Wind Contribution to Summer 2016

Posted Oct 20, 2016

The summer of 2016 was a hot one.  25 days of temperatures above 30C.  That meant a lot of A/C units running.  That, in turn, meant more demand on the system.

In Sept our Premier Kathleen Wynne claimed that if it wasn’t for the power contribution from wind turbines to the grid we would not have been able to keep Ontarians cool.  Of course, it was a claim with no hard evidence.  That’s what will be presented here.

I downloaded the entire hourly output data for all of 2016 to the present from the IESO website.   I then downloaded Environment Canada’s hourly temperature data for  months of May through September for Toronto Pearson Airport.  Once in Access I just linked by month, day and hour to the data from the IESO to see what the output of wind, and other sources, was for every hour the temperature was above 30C.

Did the wind support the grid during those hot hours?  Nope.

This is the hourly wind output as a percent of the total demand for the entire summer.

Looks pretty chaotic.  But what is important is the output from wind matching the hot temps of the day.  The best way to see that is a scatter plot of temperature vs. wind output.

Each dot is an hour of one day.  That’s a lot of dots.  Essentially,  the higher the temps at the top should be matching with higher wind output at the right, if Wynne was correct.  But it’s not looking too good.  The vast majority of the hours are when wind is not contributing much to the grid.

Let’s zoom in to get a better view of what’s going on and see what wind was doing only when the temps were 30C or more.
Most of the hours where the temp was more than 29.9C wind contributed less than 10% of the demand.  In fact, in the entire summer, only 7 hours did wind produce more than 15% of the grid power.    So out of 176 hours in the summer when the temps were scorching, wind did its job only 7 of those hours.

Now why would that be?  Simple enough to see when you look at the over all picture.  In the section on spikes here, you will recall that wind comes in a series of spikes, then drops off after 36 to 48 hours.  To best see that, we will look at a three day period from August 10 to 12th.

The top graph is the hourly temperatures.  The middle graph is the contribution to the grid by all the power sources.  The bottom graph is wind output.

Notice wind produces virtually nothing the first day and a half, hence did not help with the power for our A/Cs.  Only on the third day did the wind spike, from a warm front that moved across the province.

Let’s tease out just the wind and temps across a sever day period, August 10 to 17th.

Clearly we see that on August 10th when the temps went over 30C wind didn’t perform hardly at all.  Then on the 12th, wind produced 10% of our demand, but it was nighttime when we didn’t need it.  On the 13th, when it didn’t go over 30C wind added to the grid of 10% of the demand.  But on the two next days nothing from wind.  Then on the 16th wind picked up to 13% of the demand only to drop off as soon as it got hot in the afternoon and demand would have reached the highest for the day.

This is the same seven day period showing the demand with wind’s contribution.

Pretty pathetic.

So what source provided the demand on those hot days since wind couldn’t?  Natural gas did.

So, clearly Wynne didn’t know what she was talking about, and lives in this dream world of wind providing all the power we need.

There is also a serious concern here about the pattern of wind output.  As more turbines are added to the grid, the more they contribute as a percent when the wind does blow.  But when the wind doesn’t, the entire fleet contributes next to nothing.

What this means is the spikes go up very quickly to a high peak, but then fall off the cliff when the wind goes down.  This puts the entire grid system at risk of crashing, as happened in Australia recently.

It’s only a matter of time before we also experience a collapse of the grid for several days all because of the unpredictable and unreliable wind power.  And your power bills are through the roof to pay for this.

 

Why there is a push for more gun control, part two

In part one I described what Canadians have had to endure with respect to gun control. I used Canada because it is not only what I’m actually having to personally deal with, but we seem to be in the middle of the gun control spectrum when compared to other countries. That could go either way after the next election in October.   A conservative government recognizes that shooting sports and hunting are an integral part of Canadian Culture.   They don’t want to disarm us.   With the right pressure, we might get even more of the gun-grabbing laws changed to be more rational.

But that is not the case with the other two political parties: the Liberals, who are center-left, and the New Democrats, who are far left. During the writing of C-68, the Liberal’s draconian gun law, their view was that only the military and the police should have guns. No civilian ownership of any firearm.

“I came to Ottawa . . . with the firm belief that the only people in this country who should have guns are police officers and soldiers.” –Liberal minister of justice, Allan Rock, 1994.

