Chase Energy Canada Limited

IBM and its Business Partner Telvent announced that they have been selected by Hydro One, the largest distributor of electricity in Ontario, for a new smart grid project that will help transform the province’s electrical system. Together, the companies will run simulations and tests to determine the smart grid technologies that have the potential to improve power efficiency and reliability. The Advanced Distribution System project will help the utility identify and assess equipment, test new delivery models for electricity, validate the costs and benefits anticipated with a new smart grid and recommend changes to cost effectively modernize Ontario’s distribution system. The project intends to enable an increased amount of Distributed Generation into the grid as well as help increase the reliability of the current distribution system and improve outage management during large scale situations. By taking advantage of the insights gained from new data sources based on analytics, Hydro One will be able to optimize energy utilization and management for greater efficiency while accommodating consumer demand.

Boralex Inc. said Tuesday it has acquired an electricity supply agreement for a 50-megawatt wind power project in Temiscouata, Que., from Venterre NRG Inc. The 20-year contract was part of a Hydro-Quebec call for proposals in 2008 for 2,000 megawatts of wind power. Start up is slated for late 2015. Boralex said it plans to build the wind farm on land that is publicly owned by Saint-Elzear-de-Temiscouata and Saint-Honore-de-Temiscouata, near where the company is already developing a wind power project.

State regulators have approved a new pricing plan for some Idaho Power Company residential customers who agree to shift the times they use electricity to late night and weekend hours.

The City of Medicine Hat, Alberta, has selected MeterSense, a division of Harris Utilities, to provide meter data management (MDM) for its electricity, water and gas delivery services. The utility will implement MeterSense as part of a larger advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) smart meter project. MeterSense’s AMI and MDM capabilities will help the utility improve the way it serves the Medicine Hat population of 61,000. Thanks in part to MeterSense, the City of Medicine Hat expects that its smart-meter program will pay for itself in approximately seven years.

The National Council on Privatisation, NCP, yesterday approved a Canadian firm, Manitoba Hydro International, for simultaneous opening of their financial proposal and commencement of contract negotiations as the management contractor for the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN. Three firms, Manitoba, Power Grid Corporation of India Limited and ESB International of Ireland, were invited to place bids by the NCP.

The Obama administration will press ahead on Tuesday with the first-ever limits on heat-trapping pollution from new power plants, ignoring protests from Republicans who have said the regulation will raise electricity prices and kill off coal. But the proposal, which was outlined to the Associated Press by administration officials, also will fall short of environmentalists’ hopes because it goes easier than it could have on coal-fired power – one of the largest sources of the gases blamed for global warming. The proposed rule will not apply to existing power plants or new ones built in the next year. It will also give future coal-fired power plants years to meet the standard, because it will eventually require that carbon pollution be captured and stored underground.

Battle River#5 went offline at 06:00 Saturday and came back online at 10:00 Sunday.

West Fraser Mills Ltd will soon upgrade its Slave Lake, Alberta pulp mill in order to convert waste products into electricity, with the help of $10 million in funding from the Alberta government. An anaerobic treatment system will treat a portion of the facility’s processed waste and then convert the biodegradable materials into biogas that will be used to generate electricity at the plant.

Ontario electricity ratepayers now have 251,520,340 more reasons to love their smart meters. That’s the cost of developing the information hub at the heart of the smart meter system, and operating it over the next five years. It’s the centre that tracks hour-by-hour power use for every home and small business in the province, through the data collected by their smart meters. Ratepayers, of course, will pick up the tab for running the hub. Starting July 1, every hydro customer in the province will pay an extra 81 cents a month to cover the cost of amassing and processing the flood of data from the meters. This application was filed by IESO Friday.

Another Japanese nuclear reactor was taken off line for maintenance on Monday, leaving the country with only one of its 54 reactors operational. The last reactor is expected to be shut down by early May, raising the possibility of power shortages across the nation as demand increases in the hot summer months. Japanese reactors are taken off line every 13 months for regular checks. With concerns over nuclear safety high following the Fukushima crisis, none of the reactors that have been shut down for checks, and none that were already off line at the time of the disaster, have been allowed to restart.

