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Ontario Ultra-Low Overnight Electricity Rate lets eligible customers opt in to 2.4 cents per kWh time-of-use pricing, set by the Ontario Energy Board, as utilities roll out the plan between May 1 and Nov. 1.

Key Points

An OEB-set overnight TOU price of 2.4 cents per kWh for eligible Ontarians, rolling out in phases via local utilities.

✅ 8 of 61 utilities offering rate at May 1 launch

✅ About 20% of 5M customers eligible at rollout

✅ Enova Power delays amid merger integration work

A million households can opt into a new ultra-low overnight electricity rate offered by the Ministry of Energy, as province-wide rate changes begin, but that's just a fraction of customers in Ontario.

Only eight of the 61 provincial power utilities will offer the new rate on the May 1 launch date, following the earlier fixed COVID-19 hydro rate period. The rest have up to six months to get on board.

That means it will be available to 20 percent of the province's five million electricity consumers, the Ministry of Energy confirmed to CBC News.

The Ford government's new overnight pricing was pitched as a money saver for Ontarians, amid the earlier COVID-19 recovery rate that could raise bills, undercutting its existing overnight rate from 7.4 to 2.4 cents per kilowatt hour. Both rates are set by the Ontario Energy Board (OEB).

"We wanted to roll it out to as many people as possible," Kitchener-Conestoga PC MPP Mike Harris Jr. told CBC News. "These companies were ready to go, and we're going to continue to work with our local providers to make sure that everybody can meet that Nov. 1 deadline."

Enova Power — which serves Kitchener, Waterloo, Woolwich, Wellesley and Wilmot — won't offer the reduced overnight rate until the fall, after typical bills rose when fixed pricing ended province-wide.

Enova merger stalls adoption

The power company is the product of the recently merged Kitchener-Wilmot Hydro and Waterloo North Hydro.

The Sept. 1 merger is a major reason Enova Power isn't offering the ultra-low rate alongside the first wave of power companies, said Jeff Quint, innovation and communications manager.

"With mergers, a lot of work goes into them. We have to evaluate, merge and integrate several systems and processes," said Quint.

"We believe that we probably would have been able to make the May 1 timeline otherwise."

The ministry said retroactive pricing wouldn't be available, unlike the off-peak price freeze earlier in the pandemic, and Harris said he doesn't expect the province will issue any rebates to customers of companies that introduce the rates later than May 1.

"These organizations were able to look at rolling things out sooner. But, obviously — if you look at Toronto Hydro, London, Centre Wellington, Hearst, Renfrew — there's a dynamic range of large and smaller-scale providers there. I'm very hopeful the Region of Waterloo folks will be able to work to try and get this done as soon as we can," Harris said.

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U.S. Energy Transition Delays stem from grid bottlenecks, permitting red tape, solar tariff uncertainty, supply-chain shocks, and scarce affordable EVs, risking deeper fossil fuel lock-in despite climate targets for renewables, transmission expansion, and decarbonization.

Key Points

Delays driven by grid limits, permitting, and supply shocks that slow renewables, transmission, EVs, and decarbonization.

✅ Grid interconnection and transmission backlogs stall renewables

✅ Tariff probes and supply chains disrupt utility-scale solar

✅ Permitting, policy gaps, and EV costs sustain fossil fuel use

Big solar projects are facing major delays. Plans to adapt the grid to clean energy are confronting mountains of red tape. Affordable electric vehicles are in short supply.

The United States is struggling to squeeze opportunity out of an energy crisis that should have been a catalyst for cleaner, domestically produced power. After decades of putting the climate on the back burner, the country is finding itself unprepared to seize the moment and at risk of emerging from the crisis even more reliant on fossil fuels.

10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint
The problem is not entirely unique to the United States. Across the globe, climate leaders are warning that energy shortages including coal and nuclear disruptions prompted by Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine and high gas prices driven by inflation threaten to make the energy transition an afterthought — potentially thwarting efforts to keep global temperature rise under 1.5 degrees Celsius.

“The energy crisis exacerbated by the war in Ukraine has seen a perilous doubling down on fossil fuels by the major economies,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres said at a conference in Vienna on Tuesday, according to prepared remarks. He warned governments and investors that a failure to immediately and more aggressively embrace clean energy could be disastrous for the planet.

