Ontario power generation: Cost analysis

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You have to consider the cost of building, maintaining, and decommissioning a nuclear power plant.

750 million to take it apart is not pocket change.
300 employees on the daily payroll is not either...

They are putting up 20 megawatts, 80,000 solar panels, near me.
Zero emissions, zero fuel costs, an employee checks the site once a month.
(Status reports sent electronically)

http://wavy.com/2016/10/25/construction-underway-on-isle-of-wight-solar-farm/
 
Originally Posted By: mattwithcats
You have to consider the cost of building, maintaining, and decommissioning a nuclear power plant.


I suggest going back and reading the original post. This was covered. In fact the initial construction costs being paid back was the entire premise of the first segment. The 2nd segment covered the amount of power and profit produced over the lifetime of the device, which includes operating costs as well as refurbishment. It's all there, go back and read it.

Regarding your local example, what are the construction costs? What's the rate paid to the facility? What's the annual output? You are welcome to run the math on that facility yourself and post back your results.
 
mattwithcats:

Just did a quick search here:

http://www.dailyprogress.com/news/busine...8e70a9ffcb.html

Quote:
New solar power farms could be coming to Louisa, Powhatan and Isle of Wight counties, Dominion Virginia Power announced Thursday.


*snip*

Quote:
The three planned solar farms would cost an estimated $129.5 million, which Dominion Virginia Power is asking to pay for through a rate adjustment rider that would add 7 cents to the average residential bill starting Dec. 1, 2016.


So we have our cost. 56MW of solar @ $129.5 million dollars. That is $2,312,500/MW. Virginia's climate isn't much different from Ontario's, so some of the numbers will be relatively portable here. So if we assume the efficiency of this facility is in-line with the Ontario facility average I cited in the opening piece, which is 892,857.14KWh/MW, and the lifetime is the same 20 years, then our lifetime KWh per MW is the same at 17,857,142.8KWh/MW, then the rate required to recoup the initial investment is $0.13/KWh.

This is in-line with the above quote. If you are currently paying $0.07/KWh, you'll now be paying $0.14/KWh to pay for these facilities. Ergo, your hydro rates just doubled.

In contrast, wind, at less than 3 cents per KWh is a bloody bargain.
 
Ran out of edit time on the above post.

the quote in the above post does not read very well, however the same language is used on the Dominion site, so I'm not sure if they are talking about 7 cents to the total bill, or 7 cents to the per KWh rate?
21.gif
.

Also of note is that Dominion appears to believe these panels will last 35 years. Our experience with them having to weather winters has not supported even the marketed lifespan (half our panels had to be replaced at the local farm due to the weather prematurely aging them) but perhaps they'll be lucky? If that's the case, the per KWh rate would obviously be lower. All of the facilities are relatively young compared to their intended lifespan, so it will be interesting to see how well or how poorly they age. Weather seems to have a pretty significant impact.
 
Ontario=hydro. "the politically incorrect renewable resource" Can't beat water running downhill for price.

Past hydro the cheapest resource would probably be a natural gas combined heat and power. Basically a semi tractor sized generator that produces electricity reasonably efficiently, but is small enough to produce heat (which can be turned into air-conditioning in addition to space heating) in useable quantities. 80% thermal efficiency.

Past that would be a combined cycle natural gas generator. The latest ones use a beefed up 757 engine turned on its side and operate at 60% thermal efficiency. Up to 600MW, about 60% the output of a large nuclear plant. They can be fired up in less than 15 minutes and they take maybe a couple of years to install.

Solar doesn't match load all that well, even in Phoenix. Windmills aren't dispatchable as with more conventional resources. You can't make a phone call and have 150 MW on line in 15 minutes, day and night

I don't know why they have solar panel farms. One of the few natural advantages to solar is that it can be sited so close to the load. That makes a difference in transmission constrained areas.
 
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Investing in a large solar project in the northern latitudes of Canada just seems like a bad choice. Whose idea was that?
 
