapacitor. The amount of energy captured in this manner is potentially enough to power an iPod, or charge a cell phone if I’m going for a long walk. If one looks at the cost of the power thus obtained, it’s in the tens of dollars/KWh. If I’m in the middle of nowhere, but still in a location that has cell phone access, that cost of power is reasonable to me given that the alternative is potentially not getting assistance when I need it and my cell phone battery is discharged.
As baseline power load, this form of energy is highly overpriced. Hydroelectric power is to be preferred when it’s available as it’s the ultimate renewable form of electricity generation. The problems of silting up of dam reservoirs are trivial to deal with in comparison to wear and tear on wind turbines in the chaotic atmosphere. It doesn’t take a genius to perform the calculation of relative energy density of a reservoir full of water compared to the fickle wind where the energy density is so low that the only practical use of this power source is on a high windy mountain where it’s uneconomic to run a powerline from a hydroelectric generator.
Another benefit of hydroelectricity is that the reservoirs required prevent downstream flooding in wet years. They also provide water for irrigation in arid areas along with a handy source of power to pump the water to where it’s needed. Wind power is just a great killer of birds and bats as well as providing a totally useless source of power because of its intermittent nature. In the case of pumping water uphill, wind power is simply uneconomic when it compares to capturing energy from Gaia’s hydrologic cycle.
As a hardware hacker, I understand the draw in creating micropower devices and energy harvesting from non-conventional energy sources. This might be the future of distributed monitoring systems in an ubiquitous computing environment, but the devices that use these unconventional energy sources require microwatts, not the megawatts that conventional electricity consumers require. My only unconventional energy source now is my wood stove fan which is powered by a thermocouple converting temperature differences to electricity. The sooner that wind energy is consigned to the category of idiotic errors made by politicians, the better.
cgh, very well said. Obviously you’re very familiar with the power infrastructure in Ontario. My question is who were politicians listening to? Not having an engineering background, I’ve had to come to the same conclusions you have based on first principles. Whenever I see something illogical being done and a flow of money going in a direction that economics dictate it shouldn’t, I start looking into who benefits and what nepotismic arrangements underly this flow of capital.
One class of individuals who are hyperaware of capital concentrations and flows are criminals. Likely this class of individuals is highly represented in “renewable energy” projects.
James!
Stop that whimpering and licking!
Loki, the disaster happened when Bob Rae was elected Premier in 1990. An officially antinuclear government, he promptly proceeded to appoint Marc Eliesen and Maurice Strong as the successive heads of Ontario Hydro. During that five years, the nuclear expertise at OH was gutted by a variety of forced retirements. The utility was left with inadequate resources to maintain its nuclear facilities, and performance fell drastically.
That’s what you get from listening to Uncle Mo and the rest of the green slime.
So much so, that there was a performance crisis by 1997, resulting in the shutdown of seven reactors. Only late last year were the last of the shutdown reactors recovered, Bruce units 1 and 2, by Bruce Power.
Harris essentially made the situation worse by breaking up Ontario Hydro. This meant that Canada’s largest province no longer had a utility large enough and strong enough to undertake major capital programs. The Harrisites believed that OH could be broken up despite the fact that all of its generating stations and transmission grid were designed to function as parts of an integral unit. The resulting private power market in 2001 lasted for all of about two weeks before it was frozen.
That’s what you get for listening to Energy Probe.
The McGuinty years were no better. Instead of pulling parts of the corporation back together, they further atomized the electricity sector, creating three new electricity agencies. They started a long term planning process, but promptly buried the resulting plan when it produced conclusions the government didn’t like (specifically don’t build much renewables, and don’t do FIT programs).
One of the chief villains in this was a noxious bitch called Marion Fraser, a deep Green on renewable generation if ever there was one. She was the principal energy advisor in McGuinty’s office through most of his nine years.
The result was George Smitherman and his Green Energy Act, which is where we are today.
That’s what you get for listening to the green slime, part 2.
The fact is that Ontario’s electricity system has not had a competent government owner since the last years of Bill Davis in the early 1980s. Everyone else, Liberals, Harrisite Conservatives and the Dippers, has made a thorough mess of things. What none of them were doing was listening to power system engineers. Mostly they were listening to a lot of theoretical economists from both extreme ends of the political spectrum. And a lot of special interest groups, many of which got loaded onto Ontario Hydro’s Board of Directors in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
Mostly this was not nepotism (except for Mo Strong being Bob Rae’s uncle), or corruption. Mostly it was sheer, blinding technical ignorance on the part of the government. Add to that a visceral dislike of nuclear by the kid bureaucrats at Ministry of Energy, because the nuclear engineers usually made them feel stupid (which mostly they were).
Folks concerned about this issue (which should be everybody, at least in the productive element of society, IMO) need to print your responses, frame them, put them on the wall and read them daily, each time seeking a better understanding of what you mean — although I do think you missed a beat on “coffee pots” (which I think should have read, “HVAC equipment (particularly air conditioning equipment)”) — you’d concede, I’m sure, that if it was just “coffee pots”, the problem would be one or more orders of magnitude less significant.
Nevertheless, I read your responses several times last evening and again this morning (including your response to Loki, which is substantially historically correct, even if I have come to different conclusions than you about the public policy implications — and I voted for Bill Davis in 1981, the first election in which I was eligible and the last election in which he ran), to make sure I had the right perspective. Without being alarmist in any way, I can say that the Addendum is one of the most disturbing things I have ever read about the political economy of Ontario, to wit:
“Displacement of baseload generation is extremely damaging to the power system grid. Nuclear plants are designed to be turned on and left on at full nominal power for months or years continuously until they are taken off line for maintenance. Ontario’s renewables have been forcing hundreds of “reactor maneuvers” by Ontario’s nuclear generators on a monthly basis.”