U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry suggested that nations are falling prey to a flawed logic that fossil fuels will help them weather this period of instability, undermining U.S. national security and climate goals, which has seen gas prices climb to a record-high national average of $5 per gallon. “You have this new revisionism suggesting that we have to be pumping oil like crazy, and we have to be moving into long-term [fossil fuel] infrastructure building,” he said at the Time100 Summit in New York this month. “We have to push back.”

Climate envoy John F. Kerry attends the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles on June 8. Kerry has criticized the tendency to turn toward fossil fuels in times of uncertainty. (Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images)
In the United States — the world’s second-largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China — the hurdles go beyond the supply-chain crisis and sanctions linked to the war in Ukraine. The country’s lofty goals for all carbon pollution to be gone from the electricity sector by 2035 and for half the cars sold to be electric by 2030 are jeopardized by years of neglect of the electrical grid, regulatory hurdles that have set projects back years, and failures by Congress and policymakers to plan ahead.
The challenges are further compounded by plans to build costly new infrastructure for drilling and exporting natural gas that will make it even harder to transition away from the fossil fuel.

“We are running into structural challenges preventing consumers and businesses from going cleaner, even at this time of high oil and gas prices,” said Paul Bledsoe, a climate adviser in the Clinton administration who now works on strategy at the Progressive Policy Institute, a center-left think tank. “It is a little alarming that even now, Congress is barely talking about clean energy.”

Consumers are eager for more wind and solar. Companies looking to go carbon-neutral are facing growing waitlists for access to green energy, and a Pew Research Center poll in late January found that two-thirds of Americans want the United States to prioritize alternative energy over fossil fuel production.

But lawmakers have balked for more than a decade at making most of the fundamental economic and policy changes such as a clean electricity standard that experts widely agree are crucial to an orderly and accelerated energy transition. The United States does not have a tax on carbon, nor a national cap-and-trade program that would reorient markets toward lowering emissions. The unraveling in Congress of President Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better plan has added to the head winds that green-energy developers face, even as climate law results remain mixed.

Vice President Harris tours electric school buses at Meridian High School in Falls Church, Va., on May 20. (Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images)
“There is literally nothing pushing this forward in the U.S. beyond the tax code and some state laws,” said Heather Zichal, a former White House climate adviser who is now the chief executive of the American Clean Power Association.

The effects of the U.S. government’s halting approach are being felt by solar-panel installers, who saw the number of projects in the most recent quarter fall to the lowest level since the pandemic began. There was 24 percent less solar installed in the first quarter of 2022 than in the same quarter of 2021.

The holdup largely stems from a Commerce Department investigation into alleged tariff-dodging by Chinese manufacturers. Faced with the potential for steep retroactive penalties, hundreds of industrial-scale solar projects were frozen in early April. Weak federal policies to encourage investment in solar manufacturing left American companies ill-equipped to fill the void.

“We shut down multiple projects and had to lay off dozens of people,” said George Hershman, chief executive of SOLV Energy, which specializes in large solar installations. SOLV, like dozens of other solar companies, is now scrambling to reassemble those projects after the administration announced a pause of the tariffs.

Meanwhile, adding clean electricity to the aging power grid has become an increasingly complicated undertaking, given the failure to plan for adequate transmission lines and long delays connecting viable wind and solar projects to the electricity network.

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Nissan V2G Parking lets EV drivers pay with electricity via bidirectional charging at the Yokohama Nissan Pavilion, showcasing vehicle-to-grid, smart energy trading, and integrated mobility experiences like Ariya rides and Formula E simulators.

Key Points

A program where EV owners use V2G to pay for parking by discharging power at Nissan's Yokohama Pavilion.

✅ Pay for parking with EV energy via V2G

✅ Powered by Nissan LEAFs and solar at the Pavilion

✅ Showcases Ariya, Formula E, ProPILOT, and I2V tech

Nissan is letting customers pay for parking with electricity by discharging power from their electric car’s battery pack, a concept similar to how EV owners sell electricity back to the grid in other programs. In what the company claims to be a global first, owner of electric cars can trade energy for a parking space at Nissan Pavilion exhibition space in Yokohama, Japan, echoing how parked EVs earn from Europe's grids in comparable schemes.

The venue that showcases Nissan's future technologies, opened its doors to public on August 1 and will remain so through October 23, underscoring how stored EV energy can power buildings in broader applications. “(It) is a place where customers can see, feel, and be inspired by (the company's) near-future vision for society and mobility," says CEO Makoto Uchida. “As the world shifts to electric mobility, EVs will be integrated into society in ways that go beyond just transportation."

