Tuesday, August 02, 2005

The bare minimum

While the load on Ontario's power supply may not be going down, the supply itself is due to maintenance:
Four of the five units - nuclear power generators at the Pickering station east of Toronto and the Bruce plant on the shores of Lake Huron, plus two fossil-fuel units in Nanticoke, southeast of London, Ont. - were expected to be down for the day. The fifth, a Lambton coal-fired unit in Sarnia, was expected to return to service Tuesday. Several other units in the province also weren't operating at full capacity...

Tuesday's projected peak demand was expected to reach 25,400 megawatts, with the province only capable of generating about 23,700 megawatts, he added.

Constraints in those U.S. states that ship surplus power to Ontario could force the province to take more drastic steps, including brownouts and rolling blackouts, Young warned...

It wasn't immediately clear why several generating units were taken out of service but Young said it's not unusual for repairs to be required in a summer when generators have been working full out.

"You're seeing a system that is very strained," he said.

While it makes sense that some generators will need repairs after facing as great a load as they have this summer, there's no explanation as to why the system hasn't been planned to take into account for such readily apparent risks. But the answer to that can be found fairly quickly.

Today's Globe web comment includes the ever-fun spectacle industry apologists trying to make the case as to why Ontario is supposed to be better off under its privatized system. The comment claims that privatization will transfer risk from the public to investors...while conveniently ignoring the risk of power becoming unavailable entirely. This is the obvious risk of a system designed for profit: there's less incentive to provide any leeway, and thus more likelihood that peak demand totals will exceed supply. Just when it's needed most, the power most likely won't be there.

Of course, the comment does take time to lecture people about the need to plan added capacity. It conveniently neglects the time and effort that were spent planning the privatized system itself which could have been put to more productive uses.

All this isn't to say that the pre-privatization system was sustainable on its face: if rates were $2 billion per year below the cost of production, then the system was bound to run into problems no matter who was running the show. But there's no reason whatsoever why the now-higher rates couldn't have been used by a public utility to make added investments in the existing grid, without either the expense of privatizing or the risks inherent in a system designed to operate with a lower margin of error.

Now, power needs are soaring, the system not only can't keep up but needs to be shut down for repairs, and future projects to try to meet the needs are merely in a negotiation phase. Could continued public-sector management have worked out any worse?

No comments:

Post a Comment