“Canada will be one of the first unarmed countries in the world.” –Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy, 1998.

“Disarming the Canadian public is part of the new humanitarian social agenda.” — Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy at a gun control conference, Oslo, Norway, 1998

Hence the attempt to disarm Canadians through C-68, and the powers the Liberals gave to police agencies to make their own laws with no oversight, and no recourse.

Those two parties have been clear, should they win the next election, they would make gun control even more strict, including banning of all handguns.

They know criminals won’t abide to any gun control laws. If anything these socialists would require criminals to invoke fear in the public to make them more willing to have our freedoms sucked away.

We are not unique in this regard.

Australian gun laws are even more strict than Canada’s. After several mass shootings occurred their conservative Government imposed one of the strictest controls on gun ownership in the Western World. It resulted in the destruction of nearly a million firearms. Even pump action shotguns were included in the banning. By law the government was required to pay everyone who handed in a gun.   Nearly a billion dollars was paid, which came from a special one off tax on their health care.

New laws on ownership included air-rifles and even paintball guns. One needs a “Genuine Reason” to own any firearm, including a paintball gun! Airsoft guns are banned outright. Airsoft “guns” fire plastic pellets using CO2 pressure. They are very popular with re-enactors because these devices often resemble the firearms the re-enactors need for their events.

The interesting aspect of the Australian gun control is the government sent everyone a pamphlet stating in no uncertain terms, that no one has the right to use guns for self-defence.

Such is the case in Canada too.

The Australian government claims gun related crime has dropped. Suicides by guns have dropped. What they don’t want people to know is that overall crime rate has increased, dramatically, specifically home invasions. Suicides actually increased in the years after the gun control.   People just found other means.

What the government also doesn’t want people to know is how many of the illegal guns are buried in the Outback. Estimates are it could be a million of them.

In the UK, things are much worse.

When the final stage arrived in 1997, and virtually all handguns were banned via the Firearms Act, the promise was a reduction in crime and greater safety for the British people. But the result was the emergence of Britain as the “most violent country in Europe.”

Link.

In the years since these two countries have had strict gun laws, with the promise of people being more safe we have this:

Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven’t made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don’t provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems.

Link.

Criminals, it seems, don’t care about gun laws. Go figure.

Now we come to the US.   The current government has been using shootings to justify confiscating or at least restricting gun ownership.   Indeed, this is a tough battle because of the Second Amendment, but that doesn’t stop the US government, some states, and some cities from imposing gun bans. But then the US Supreme Court puts an end to those bans.

After the bans, gun crime in those jurisdictions went up. Allowing conceal carry in other states, and gun crime goes down. Link. See also a study referenced here.

So what is the reason for the attempt at confiscating firearms from private ownership if it isn’t to curb crime?

“C-68 has little to do with gun control or crime control, but it is the first step necessary to begin the social re-engineering of Canada.” –Liberal senator Sharon Carstairs, 1996.

That “re-engineering” is UN Agenda 21.

Agenda 21 was made public in 1992. Canada’s gun control came in 1995. Australian gun control came in 1996. Though British gun control started before then, beginning in earnest after WWII, the current gun laws came into effect in 1997. I don’t like co-incidences on that scale.

Agenda 21 is the UN vision of what the world should be in the 21^st century. It’s a communist’s wet dream. No private ownership of anything, not land, not possessions. It firmly requires redistribution of resources evenly around the world. It requires people to be packed into urban cubicles to limit the human impact on the environment.

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class — involving high meat intake, the use of fossil fuels, electrical appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning and suburban housing — are not sustainable,” explained UN Earth Summit Secretary-General Maurice Strong as he ushered in Agenda 21 two decades ago. In other words, the UN sustainability agenda eventually seeks to curtail people’s choices in terms of food, transportation, housing, and much more. The document itself makes that abundantly clear, too.

Link.

No government can implement Agenda 21 while private citizens are armed, hence the 2006 UN Small Arms Treaty.

The original idea was simple: Recognising the terrible damage caused by the unchecked global trade in arms, a group of Nobel Peace Laureates drafted a set of principles that would apply existing international human rights and humanitarian law to international arms transfers.

These principles were developed into a draft arms trade treaty (ATT) that would oblige states to regulate and report all international arms transfers, and to prevent transfers where the arms would be likely to be used to commit war crimes or human rights abuses.

Link.