Originally Posted By: Pop_Rivit
Here locally we have over 6,200 MW as of early this year (additional capacity has come on line since). It's successful enough that we're soon going to be a net energy exporter, even after satisfying our own power generation needs.


You know that's only the equivalent annual generation of a 1,600 to 2,000MW thermal plant don't you ?

And relies on the thermals to provide energy when the wind is down in the absence of battery storage ?

Every 1,000MW of thermal that closes needs 3,000-4,000MW of wind/solar, and batteries/storage with a round trip cost of $200/MWh to truly replace the "traditional" technology...makes it pretty expensive reall, having to install that many times the nameplate rating PLUS storage to get you through the day.

edit...I note that you said "nett"...that's where the ugly facts lie, the "evil" plants being in someone else's back yards.
 
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Originally Posted By: jimbrewer
Ontario=hydro. "the politically incorrect renewable resource" Can't beat water running downhill for price.


Gotta agree with you on that. Nukes provide 60% of Ontario's power generation. Combined with hydro, they cover close to 90% of the province's power needs.

Originally Posted By: jimbrewer
Past hydro the cheapest resource would probably be a natural gas combined heat and power. Basically a semi tractor sized generator that produces electricity reasonably efficiently, but is small enough to produce heat (which can be turned into air-conditioning in addition to space heating) in useable quantities. 80% thermal efficiency.


Do you have any cost information on these?

Originally Posted By: jimbrewer
Past that would be a combined cycle natural gas generator. The latest ones use a beefed up 757 engine turned on its side and operate at 60% thermal efficiency. Up to 600MW, about 60% the output of a large nuclear plant. They can be fired up in less than 15 minutes and they take maybe a couple of years to install.


This sounds like a peaker plant. If that's the case, they get paid a rate premium due to that dispatchability. Also, definitely not 60% of one of our three plants. The smallest in Ontario is more than 3,500MW. Bruce is 6,232MW (7,276MW net).

Originally Posted By: jimbrewer
Solar doesn't match load all that well, even in Phoenix. Windmills aren't dispatchable as with more conventional resources. You can't make a phone call and have 150 MW on line in 15 minutes, day and night

I don't know why they have solar panel farms. One of the few natural advantages to solar is that it can be sited so close to the load. That makes a difference in transmission constrained areas.


The advantage of wind is the fact it is cheap and can be leveraged as a profit centre if you aren't relying on it to provide something silly like baseload, which it is incapable of doing. During windy periods, you can lean on the wind instead of your peaker plants and have no fuelling costs. If demand is low, you can sell that generation at a profit, as it costs nothing to make as long as your investment costs are covered, which was what I was exploring here. The output of solar is so low and subsequently the necessary recoupment rate is so high, that until there is both an increase in output and drop in price, I simply don't see it as making financial sense. At least based on the numbers we've explored in the thread so far. The numbers I came up with regarding the triple install mattwithcats touched-on, while better than my Ontario example, is still massively more expensive per KWh than wind and also has the disadvantage of taking up huge tracts of land and having more than 100,000 directly exposed points of failure.
 
All electrical generation requires 100% backup at some time.

The windfarms around me are a huge boon with taxes and a great yoke taken off the regular property owner around here.

In Illinois they have deregulated the electrical industry like no where else in the US. It's now all on the wholesale cost.
 
Originally Posted By: SHOZ
All electrical generation requires 100% backup at some time.


Even the most green eyed analyst would HAVE to admit that there's a difference between schedulable generation being taken oout for a fortnight a year, and 6 weeks every year, and losing a week per annum in breakages versus something that runs from nothing today to full load tomorrow, to bouncing in between nothing and 3/4 load all the next day.

For the former, market application for the maintenance shuts is notified to the market months or years out so that the market can structure itself for the shortfall, players can stock up on gas contracts and the like to cover it.

For the latter, the only notice that the market gets is when the frequency drops, and all of a sudden the schedulable generators get called up to higher loads...only to get smashed back down at the next wind gust.