Apart from the innovate parking experience, people visiting the pavilion can also virtually experience the thrill of Formula E electric street racing or go for a ride in the all-new Ariya electric crossover, similar to demos at the Everything Electric show in Vancouver. Other experiences include ProPILOT advanced driver assistance system as well as Nissan’s Invisible-to-Visible (I2V) technology, which combines information from the real and virtual worlds to assist drivers, themes also explored at an EV education centre in Toronto for public outreach.

A mobility hub in front of the Pavilion offers a variety of services including EV car-sharing. The Pavilion also operates a cafe operated on power supplied by Nissan LEAF electric cars and solar energy, showcasing vehicle-to-building charging benefits on site.

As part of its Nissan NEXT transformation plan, the company plans to expand its global lineup of EVs and aims to sell more than 1 million electrified vehicles a year by the end of fiscal 2023, aligning with the American EV boom and the challenge of scaling charging infrastructure.

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Hydro One Rate Hike reflects Ontario Energy Board approval for higher delivery charges, impacting seasonal customers more than residential classes, funding infrastructure upgrades like wood pole and transformer replacements across Ontario's medium-density service areas.

Key Points

The Hydro One rate hike is an OEB-approved delivery charge increase to fund upgrades, with impacts on seasonal users.

✅ OEB-approved delivery rate increases retroactive to 2018

✅ Seasonal customers see larger monthly bill impacts than residential

✅ Funds pole, transformer replacements and tree trimming work

Hydro One seasonal customers will face bigger increases in their bills than the utility's residential customers as a result of an Ontario Energy Board approval of a rate hike, a topic drawing attention from a utilities watchdog in other provinces as well.

Hydro One received permission to increase its delivery charge, as large projects like the Meaford hydro generation proposal are considered across Ontario, retroactive to last year.

It says it needs the money to maintain and upgrade its infrastructure, including efforts to adapt to climate change, much of which was installed in the 1950s.

The utility is notifying customers that new statements reflect higher delivery rates which were not charged in 2018 and the first half of this year, due to delay in receiving the OEB's permission, similar to delays that can follow an energy board recommendation in other jurisdictions.

The amount that customers' bills will increase by depends not only on how much electricity they use, but also on which rate class they belong to, as well as policy decisions affecting remote connections such as the First Nations electricity line in northern Ontario.

For seasonal customers such as summer cottage owners, the impact on a typical user's bill will be 2.9 per cent more per month for 2018, and 1.7 per cent per month for 2019.

There will be further increases of 1.0 per cent, 1.4 per cent and 1.1 per cent per month in 2020, 2021 and 2022 respectively. 

Typical residential customers will experience smaller increases or rate freezes over the same period.

In the residential medium density class, the rate changes are a 2.0 per cent increase for last year, a decrease of 0.5 per cent this year, and an increase of 0.5 per cent in 2021. There will be no increases in 2020 and 2022.

Seasonal Rate Class — Estimated bill impact per month

2018 - 2.9 %

2019 - 1.7%

2020 - 1.0%

2021 - 1.4%

2022 - 1.1%

Residential Medium Density Rate Class — Estimated bill impact per month

2018 - 2.0%

2019 - -0.5% decrease

2020 - 0.0%

2021 - 0.5%

2022 - 0.0%

A Hydro One spokesperson told tbnewswatch.com that over the next three years, the utility's upgrading plan includes reliability investments such as replacing more than 24,000 wood poles across the province as well as numerous transformers.

In the Thunder Bay area, the spokesperson said, some of the revenue generated by the higher delivery rates will cover the cost of replacing more than 180 poles and trimming hazardous trees around 3,200 kilometres of overhead power lines while sharing electrical safety tips with customers.

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France Nuclear Heatwave Restrictions signal reduced nuclear power along the Rhone River as EDF imposes output limits due to high water temperatures, grid needs, with minimal price impact amid strong solar and exports.

Key Points

Temporary EDF output limits at Rhone River reactors due to hot water, protecting ecosystems and grid reliability.

✅ EDF expects halved output at Bugey and Saint Alban.

✅ Cuts align with water temperature and discharge rules.

✅ Weekend midday curtailments offset by solar supply.

The high temperature warning has come early this year but will affect fewer nuclear power plants. High temperatures could halve nuclear power production, with river temperature limits at plants along France's Rhone River this week. 

Output restrictions are expected at two nuclear plants in eastern France due to high temperature forecasts, nuclear operator EDF said. It comes several days ahead of a similar warning that was made last year but will affect fewer plants, and follows a period when power demand has held firm during lockdowns across Europe.