It’s all in the interpretation of the wording. The Treaty states that countries should not be selling arms to countries where “…they would contribute to or undermine peace and security; or could be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law, human rights law, terrorism or transnational organised crime. The risk of a contributing to or facilitating serious acts of gender based violence or violence against women or children is also included.” Link.

The NRA claimed, “Barack Obama or a future anti-gun president could use [the treaty] and international norms compliance to rationalize enacting gun control politics through executive actions, especially in the import and export realms.”

Liberal minded people in positions of government look to the UN as the world authority on, well, everything. So when the UN says countries should control guns more, they expect countries to abide.   Progressive politicians are all too keen to abide. The wording of the Treaty could be used by gun-grabbing governments to stop the importation of firearms into their country because criminals are using those firearms to commit crimes, be it domestic violence resulting in murdered women, or mass shootings.

Couple all this with the state of the world economy: it’s collapsing. It’s only a matter of time before the debt bomb goes off. When it does it will make the 1930 depression look like good times.   That will mean rioting in the streets.

However, a disarmed public is an obeying public when confronted with armed police willing to use lethal force when ordered to, or so socialist governments hope. Though they are likely to find out that assumption is very wrong.

The US government has been on an ammunition-buying spree. Agencies are stockpiling billions of rounds.

…some of this purchase order is for hollow-point rounds, forbidden by international law for use in war, along with a frightening amount specialized for snipers.

Link.

Why? Does the government feel something is coming that they think they will need billions of rounds to control the populous?

Couple this with the rumors of FEMA camps being readied to detain Americans during civil unrest (link) and the dots start to get connected.

Why there is a push for more gun control, part one.

And it has nothing to do with saving lives. In Canada we have strict gun controls. We can own handguns and semi-auto (self-loading) rifles, and even full auto machine guns, provided you have the right licenses.

The first gun control on Canadians was in 1934 when a registry for all handguns was established. Link. But the real change in firearms laws was started by the Liberal Government in 1979 when the Firearms Acquisition Certificate was introduced. You could own a non-handgun with no license, but you had to have the FAC to buy any kind of gun after the bill, C-17, was passed.

Then came Alan Rock, Minster of Justice for the Federal Liberal Government. It was a massive change to gun laws and came about after a mass shooting on December 6, 1989, at the École Polytechnique in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Link.

C-68 was passed in 1995 as it took the government years to figure out how they could confiscate every handgun, every semi-auto rifle, and anything that looked scary.

The goal of C-68 was to ban as many handguns as possible. To achieve that goal, they banned all 25 cal, and all 32 cal pistols. Then when they still hadn’t reached the majority of handguns in private hands, they looked at barrel length. Anything four inches or smaller was banned.

Unintended consequence of course happened. For example, German Lugers instantly became illegal because of their short barrel. There is likely thousands of them in Canada brought home as souvenirs after WWII. Many were turned in and destroyed. But a fellow in Montreal, who has a prohib license, buys these relics of history and puts new barrels on them. A mere quarter inch longer. That makes them legal as restricted handguns. Go figure. Obviously there is no difference in function.

The result of C-68 was a three tiered license system – non-restricted, restricted and prohibited. Prohibited included anything full auto, or even converted from a full auto machine gun. Those in private hands were grandfathered with a special prohibited license, which could be passed down to their heirs. But no new prohib licenses would be issued ever again.

Right off, the government had a serious problem because Olympic competitors use 32 cal revolvers, so they had to get an exception from the prohib rules.

Other provisions in C-68 was magazine restriction for semi-auto rifles to just rive rounds. Originally, Alan Rock demanded that a rifle hold no more than one round at time. It was deemed impossible to force the public to hand in all their rifle magazines. So, under pressure, he caved and allowed us five round magazines for semi-auto rifles, ten round magazines for handguns, and no limit for bolt action rifles. (though some ten round mags for bolt action rifles can fit some semi-auto rifles, go figure…)

C-68 also forced those buying ammo to have a license. It also forced everyone to register everything they owned, including bolt action rifles and shotguns. That was called the Long Gun Registry. The Liberals claimed it would cost only three million to implement. It cost two billion. And not everyone registered their rifles. Estimates are that less than half the long guns in private hands were registered.