WHEN the schedulable machines are all pushed out of the market, then Wind/Solar has to install 3-4 times the nameplate capacity to simply HARVEST the amount of energy in a 24 hour period...not even related to "backup", it's simply gathering the required energy (which then has to be stored).

As a professional in the industry, can you at least acknowledge the difference ?

Originally Posted By: SHOZ
In Illinois they have deregulated the electrical industry like no where else in the US. It's now all on the wholesale cost.


Yep, watch that, it's what Oz did in the '90s.

Wind, being uncontrolled bid in at $0/MW, and gets paid what the highest cost scheduled generator gets for each MWh...when windy, they crash the price, but still make more than the last called up schedulable machine, who gets THAT price times the number of MWh required to "top up" the grid.

If there's more wind than energy needed (pops' "nett export), the wholesale price even goes negative (3 Oz states were $0 to -$0.05 on Monday)...South Oz (the experiment that you should be watching in the other thread) regularly goes to $-300/MWh.

That's what drives market transitions, the schedulable machines lose money and close, while wind harvests money while offering no security.

"Orderly" transition will NEVER occur, as when wind is disrupting traditional energy, it's cheap...but there's no plan for 3MW of wind for every MW of thermal that closes, no-one is factoring THAT in, and the storage that's needed...Oz modelling is that's 3x the current average wholesale cost, even before storage is factored in.
 
Originally Posted By: Shannow
Originally Posted By: SHOZ
All electrical generation requires 100% backup at some time.


Even the most green eyed analyst would HAVE to admit that there's a difference between schedulable generation being taken oout for a fortnight a year, and 6 weeks every year, and losing a week per annum in breakages versus something that runs from nothing today to full load tomorrow, to bouncing in between nothing and 3/4 load all the next day.

For the former, market application for the maintenance shuts is notified to the market months or years out so that the market can structure itself for the shortfall, players can stock up on gas contracts and the like to cover it.

For the latter, the only notice that the market gets is when the frequency drops, and all of a sudden the schedulable generators get called up to higher loads...only to get smashed back down at the next wind gust.

WHEN the schedulable machines are all pushed out of the market, then Wind/Solar has to install 3-4 times the nameplate capacity to simply HARVEST the amount of energy in a 24 hour period...not even related to "backup", it's simply gathering the required energy (which then has to be stored).

As a professional in the industry, can you at least acknowledge the difference ?

Originally Posted By: SHOZ
In Illinois they have deregulated the electrical industry like no where else in the US. It's now all on the wholesale cost.


Yep, watch that, it's what Oz did in the '90s.

Wind, being uncontrolled bid in at $0/MW, and gets paid what the highest cost scheduled generator gets for each MWh...when windy, they crash the price, but still make more than the last called up schedulable machine, who gets THAT price times the number of MWh required to "top up" the grid.

If there's more wind than energy needed (pops' "nett export), the wholesale price even goes negative (3 Oz states were $0 to -$0.05 on Monday)...South Oz (the experiment that you should be watching in the other thread) regularly goes to $-300/MWh.

That's what drives market transitions, the schedulable machines lose money and close, while wind harvests money while offering no security.

"Orderly" transition will NEVER occur, as when wind is disrupting traditional energy, it's cheap...but there's no plan for 3MW of wind for every MW of thermal that closes, no-one is factoring THAT in, and the storage that's needed...Oz modelling is that's 3x the current average wholesale cost, even before storage is factored in.
Well sure there's a difference. Doesn't take away from the statement about backup.

So far with the regulation the cost have been kept down, it's been 5 years or so since they did this. But the nukes suffer as they have to compete on the wholesale market with nat gas. Wind is an excellent source of energy here in the flatlands. Minimal pollution and land use.
 
Sounds like wind with some pumped storage could be around $0.10/kwh for the actual cost of production then?

