Ontario to spend 7 Billion on Climate Plan

[Peter_M]

I don't see why they would need to separately meter night-time free electricity or even restrict it to EV owners. If they made electricity free from say 1am to 5am for all households, EV owners would benefit, but anyone else who can find a way to shift their usage to the night would benefit too, and that's fine. Charging a home battery, heating up a water tank, whatever. It flattens the demand curve, keeps generation costs down, reduces the amount of power wasted or given away (or sold at a loss), and shifts usage to low-demand times when natural gas generation could be shut down, so it would reduce emissions even for non-EV owners.

 

[wayner]

Allowing free energy usage would promote folks buying PowerWall batteries to charge up at night and then discharge during the day to offset peak usage. But does it make sense to put batteries, and the required inverters in everyone's homes or would it make sense to put them at the power plants? I have to think that it would be cheaper in aggregate to put them at the power plants since it would be much cheaper installing them in bulk rather than in small increments of one or two Powerwalls, plus inverters in everyone's house. But the economic incentives will be to put them at your house as you can offset peak usage rates that are something like $0.25/kWh all-in as you are not only offsetting the cost of generating the electricity, you are also offsetting all of the transmission, and distribution costs, not to mention the surcharges.

But this just downloads the costs of the grid to those who can't afford to do this and will likely lead to higher fixed costs every month to pay for the grid.

 

[cwave1]

I'm not sure if this is old news or has been posted before but this PowerStream project seems to be the future we are all speaking of. I thought there was a residential pilot in the Richmond Hill area but I cannot find the details on it anymore.

Micro Grid Project | PowerStream

Does anyone know more about this?

 

[wayner]

Is that the future? It isn't clear how we get from here to there since if a significant amount of homes and businesses leave the grid for micro grid or off-grid then it is extremely disruptive to those who stay on the grid. If 50% of the people leave the grid then who pays to maintain the current grid? Do those who remain pay about 200% of what they pay today, since the costs are pretty fixed, at least in the short term.

 

[Totezla]

Any ideas on when/if they will roll out the PST rebate that is outlined in this plan?

 

[Phillip L]

Any ideas on when/if they will roll out the PST rebate that is outlined in this plan?

Exactly. Was literally on the cusp of buying a Chevy Volt as our second (wife is range anxiety bound) electric car but the no pst on the price would save us $2500.00.

 

[SmartElectric]

The information currently available on the plan is from a leaked document. There will need to be a set legislative activities and all of this is predicated on the passing of cap and trade which will provide the money for the incentives and tax deductions / etc.