Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Electricity Demand Figures From Ontario and Neighbouring Jurisdictions

I read a New York Times Green Blog entry offering up some statistics on electricity consumption in the U.S.A., and I thought a short entry might be useful in illustrating some of the Ontario news that is coming out this week, specifically that tying pricing to elevated supply, and the procurement methods/pricing of that supply.


PJM predicted a peak demand this summer of 148,490MW, which was surpassed on Wednesday as demand hit 150,560MW. They report PJM has 180,400MW of generation capacity - ot about 20% more than the consumption on Wednesday afternoon.

New York Independent System Operator is expecting this summer's peak will be 4% below that set on August 2nd 2006, and ISO New England is pedicting peak demand less than 2% up from last year and 2% down from the all-tme peak also on August 2nd, 2006.

How does Ontario compare?
The IESO wisely offers a couple of figures for anticipated peak demand, and the extreme weather peak from it's May 18-Month Outlook was 26,073MW (the normal weather peak was 23539MW). Tomorrow is anticiptated to be around a record daily high temperature, in Toronto, and the day-ahead forecast is just under 25900MW, which would be up 3% over last year, but down 4% from the all-time high set one day earlier than records in New York and New England, on August 1st, 2006.

So Ontario's performance looks comparable to New York, and slightly ahead of New England - in terms of reducing demand since 2006's hottest days.

Ontario's installed capacity is 34,882MW, or about 35% more than the high expected Thursday, which is essentially the extreme weather peak expectation.
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Update July 21st
The projected Ontario peak is actually 25,651MW -- which might indicate demand reduction since 2006 has been slightly greater than in the other jurisdictions, with the annual increase closer to the 2% mentioned elsewhere.

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