The hot weather is likely to halve the available power supply from the 3.6 GW Bugey plant from 13 July and the 2.6 GW Saint Alban plant from 16 July, the operator said.

However, production will be at least 1.8 GW at Bugey and 1.3 GW at Saint Alban to meet grid requirements, and may change according to grid needs, the operator said.

Kpler analyst Emeric de Vigan said the restrictions were likely to have little effect on output in practice. Cuts are likely only at the weekend or midday when solar output was at its peak so the impact on power prices would be slim.

He said the situation would need monitoring in the coming weeks, however, noting it was unusually early in the summer for nuclear-powered France to see such restrictions imposed.

Water temperatures at the Bugey plant already eclipsed the initial threshold for restrictions on 9 July, as European power hits records during the heatwave. They are currently forecast to peak next week and then drop again, Refinitiv data showed.

"France is currently net exporting large amounts of power – and, despite a nuclear power dispute with Germany, single nuclear units' supply restrictions will not have the same effect as last year," Refinitiv analyst Nathalie Gerl said.

The Garonne River in southern France has the highest potential for critical levels of warming, but its Golfech plant is currently offline for maintenance until mid-August, as Europe faces nuclear losses, the data showed.

"(The restrictions were) to be expected and it will probably occur more often," Greenpeace campaigner Roger Spautz said.

"The authorities must stick to existing regulations for water discharges. Otherwise, the ecosystems will be even more affected," he added.

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COVID-19 Impact on Electricity Demand, per IEA data, shows 15% global load drop from lockdowns, with residential use up, industrial and service sectors down; fossil fuel generation fell as renewables and photovoltaics gained share.

Key Points

An overview of how lockdowns cut global power demand, boosted residential use, and increased the renewable share.

✅ IEA review shows at least 15% dip in daily global electricity load

✅ Lockdowns cut commercial and industrial demand; homes used more

✅ Fossil fuels fell as renewables and PV generation gained share

The daily demand for electricity dipped at least 15 per cent across the globe, according to Global Energy Review 2020: The impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on global energy demand and CO2 emissions, a report published by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in April 2020, even as global power demand surged above pre-pandemic levels.

The report collated data from 30 countries, including India and China, that showed partial and full lockdown measures adopted by them were responsible for this decrease.

Full lockdowns in countries — including France, Italy, India, Spain, the United Kingdom where daily demand fell about 10% and the midwest region of the United States (US) — reduced this demand for electricity.

Reduction in electricity demand after lockdown measures (weather corrected)

Source: Global Energy Review 2020: The impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on global energy demand and CO2 emissions, IEA

Drivers of the fall

There was, however, a spike in residential demand for electricity as a result of people staying and working from home. This increase in residential demand, though, was not enough to compensate for reduced demand from industrial and commercial operations.

The extent of reduction depended not only on the duration and stringency of the lockdown, but also on the nature of the economy of the countries — predominantly service- or industry-based — the IEA report said.

A higher decline in electricity demand was noted in countries where the service sector — including retail, hospitality, education, tourism — was dominant, compared to countries that had industrial economies.

The US, for example — where industry forms only 20 per cent of the economy — saw larger reductions in electricity demand, compared to China, where power demand dropped as the industry accounts for more than 60 per cent of the economy.

Italy — the worst-affected country from COVID-19 — saw a decline greater than 25 per cent when compared to figures from last year, even as power demand held firm in parts of Europe during later lockdowns.

The report said the shutting down of the hospitality and tourism sectors in the country — major components of the Italian economy — were said to have had a higher impact, than any other factor, for this fall.

Reduced fossil fuel dependency

Almost all of the reduction in demand was reportedly because of the shutting down of fossil fuel-based power generation, according to the report. Instead, the share of electricity supply from renewables in the entire portfolio of energy sources, increased during the pandemic, reflecting low-carbon electricity lessons observed during COVID-19.

This was due to a natural increase in wind and photovoltaic power generation compared to 2019 along with a drop in overall electricity demand that forced electricity producers from non-renewable sources to decrease their supplies, before surging electricity demand began to strain power systems worldwide.

The Power System Operation Corporation of India also reported that electricity production from coal — India’s primary source of electricity — fell by 32.2 per cent to 1.91 billion units (kilowatt-hours) per day, in line with India's electricity demand decline reported during the pandemic, compared to the 2019 levels.

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