Hide and Seek with ‘Fair’ Hydro Plan Costs

At the Ontario legislature’s Estimates Committee last week on Wednesday, NDP Energy Critic Peter Tabuns asked the Energy minister, the deputy minister, and OPG officials to explain an amount of $4 billion in extra financing costs that the Financial Accountability Officer attributed solely to the government’s choice of an “alternative” financing model. The fumbling responses …

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Compensation Pain (podcast)

One of the general themes of this website is to document how public policy debates over energy in Ontario don’t obviously display the collective wisdom to correctly identify even short-run cause and effect relationships. One example of this deficiency relates to labour compensation rates in the utility sector. Is executive compensation at OPG and Hydro …

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AECL: Jim Flaherty’s Atom Splitting Headache

This link: Jim_Flaherty_s_Atom_Splitting_Headache is the slide deck  originally prepared for a lecture presented to U of T EngSci ESC 203, “Engineering, Society and Critical Thinking” October 26, 2010. EngSci students are specifically invited to send in comments or questions, as are any other interested readers. Many thanks again to Lisa Romkey, the instructor for ESC 203, for the …

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OPG Nuclear Results for 2008/09

In late 2007, OPG forecast nuclear running costs for “˜08 and “˜09 at $43/MWh and $46/MWh respectively (OEB file EB-2007-0905 Ex. A1/T4/S3 Chart 2). For 2008 and 2009, the results were $44.31/MWh and $ 44.09/MWh respectively. OPG’s achievement in 2009 of running cost results slightly better than forecast occurred not withstanding a substantial shortfall in …

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Background Notes on Electricity Developments in Ontario

During the first half of 2009, OPG experienced an increase in operating costs of 4.4% over the same period last year, while production was lower by 16%. The Niagara tunnel project is now forecast to be 62% more costly than OPG announced when the project started and take about 68% longer. (ref: http://www.opg.com/news/releases/090814Q2Financials.pdf) For the …

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