The Alberta government hinted at an uncertain future for the province’s regulated option for electricity Thursday, naming an independent panel to review the default residential rate. This one is really weird – looking into the RRT instead of looking into the weaknesses of the forward power market – the RRT is not the problem – it’s the way the market price is discovered. A warm winter, unplanned power-plant outages and increasing population have driven up prices, and most of the spikes are due to basic supply and demand. We had this same situation when natural gas was de-regulated and the problem was solved when the then pipeline owner, NOVA, told customers they had to balance their account. This pushed over 700 customers to buy/sell/trade to get to within a tolerance. We need to do that here – drop the “Merit Order” and discover price in the open market – an open market not dominated by generators but by all market participants.

Enbridge Inc. bought the 50MW Silver State North project solar farm in Nevada from First Solar Inc. to help offset carbon emissions from the electricity it consumes.

Ontario’s Liberal government announced Thursday it would lower the premiums it pays for future wind and solar energy projects, but electricity bills will keep rising. The province will drop the guaranteed rate for small rooftop solar projects from 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour to 54.9 cents, while larger solar installations will get between 34.7 cents and 44.5 cents a kWh.

Sask Power has some line maintenance today limiting imports and exports today – see chart on page 3.

Clenergen Corporation has entered into a partnership with Niskibi Power Corporation to supply up to 1,000MW of renewable energy in partnership with the First Nations communities in Ontario and other parts of Canada. NPC is currently evaluating modular LNG power solutions as a cost effective alternative to diesel generated power plants in remote coastal regions of Canada. Clenergen said it is delivering off-grid electricity using small biomass gasification power plants ranging in capacity from 250 KW to 2 MW. The joint venture will initially focus on sites that can be connected to the national grid, which generate either hydro or wind electricity, and can provide opportunity for commercial scale projects. Biomass will be produced by growing Miscanthus grass that has been cloned to adapt to the Canadian climate, averaging 17 tons per acre, with a life expectancy estimated at 17 years.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company announced that it expects to issue its 2012 Solar Photovoltaic Power Purchase Agreement Request for Offers in late March or April 2012. PG&E plans to procure 50 MW-AC of new PV generation in this second round of the program. This is part of a total goal to procure 250 MW-AC of PV projects through multiple RFO processes over a five-year period. Interconnection applications must be filed by March 31st.

HR Milner was offline from 14:51 to 17:22 yesterday pushing AESO prices to $30.39 for HE 16 and $245.41 for HE 17.

Vulcan Council has scheduled a special Municipal Planning Commission meeting for March 28 to discuss a development permit application for solar panels to be placed on farms. The Alberta government’s Growing Forward program provides grants to farmers wanting to set up grid-connected solar photovoltaic systems, but the program requires a development permit from the municipality where the solar panels would be built. The Solar Assessment and Solar PV Equipment Pilot program will re-open on April 2, and updated application forms will then be available. But they heard that a development permit for these electricity-generating facilities would be a discretionary use, meaning the County would have to notify adjacent landowners first. They are given two weeks to comment.

The first commercial geothermal power plant of Oregon is expected to start electricity production by mid to late summer. It is estimated to produce about 23MW of power. Neal Hot Springs project will make use of a binary system where hot water is run through a heat exchanger to vaporize a binary or working fluid and the pressure developed from that turns the turbine-generator. The geothermal water is cooled and injected back into the geothermal reservoir. The company has already completed four production wells and is working to complete a series of injection wells. Nichols said the company has finished drilling of five injections wells and three more are required.

The average small farm in rural Alberta – a small cow-calf operator or a small grain farmer – is paying anywhere from $750 to $1,000 per month for electricity vs. $100 pre-deregulation according to a county councilor who has been farming 6,000 acres of grain for 40 years.

Two power companies have applied to the National Energy Board for permission to export Canadian electricity to the United States and Brian Mason NDP leader is questioning Alberta’s massive transmission build. Capital Power spokesman Martin Kennedy said Mason’s interpretation of the company’s application is “completely wrong in every respect.” The company did make an application to the National Energy Board, but it was a national application process that comes up every 10 years. The company has no plans of increasing power exports from Alberta. In fact, Alberta makes up less than 5 per cent of exports to the US.

The federal government will allow Nova Scotia to manage its own emission regulations for coal-fired power plants, with an exemption from federal rules that will serve as a precedent as Ottawa moves to impose new greenhouse gas targets on the energy sector. Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan and Alberta will face the biggest challenges because they are most reliant on coal to fuel their electricity sectors. All three provinces have complained about the lack of flexibility in the federal approach, saying it will unnecessarily drive up costs to consumers and interfere with their own attempts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions.

