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 2^nd 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 2^nd, 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 1^st, 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.