C-68 had subsequent amendments, called Order in Council, which was used to prohibit specific firearms by name. The hit list was large. Even the AR15 was on the list, but it was classified as restricted. A restricted rifle was any rifle with a barrel length of less than eighteen inches. Or by name as the government deemed necessary (hence twenty inch barrel ARs are restricted).

Rumors have it that when the government decided what rifle was to be prohibited, they looked through a catalog and circled in red anything they deemed was scary looking. Functionality was irrelevant.

For example, one can buy a semi-auto 45 ACP rifle. They are restricted. But the Auto-Ordinance series of semi-auto rifles based on the classic Thompson submachine gun, is prohibited. So is anything deemed to be a “variant of” something already prohibited.

This has opened the door to a lot of abuse. For example, anything that looks like an AK47, regardless of the functionality, is prohibited. Why? Because it’s a scary looking assault rifle used to kill millions of people. It’s so ridiculous that the Mossberg Blaze 47 .22 cal rimfire rifle was instantly deemed prohibited by the RCMP just recently. They didn’t even bother to test it.

Yet they have just allowed the .22cal version of the famous StG44 into Canada as a non-restricted.

The original StG44 was a German assault rifle of the latter year of WWII. It was used as the template for the Russian AK47. Even the semi-auto centre fire (8mm Kurtz) version of the StG44 made by a German company is legal as a restricted rifle in Canada.

By the time the Conservatives got into government some nine years ago, the Firearms Act was a spaghetti mess. And costing the government billions. But the headache for the new government wasn’t just the money.

C-68 set up provincial Chief Firearms Officers. Part of their job is to issue Authorizations to Transport. This was a new provision in C-68 as well. Anyone with a restricted or prohibited firearm had to get an ATT to move it out of their homes. (One guy I know has an ATT to go from his house to his private range in the back yard).

Those firearms could only be used at approved ranges as well. If you belonged to a club they would get your ATT. If you needed to take your firearm to a gunsmith, you had to call the CFO office and request an ATT to take it there. Then when done, you had to get another to bring it home. If you bought a firearm at a store, you had to get another ATT to transport THAT gun only. If you bought a restricted gun in a private sale, you need to get an ATT to pick it up at the post office.  The seller needed one to get it to the Post Office. Lend your firearms to someone, and you needed an ATT.

The interesting thing about these ATTs is no one looked at them. They were never used in any criminal investigations (criminals don’t bother to call the CFO to ask for an ATT).

Not long ago, in Ontario, things got real interesting. An individual with handguns, and did not belong to a range, was denied ATTs to go to any ranges in the province. He took the CFO to court, but lost. The Firearms Act allowed CFOs to be kings and make their own laws.

To prove that, CFOs decided, on their own, that you must belong to a club to keep your restricted firearms. If you did not belong to a club, upon renewal of your license, they could come and confiscate all your restricted firearms, and destroy them. No recourse, and no compensation for the value of the firearms.

The next thing the Ontario CFO did was to impose new rules on ATTs. You could only get an ATT for the club you belonged to. If you wanted to attend an event at another club, you had to get an invitation from that club, and then the CFO might give you a short term ATT to attend the event.

If you got caught without one going to another club, you were looking at three years in a federal prison.

What was interesting about these conditions was there was no legislation in the Firearms Act for any of it. The Ontario CFO was making his own laws whenever he wanted to, which carried with it criminal consequences for anyone violating the rules. Classic police state.

The Conservative Party finally got a majority government in 2011. The first thing they did was to pass a law ending the costly Long Gun Registry. The anti-gun people went ballistic. They screeched that there would be blood running in the streets. I watched the hearings live, and the anti-gun people were ruthless in their attack against all firearms owners. They grave danced on the victims of gun violence, all the while lying to Parliamentarians about what would happen with no restrictions on long guns. NDP and Liberal MPs sung along with the gun-grabbers.

Yet not one of them, when probed, could site a single case of a life being saved because of the Long Gun Registry.

In the end, C-19 passed, and we could burn our certificates for all our long guns. Blood didn’t run in the streets. The data was destroyed at the Federal government, except Quebec’s records. They wanted to make their own Long Gun Registry, and wanted the government’s data. The Supreme Court of Canada said no.

But that wasn’t the end of the data saga. Chiefs of Police were against the government abolishing the Long Gun Registry. And once C-19 passed, CFOs tried to make their own back door registry, by keeping copies of the data, and also ordering business to hand over any and all sales of long guns. The Federal government squashed that immediately.