I guess from my perspective, we built our house not to use much electricity and so we don't. 10 cents per kwh wholesale pricing for green energy would be a great thing, even 20 cents, I don't care personally as we still waste electricity and could cut back more if the payback was there. High prices are really the only driver to making most people become efficient, otherwise they don't care. I'm sure a large proportion would bring back the smog days of coal plants if it saved them $10/month, while the smog made life miserable for their children and grandparents...

I really only worry about industry leaving Ontario due to high electricity prices. But maybe there's not much heavy manufacturing left to worry about anymore as they've moved to Mexico or China for other reasons already.
 
Very interesting read...when I was fishing on your Lac Seul system of lakes, I found out that Ontario has a HUGE number of hydro electric dams on the various river systems up there. I noticed you didnt delve into Hydro elec in your comparison, so I have to ask why not? Its probably the least costly to build and maintain and zero pollution as well. Just curious?
 
Originally Posted By: Click
Very interesting read...when I was fishing on your Lac Seul system of lakes, I found out that Ontario has a HUGE number of hydro electric dams on the various river systems up there. I noticed you didnt delve into Hydro elec in your comparison, so I have to ask why not? Its probably the least costly to build and maintain and zero pollution as well. Just curious?


I didn't have any readily available dam costs that I could run the comparison on. I could however look it up if there was interest. I'm sure I could find an example. I did touch on hydro electric a few times here, it is our second largest generation source behind the nukes. The two together make up almost 90% of our generating capacity.
 
Originally Posted By: IndyIan
Sounds like wind with some pumped storage could be around $0.10/kwh for the actual cost of production then?

I guess from my perspective, we built our house not to use much electricity and so we don't. 10 cents per kwh wholesale pricing for green energy would be a great thing, even 20 cents, I don't care personally as we still waste electricity and could cut back more if the payback was there. High prices are really the only driver to making most people become efficient, otherwise they don't care. I'm sure a large proportion would bring back the smog days of coal plants if it saved them $10/month, while the smog made life miserable for their children and grandparents...

I really only worry about industry leaving Ontario due to high electricity prices. But maybe there's not much heavy manufacturing left to worry about anymore as they've moved to Mexico or China for other reasons already.




I could be completely out to lunch, but I think wind should be leveraged more as an intermittent replacement for the gas peakers, not baseload. We currently lack sufficient baseload thanks to lack of planning from the McGuinty and Wynne Liberals, so we are using way more natural gas than we should be. We are also subsidizing wind out the wazoo when we could be paying them fair market rate and they'd still be profitable. I see it as a situation where, if there were sufficient baseload in place, that wind would be leveraged as a peaker when viable and made up for by natural gas when it isn't. When it makes excess generating capacity, it becomes a profit centre. This of course depends on the cancellation of the current contracts that are in place that make them a huge cost black hole.

BTW, what is your average monthly usage? I'm around 780KWh. I think we discussed this before, however I don't recall what you said and am too lazy to look it up
wink.gif
 
We used 450-600kwh per month this summer even running the AC more than was really necessary. But we still have all sorts of [censored] plugged in all the time, fluorescent lights, use the electric dryer and dishwasher almost everyday. Probably we could ditch our smaller chest freezer too and if power was more expensive we would use less.
It would be nice if OPG just built some large scale wind capacity and match it with pumped storage and just ran it at cost. No private companies getting huge subsidies.
 
The problem now is that we have tons of wind capacity, all massively subsidized, and not enough baseload. I think they should finish the Darlington expansion. That 2,400MW of baseload would be quite beneficial right now.
 
Originally Posted By: Youppi
It seems Wynne read your thread Overkill:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/q...rates-1.3868058

Also a factor in electricity rates, overpaid employees in Ontario One:

Quote:
The auditor general flagged in 2013 that generous salaries, pensions and benefits at OPG — especially among top executives — were partly to blame for rising hydro prices.


http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/ontario-hydro-bills-1.3860314
Not a surprise with the overpaid employees. One of the reasons for the huge debt left by the former Ontario Hydro. Looks like no lessons were learned from that experience.
 
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