Quite apart from the obvious and implicit (if nevertheless predictable) results that these practices will create (your remarks are way too gentlemanly, IMO), the current demand-supply plan, authored as it was by the Ministry of Energy (I believe), calls for massive new (presumably load-following/peak-chasing — not specified — do they know?) nuclear output and more wind turbines to replace coal generation. So, as I see it, what they have proposed amounts to blasting a big hole in the load duration analysis which you have so simply and aptly described.
Have I got that right?
David,
You ask, “Do they know?” Over the course of my career I’ve talked about these kinds of issues with these people, or those like them, in both federal and provincial governments. Let’s get down to some basics. First off, no, they don’t know. This is for several reasons.
1. Prior to 1990, energy policy in Ontario was made by Ontario Hydro and the Premier’s Office, not the Ministry of Energy. This was a no-hope, end-of-career location for any provincial bureaucrat. Its techical knowledge was zero, its input on energy policy was close to zero.
And this was bitterly resented. So this place was staffed by senior bureaucrats too useless to be anywhere else more promising for career purposes, young hirees with ambition looking to transfer to an important Ministry as soon as possible, and a growing clique of green advocates hoping to influence Ontario energy policy. Rae comes along, demolishes the old decision making lines and effectively creates a vacuum.
Some policy making power was transferred to the Ministry but it was obvious that it wasn’t up to the job. The Dippers had ages prior declared themselves mortal enemies of Ontario Hydro, so they couldn’t leave it there either. Effectively the decision making was transferred fully to the Premier’s Office and to the Finance Ministry. This meant all decisions were now made on a short term basis.
And since Rae’s time, that’s never really changed.
2. When it became obvious that Ontario was going to have to build new generating facilities, they merged Energy with Infrastructure during George Smitherman’s time. This was an unholy disaster. Ontario was committing to build new nuclear plant. The only crown agency with any such expertise was Ontario Power Generation. But it had no money, for reasons I discussed above. And no one in the provincial government likes any of the actual electrical companies that do all the real work, OPG, Bruce Power, Hydro One. The government had just fired the head of Hydro One for telling the public the truth about the McGuinty mismanagement.
But the problem now became that Infrastructure was now responsible for contracting with AECL for a new pair of nuclear reactors. Infrastructure had never done anything more complicated than schools or hospitals, so naturally it made a godawful mess of the negotiations and tendering. Sufficiently so, that it’s still sitting on idle to this day after seven years.
3. Power system planning was done by Ontario Hydro. And by and large it was done effectively. Critics might sneer that it had overbuilt at times, but this was irrelevant. Ontario Hydro was always able to export profitably its power surplus. And rates were sustainably among the lowest in the continent, thanks to cheap nuclear, cheap hydro and good connections south of the border. Plentiful cheap power from nuclear was a key reason why all the Japanese automakers came into Ontario in the 1980s to build plants in Alliston, Cambridge, etc. These were brand new factories heavily dependent on electro-technology, quite unlike the old style assembly plants of Ford and GM in Oakville and Oshawa.
But all this changed when Harris broke up OH. Now no one was doing power planning of any kind, which in its own way was as big a disaster as what Rae had done. And Ontario hasn’t had a new auto plant since. So McGuinty set up a new office to do just that: the Ontario Power Authority (OPA). And who did they get to staff it? Old system planners formerly with Ontario Hydro.
And McGuinty charged it with coming up with a sensible long term plan for Ontario’s electricity future. He saddled it with a whole bunch of renewable mandates and other things, but by and large it seemed to work out reasonably well. OPA came out with its plan in 2007. The green slime in the provincial government, with Smitherman leading the charge, threw a shit-fit. OPA had largely rejected their green nostrums. So they dumped OPA’s long term plan.
There’s been a vacuum ever since. OPA has been reduced to being the contracting authority for green power projects, and no one is doing long term planning except for whatever dementia is swirling around in the empty heads at Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure. They don’t have to think about the future; Bruce Power has revived four shut down reactors over the past eight years, and that alone takes care of any immediate power needs for the rest of this decade.
And Ontario’s 30-year boom in auto assembly is done. It was dependent upon low cost baseload power, and McGuinty has put us on a very high cost industrial rate structure thanks to his renewable mandates.
Oh about coffee pots. Think about it. Each one of them draws a fair amount of current. And in Ontario about 300,000 of them come on every morning within a space of about half an hour.
About the several hundred reactor maneuvers, the regulators don’t much like it when reactors have to alter their power output frequently. Reactor operators like it even less. At some point, the national nuclear regulator is going to make this an issue with the Ontario government and its grid dispatch rules giving priority to renewables.
Finally, in Ontario’s system you cannot replace the coal-fired stations with wind. The coal stations have been used occasionally for baseload when industrial demand is high but most commonly for peak use. Wind can’t be dispatched, which is why Ontario is building (and cancelling when politically inconvenient) large gas stations. From a grid perspective, renewables are useless, as they are neither dispatchable nor constant in their power output. And the higher the proportion of renewables there are, the more unstable the grid becomes.
Three premiers, Rae, Harris and McGuinty, have in different ways managed to demolish Ontario’s single great industrial advantage of low cost base load power. This spells the end of Ontario as a growth sector for industry. Anything new coming in over the next 10 years will be little more than a dead-cat-bounce.