Electricity breakdown for Ontario
If you’re curious to know how we’re consuming electricity in Ontario, the Independent Electricity System Operator put out some figures today for 2005. In a nutshell: As a percentage of total electricity consumption, hydro power dropped to 22 per cent from 25 per cent a year earlier because of drought-like conditions in some regions of Ontario last summer. Nuclear stands at 51 per cent, coal rose slightly to 19 per cent, and everything else — oil, natural gas and renewables — remained constant at 8 per cent.
Air conditions contributed to a nearly 2 per cent increase in province-wide electricity consumption in 2005, while we saw a 30 per cent jump in the reliance of imported power because of insufficient domestic capacity.
Let’s hope we see the “everything else” portion, excluding oil and natural gas, rise significantly higher over the next year or two.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
