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Category Archives: Reforming Ontario’s Electrical Generation Sector
Nuclear power generators to get tax breaks
Refurbished nuclear generators will qualify for tax breaks available to clean and green energy producers, the Ontario government has announced.
Privately owned Bruce Power and publicly owned Ontario Power Generation Inc., or OPG, were both hesitant yesterday to estimate the value of the tax breaks, which apply to facilities that aren’t yet producing power.
The tax breaks, which include a 10-year property tax holiday and sales tax rebates on materials used for clean, alternative or renewable energy sources, had been announced last November.
Canada's most dysfunctional power system
Dear Friend:
Hydro-Quebec’s mismanagement has created a legacy of environmental damage, unneeded dams, and squandered resources through giveaways to metal smelters. NB Power’s public utility regulator has just declared that Crown utility to be "insolvent." Manitoba Hydro has also served its citizens ill by supplying artificially cheap power to dirty, old economy paper mills and mines.
What went wrong?
Thursday’s huge power failure was likely caused by a relatively minor technical problem at a generating station, but so far, it’s not clear exactly what happened.
Some investigators in the U.S. said Friday that the trouble appears to have started in northern Ohio.
A spokesperson for the North American Electric Reliability Council, an industry-sponsored monitoring group, said it would take some time to pinpoint the cause.
Meanwhile, the Ohio Public Utilities Commission said it doubted the outage started in its state.
The post-mortem begins
The electrical power grid is like a rope linking a team of mountain climbers. On a good day, someone slips and is hauled to safety. On a terrible day, someone slips and pulls everyone off the mountain.
Thursday was a terrible day for Ontario and the northeastern United States.
The grid is a web of transmission towers, power lines and computers linking generators to distribution centres and, eventually, to that air conditioner in your window.
Power outage shows Canada-U.S. interdependence
The massive power outage that blacked out most of Ontario and several states in the northeastern United States on Thursday showed the deep interdependence of the North American power system.
The electricity grids in Canada and the U.S. link at 37 major points so that the neighbouring countries can trade significant quantities of electricity between them. The system works well when one utility has a shortage – it can then buy electricity from a neighbouring utility.
Politics of power
Ontario NDP leader Howard Hampton might be forgiven for failing to grasp the scope of Ontario Hydro’s woes. But not for ignoring his party’s role in them.
Creating a sustainable, efficient power system is a challenge. As Thursday’s blackout starkly shows, Ontario has failed to meet that challenge. One reason for the province’s decades of failure is widespread ignorance of the history of the power industry in Ontario, an ignorance perfected by Ontario’s NDP leader Howard Hampton in his recent book, Public Power: The Fight for Publicly Owned Electricity.
Outage exposes power grid's vulnerability
A nine-second event that triggered a cascading power outage Thursday demonstrated the vulnerability of the Eastern Interconnect electrical grid. It’s an integrated system that supplies power to Ontario and the northeastern United States.
The grid is the catch-all phrase for the transmission towers, power lines and computers that link generators to distribution centres and, eventually, to your desk lamp.
'It's like a tidal wave in reverse'
Ontario’s electricity system has been studied, analyzed, reformed, tweaked and overhauled for a decade.
Somehow, we’ve still ended up with the biggest blackout in the province’s history.
While no one is happy with the massive blackout, even critics of the province’s power policies acknowledge that it may not be too surprising for a system as complex as the power grid to fail once every 40 years – the last major catastrophe was in 1965.
Bringing back power a slow, tricky process
Inability to store electricity part of complex challenge Rolling blackouts likely to persist over weekend
When electrical power fails as it did Thursday afternoon across a large swath of Ontario and the northeastern United States, it can take days to restore and large cities, like Toronto, are usually among the last to regain service.
Bringing back power a slow, tricky process
Inability to store electricity part of complex challenge Rolling blackouts likely to persist over weekend
When electrical power fails as it did Thursday afternoon across a large swath of Ontario and the northeastern United States, it can take days to restore and large cities, like Toronto, are usually among the last to regain service.
Energy Probe 