Post: Ontario “well positioned” for short term reliability

Ontario “well positioned” for short term reliability

Sufficient electricity is expected to be available to meet the needs of residents, businesses and communities for the next 18 months, according to the latest outlook from IESO.

But in the Q3 2022 Reliability Outlook, published on 22 September, IESO noted that tight electricity supply conditions are emerging and that this will require active outage management and increased import volumes at specific times. IESO expects these conditions to persist for the foreseeable future. Overall, the province should have sufficient reserves for the winters of 2022-23 and 2023-24. Significant reserve shortages have the potential to materialize in summer 2023, primarily as a result of coincident generator outages.

Electricity demand is expected to increase to 136.9TWh, a projected growth rate of 0.3% in 2023. This follows higher growth in each of the previous two years – 1.4% in 2021 (133.7TWh) and a projected 2.1% in 2022 (136.5TWh). Approximately 178MW of new generation capacity is expected to connect to Ontario’s grid over this Outlook period.

But the forecast noted that Ontario has entered a period during which generation and transmission outages will be increasingly difficult to accommodate. IESO expects these conditions to persist for the foreseeable future.

In the firm scenario under normal weather conditions, available reserves fall below the requirement for five weeks in summer 2023. In the firm scenario under extreme weather conditions, the reserve is lower than the -2,000MW adequacy threshold for 10 weeks in summer 2023. Under the current outage schedule, the Reserve Above Requirement (RAR) is below the adequacy threshold for the 10-week period from July 10 to September 17, 2023.

These potential shortfalls are primarily attributed to planned generator outages scheduled. While the IESO expects to be able to mitigate any risks by rejecting outage requests during periods of low reserves, Ontario will likely rely on up to 2,000MW of supply from other jurisdictions under extreme weather conditions, and may have to rely on some imports to meet demand under normal weather conditions.

Source: IESO