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Wind power is very expensive to produce. Just add up the numbers for investment. Sticky Widgets numbers are ok, if a tad low: So about 500 million for these turbines. So in order to get any kind of ecomic return - which better be on the order of 20% per year given the political uncertainty with wind, means that you need to charge about 100 million per year for the electricity. How much juice? Easy. 100 turbines x 365*24*1.5MW * 30% of the time its windy, means $253 per megawatt hour. Or 25c per kwh. This is about 5x the price for nuclear or coal, and nuclear and coal can be called up on demand. The 'real' price is higher still, as you need a 450MW (likely gas fired) plant built to cover the times when no wind is blowing.

Right now in Ontario, power is selling for a spot price of about 1/12 that - $17 US /Mwh. Wind energy needs to be priced at the spot market value, since it is not predictable. (Unless you also build the 450 MW gas plant, and add that to the cost). http://www.theimo.com/imoweb/marketdata/marketToday.asp

Wind power is a run for your wallet arranged by big business, demanded by the populace (who can't add) and approved by the government who gets elected by city people who don't have to live with it.

Say hello to tripling your elecric bill, while not measurably lowering carbon output.

Welcome to the Wonderful World of de-regulation and energy market competition....

Ontario deals with by-the-minute electricity rates. You can see http://www.theimo.com/imoweb/siteShared/demand_price.asp?sid=ic">some of the graphs from the market operator; the lower one shows hourly averaged prices. (As of this writing, demand is lower than predicted, so prices are much lower than predicted. Electricity is free in Ontario if demand drops below the output of the nuclear plants.)

Not that I'm approving of connecting the generators directly to the business network. Having the generators output statistics via a write-only line (optically isolated by preference, either by using fibre optics or a good old fashioned opto-coupler) to a machine that's dedicated to collecting the information from the nodes at the plant and firing THAT off over a VPN to the business office.

TCP/IP is too cheap and simple these days, so it gets plumbed in everywhere. Some things shouldn't have full two-way communications, though; and maybe some older tech, like 2-wire serial, (GND and TX) would be better. (Can't have handshake--that's, at some level, communications back the other way.)

Why wouldn't it check an online service like http://www.theimo.com/imoweb/marketdata/marketToda y.asp

?

According to opg only 40% (9000MW or so) of their production comes from Fossil Fuels.
So OPG can theoretically produce 23GW (assuming that the output listed there was theoretical and we arn't selling the surplus) and Bruce Nuclear if it ever gets up produces another 7000MW

Current consumption is roughly 20GW so Fossil Fuels can only produce half of our current demand. Peak demand is roughly 25GW. So we can produce at most 30-40% of our peak demand from fossil fuels. Looking at just hydro electric we need it to be running at roughly 30% capacity for it to be at the 15% figure and that dosn't include nuclear or alternative sources of energy.

According to opg only 40% (9000MW or so) of their production comes from Fossil Fuels.
So OPG can theoretically produce 23GW (assuming that the output listed there was theoretical and we arn't selling the surplus) and Bruce Nuclear if it ever gets up produces another 7000MW

Current consumption is roughly 20GW so Fossil Fuels can only produce half of our current demand. Peak demand is roughly 25GW. So we can produce at most 30-40% of our peak demand from fossil fuels. Looking at just hydro electric we need it to be running at roughly 30% capacity for it to be at the 15% figure and that dosn't include nuclear or alternative sources of energy.

Kinda reminds me of the Ontario Electricity Market Operator www.theimo.com. During the post-blackout period, they posted the current Ontario demand hourly. It was useful to check their site to determine if rolling blackouts were required. One problem: they ship you a 100KB background bitmap which for some reason wasn't cached by MSIE. During peak use, the server failed to keep up with the load. I wonder what they could have done had they simply dropped the bitmap for that week...

The root cause is defined as the event that happened, which if didn't happen would have avoided the incident.

The loss of the 3 Ohio lines appears to be the trigger for the blackout, but not the root cause. Lines trip all the time (a list of the lines that have tripped in Ontario over the past year are listed here... before you flame Ontario, the US list is no better.) Something that happens all the time, by definition, is not the root cause.

Given that lines trip all the time (and the trigger event of the November 9 1965 blackout was also line trips), the system is supposed to be designed to withstand them. In fact, I initially though the August 14th event was a coordinated terrorist attack because I thought the system was designed to make widespread blackouts impossible! (Un)fortunately, I was wrong.

The fundamental issue here is why on August 14 some line trips caused a massive loss of power (61 billion watts). The problem should not have affected anyone other than Cleveland (just as the Ontario line trips mentioned at the IEMO website didn't affect anyone other than those nearby).

The answer to this question will be VERY interesting, and IMHO will be a political bombshell on both sides of the border....

(I walked home on August 14th. For once I'm happy to pay massive property taxes to live within 8 km of the downtown core of Toronto...)

If you check the market data at The Independant Market Operator (Ontario's energy market) there is a price peak starting around 3 or before (prior to the actual outage). What that says to me is that some capacity was offline for some reason.

Has anyone else heard this?