Ontario utility Bruce Power expects to resume the startup of its Unit 2 reactor at the Bruce A nuclear plant within a few days, a spokes-man said Monday, after the newly rebuilt reactor was shut down over the weekend after a leak. The company said the problem at the 750-megawatt re-actor was quickly isolated and repairs are in progress. The rest of Bruce A was not affected.

TransCanada Corporation announced that Bruce Power has received authorization from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission to power up the Unit 2 reactor, effectively ending the construction and commissioning phases of the project. Bruce Power will now complete final safety checks for the Unit 2 reactor as preparations begin to synchronize the unit to Ontario’s electricity grid. The company anticipates the unit will start commercial operations in the second quarter of this year. Refurbishment of the Unit 1 reactor at Bruce Power is progressing as well and it is expected to begin operations in the third quarter of 2012. Bruce Power consists of two generating stations (Bruce A & B) with each station housing four nuclear reactors. Six of those reactors are currently operational, producing more than 4,700 MW of power. TransCanada owns 49 per cent of Bruce A and 32 per cent of Bruce B.

Tembec announced a $190-million capital investment to upgrade its specialty cellulose manufacturing facility at Temiscaming, Québec. This investment will increase annual production of green electricity by up to 40 megawatts and reduce sulfur dioxide emissions by 70%. Hydro-Québec will off take the additional green electricity produced by this turbine under a 25-year contract at $106 MW/hour, indexed with CPI, which will strengthen and stabilize Tembec’s revenues through the economic cycle.

Solar lease provider SolarCity has announced a funding deal with Rabobank to fund 30 commercial photovoltaic installations in the U.S. The fund is worth US$42.5 million.

EnerNOC, Inc., the world’s leading provider of demand response applications and services, today announced that Johns Manville, a Berkshire Hathaway company, will utilize EnerNOC’s DemandSMART™ comprehensive demand response application to participate in an Automated Demand Response (AutoDR) program in Alberta. Johns Manville will participate by reducing energy use at its Innisfall, Alberta manufacturing facility, joining other commercial and industrial customers moving to complete EnerNOC’s AutoDR commitments to the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO). Through EnerNOC’s advanced AutoDR technology, these loads can be dropped off the grid in a fraction of a second when called upon AESO. By leveraging this AutoDR resource, AESO expects to be able to increase its ability to import electricity from other jurisdictions for increased reliability and competition in the Province.

Ontario’s Official Opposition has tabled legislation to make electricity in Ontario affordable again. PC Leader Tim Hudak warned last week that the main reasons for future increases in electricity are expensive subsidies paid to renewable energy developers – whether we need the power or not. Tim Hudak’s Private Member’s Bill tabled March 7 would replace these subsidies with an approach that treats energy policy as a key economic policy. The Tim Hudak legislation would end the McGuinty government’s Feed-in Tariff (FIT) and microFIT schemes, which pay unsustainable subsidies to developers through 20-year contracts. Under the FIT Program, renewable energy developers are paid two to 10 times the price of other sources of power such as nuclear, natural gas and hydroelectricity.

Keephills#1 went offline at 21:56 yesterday.

Smart meters are the foundation of a more functional and reliable electricity “smart grid” – not an Orwellian effort to spy on customers, utility and security experts said. It doesn’t make sense from either an economic or an engineering perspective to build power supply to satisfy every bump in peak demand for electricity, panelists said during a smart grid discussion at the Globe 2012 conference in Vancouver. A better alternative, they suggested, is to bring power transmission and distribution grids – which are essentially the world’s largest machines – into the digital world the way telephone services have been modernized over the last two decades since the advent of the mobile phone. That means automating power supply system controls, allowing grid components to communicate with each other, and involving consumers through introduction of smart meters in order to bring about what the Canadian Electricity Association has described as a “near-instantaneous balance of supply and demand” within grids. Worldwide, smart-grid systems are still in development and they’re a source of controversy, notably from consumers fearful of privacy lost to meters that track power use in more detail than conventional mechanical meters. The meters communicate with utilities, relaying household consumption data, but also enable consumers to track their individual power use and potentially save money.