Then in March of 2014 something miraculous happened. The RCMP decided to ban two semi-auto rifles, which had been sold in Canada for almost ten years. Over night the RCMP made some 10,000 Canadians criminals (see a pattern here?). I was one of them, as I own a Cz858 rifle.

The other rifle banned was the Swiss Arms Classic Green.

The 858 was deemed a converted from full auto. The story is long and complex, but the rifles were not converted from full auto, but the RCMP decided they were. The Classic Green, in the RCMP’s opinion, was a “variant of” a full auto Swiss Arms rifle (it isn’t).

Immediately the government acted and gave us all a two-year amnesty to keep, and use, our firearms. The RCMP was pissed. They didn’t even have time to send everyone confiscation notices. Interesting was that the 858 is non-restricted so how could they send us all notices?

This reclassification was the best thing to happen to firearms owners, but only because we have a Conservative government. In the fall the government introduced legislation to fix the CFO ATT issue and the Cz 858/Classic Green reclassification. Except the government had a problem. Prohib and restricted firearms are explicitly defined in our Criminal Code. But non-restricted rifles were not. So the government couldn’t do an Order in Council to turn the prohibited rifles the RCMP just banned back to non-restricted.

This was a deliberate omission when the Liberals wrote C-68. They didn’t want classification to be anything other than firearms going prohibited.

The new bill, C-42, just passed as law. It fixes the CFO’s being able to make their own laws. It allows us to transport our restricted firearms as part of our licenses without having to ask for an ATT. It defines what a non-restricted firearm is, and explicitly states in the bill that the government has the authority to make any firearm non-restricted by Order in Council.

This is what they will do this summer to reverse the RCMP reclassification of the two rifles. They also will be making new regulations for the CFOs and RCMP, which will spell out exactly what they can and cannot do. Ending the police state.

Last summer, they wrote new regulations on the RCMP such that they have only one year to reverse their classification designation of any new firearm. After that, they cannot change their minds. Thus all our current rifles are safe from reclassification as the RCMP had their eye on a number of semi-auto rifles they wanted to prohibit. They can’t now.

The government will also set up a committee, which will be tasked with classifications of any new firearm. That takes even more teeth out of the jaws of the RCMP.

But our successes may be for naught and short lived. We have a federal election this October. Should the Liberals or NDP get back into power we fully expect them to rejuvenate their gun grabs, and go much, much further. The Liberals narrowly defeated a policy at their convention three years ago, which would impose Aussie style gun control and confiscation.

That’s the subject of my next post.

Wind Turbines Displace Hydro

 

Wind Turbines Displace Hydro: how OPG is spending $4.2 billion to avoid Blackouts

 

OPG was directed by the Liberal Ministry of Energy to spend billions on hydro projects as evidenced by both Big Becky ($1.6 billion) and the Lower Mattagami projects ($2.6 billion). Big Becky adds no new capacity it will simply make existing production at Niagara more efficient whereas the Lower Mattagami project will supposedly add 440 megawatts (MW) of new capacity to OPG’s hydro fleet. These projects are still some way from completion so it is likely those budgeted estimates will be exceeded. Only a few years ago the estimate for Big Becky was $1 billion and for Mattagami $1.5 billion. The other issue surrounding those two engineering miracles is that they are being built at a time when Ontario has a huge surplus of power. With Bruce Power expected to hook up refurbished nuclear plants this year our surplus will increase further.

 

These two hydro projects will be available to back up wind and solar which by 2018 are expected to have a capacity of about 10,000 MW. At the same time demand in Ontario continues to drop as industries leave and high prices are having the desired effect of curtailing demand. The intermittent delivery of electricity to the grid by wind and solar generators will create problems for IESO in managing the grid and they will use hydro to balance it. Unregulated hydro from OPG will bear the brunt of their management efforts as wind and solar cycle up and down. While Ontario only has about 1800 MW of wind installed at present, IESO’s use of unregulated hydro has already presented itself and is costing ratepayers dearly.

 

The following chart shows the production and sale of unregulated hydro power by OPG in terawatts (TWh) since 2004 and where available shows prices received for that power. So far in 2012 the wholesale price has dropped a further 1 cent a kWh and if that holds OPG will receive even less for unregulated hydro in 2012 then they did in 2011.

Production of Unregulated Hydro by OPG 2004 – 2011
Year	2004	2005	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010	2011 (9 mths)
Unregulated Sold (TWh)	16.8	14.1	15	13.8	17.6	16.8	11.7	8.1
Price per kWh received	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	3.2	3.7	3.3
Income before interest and income taxes ($M’s)		732	736	329	508	209	129
Total hydro capacity (MW)	6835	6982	6956	6972	6963	6944	6996	6996
Total hydro sold (TWh)	35.7	32.6	33.3	31.9	36.4	36.2	30.6	22.3
Unregulated (%)	47.1	43.2	45	40.2	48.3	46.4	39.6	36.3
NB: All information came from OPG’s “Fact Sheets” and Annual Reports!

Should OPG’s production and sale of unregulated hydro continue at the same rate for the last quarter of 2011 the TWh sold will be 10.8 TWh or 6.8 TWh lower then 2008. The value of that lost production based on the average received (9 months) for 2011 translates to $224 million in lost revenue to OPG and a further loss to the Provincial coffers for the payment of “water rental”. According to the Ministry of Natural Resources “Conditions Report”, 2011 was a relatively good year for water flow compared to 2007 which was considered a low water level year. Despite that; production and sale of unregulated hydro by OPG will likely come in at 3 TWh less for 2011 then 2007 when wind contributed 1 TWh. Co-incidentally wind reportedly contributed 3.9 TWh in 2011 which would indicate it is displacing hydro, not coal, as promised by the Ministry of Energy.

 

Wind and solar power has displaced cheap, clean hydroelectricity at a cost to the ratepayers of a minimum of $300 million in 2011 for the 3 plus TWh it took away from OPG’s unregulated hydro production-more if the costs of transmission lines built to hook up those wind turbines are included. That $300 million alone will add about $70.00 to each ratepayers bill for the year and also extend repayment of the “stranded debt”. The Drummond Commission highlighted the fact that the Government controls OPG and it’s direction to OPG influences the payments in lieu (PIL) of taxes which are directed to pay the “stranded debt”. The spilling of clean green hydroelectric power therefore flies in the face of his recommendation to maximize profits in that entity.

 

The $4.2 billion that OPG is spending represents almost $1,000 per ratepayer household and will be paid back through rate increases. The amortization period will be long (40/50 years) but it will still drive up bills significantly. The other 6/7,000 MW of wind slated to come on stream by 2018 will further exacerbate those increases causing OPG to spill clean hydro meaning the value for the billions spent will be even less. Worth noting is that Mattagami will likely produce most of its available power in the Spring and Fall when wind also tends to produce at higher levels. Those two seasons are traditionally Ontario’s lowest demand periods so we are simply doubling up production when we need it least. Ontario electricity prices will be the highest in North America by the middle of this decade making the province a very unattractive place for any type of industry.

 

Ontarians should accept the fact that we will remain a “have not” province for years to come even if McGuinty and the other parties agree to enact all of the Drummond Commission’s recommendations. The hidden debt burden on Ontario’s future generations created with those long term wind and solar contracts will increase our social costs by creating energy poverty and will keep employment levels lower then the rest of Canada.

 

Parker Gallant,

February 29, 2012

Windpower Case Study in Ontario

Part 1: Coal-fired generation not displaced

by William Palmer
February 29, 2012

“Even while wind was at peak operation, the coal generators served as backup (at low load) to be able to respond rapidly to the anticipated, and actual, drop in wind output that occurred just hours later.”

It has been claimed that industrial wind turbines allow Ontario to shut down coal-fired electrical generating stations. But the facts reveal this to be a myth.

Read More Here.

 

Part 2: Adverse impacts on nuclear plants and general health

by William Palmer
March 1, 2012

“Excessive baseload generation largely due to a contractual requirement to buy all available wind output might make it look like wind is supplying an increasing fraction of the energy supply (in TWh), while the nuclear supply appears to be decreasing. But in reality, the reduction in Bruce B unit output to permit this fallacy cannot be justified economically, nor is it wise and conservative operation of a nuclear station.”

The following eight charts extracted from the Sygration website, which allows plotting of the Ontario IESO electrical generating unit performance, demonstrate that not only are wind turbines ineffective to replace coal, in actual fact, they do considerable harm to the stability of the electrical supply, and increase the risk of upset and accident at a nuclear generating station.

Read More Here.