More stability for electricity consumers

Ontario-Quebec Electricity Deal explores hydro imports, terawatt hours, electricity costs, greenhouse gas cuts, and baseload impacts, amid debates on Pickering nuclear operations and competitive procurement in Ontario's long-term energy planning.

Key Points

A proposed hydro import deal from Quebec, balancing costs, emissions, and reliability for Ontario electricity customers.

✅ Draft 20-year, 8 TWh offer reported by La Presse disputed

✅ Ontario seeks lower costs and GHG cuts versus alternatives

✅ Not a baseload replacement; Pickering closure not planned

Ontario is negotiating a possible energy swap agreement to buy electricity from Quebec, but the government is disputing a published report that it is preparing to sign a deal for enough electricity to power a city the size of Ottawa.

La Presse reported Tuesday that it obtained a copy of a draft, 20-year deal that says Ontario would buy eight terawatt hours a year from Quebec – about 6 per cent of Ontario’s consumption – whether the electricity is consumed or not.

Ontario Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault’s office said the province is in discussions to build on an agreement signed last year for Ontario to import up to two terawatt hours of electricity a year from Quebec.

But his office released a letter dated late last month to his Quebec counterpart, in which Mr. Thibeault said the offer extended in June was unacceptable because it would increase the average residential electricity bill by $30 a year.

“I am hopeful that your continued support and efforts will help to further discussions between our jurisdictions that could lead to an agreement that is in the best interest of both Ontario and Quebec,” Mr. Thibeault wrote July 27 to Pierre Arcand.

Ontario would prepare a “term sheet” for the next stage of discussions ahead of the two ministers meeting at the Energy and Mines Ministers Conference later this month in New Brunswick, Mr. Thibeault wrote.

Any future agreements with Quebec will have to provide a reduction in Ontario electricity rates compared with other alternatives and demonstrate measurable reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, he wrote.

Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown said Ontario doesn’t need eight terawatt hours of additional power and suggested it means the Liberal government is considering closing power facilities such as the Pickering nuclear plant early.

A senior Energy Ministry official said that is not on the table. The government has said it intends to keep operating two units at Pickering until 2022, and the other four units until 2024.

Even if the Quebec offer had been accepted, the energy official said, that power wouldn’t have replaced any of Ontario’s baseload power because it couldn’t have been counted on 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

The Society of Energy Professionals said Mr. Thibeault was right to reject the deal, but called on him to release the Long-Term Energy Plan – which was supposed to be out this spring – before continuing negotiations.

Some commentators have argued for broader reforms to address Ontario's hydro system challenges, urging policymakers to review all options as negotiations proceed.

The Ontario Energy Association said the reported deal would run counter to the government’s stated energy objectives amid concerns over electricity prices in the province.

“Ontarians will not get the benefit of competition to ensure it is the best of all possible options for the province, and companies who have invested in Ontario and have employees here will not get the opportunity to provide alternatives,” president and chief executive Vince Brescia said in a statement. “Competitive processes should be used for any new significant system capacity in Ontario.”

The Association of Power Producers of Ontario said it is concerned the government is even considering deals that would “threaten to undercut a competitive marketplace and long-term planning.”

“Ontario already has a surplus of energy, so it’s very difficult to see how this deal or any other sole-source deal with Quebec could benefit the province and its ratepayers,” association president and CEO David Butters said in a statement.

The Ontario Waterpower Association also said such a deal with Quebec would “present a significant challenge to continued investment in waterpower in Ontario.”

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BC Hydro Time-of-Use Rates propose off-peak credits and peak surcharges, with 5 cent/kWh differentials, encouraging demand shifting, EV charging at night, and smart meter adoption, pending BC Utilities Commission review in an optional opt-in program.

Key Points

Optional pricing that credits 5 cents/kWh off-peak and adds 5 cents/kWh during 4-9 p.m. peak to encourage load shifting.

✅ Off-peak credit: 11 p.m.-7 a.m., 5 cents/kWh savings

✅ Peak surcharge: 4-9 p.m., additional 5 cents/kWh

✅ Opt-in only; BCUC review; suits EV charging and flexible loads

BC Hydro is looking to charge customers less for electricity during off peak hours and more during the busiest times of the day, reflecting holiday electricity demand as well.

The BC Utilities Commission is currently reviewing the application that if approved would see customers receive a credit of 5 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity used from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

Customers would be charged an additional 5 cents per kWh for electricity used during the on-peak period from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., and in Ontario, there were no peak-rate cuts for self-isolating customers during early pandemic response.

There would be no credit or additional charge will be applied to usage during the off-peak period from 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. to 11 p.m.

“We know the way our customers are using power is changing and they want more options,” BC Hydro spokesperson Susie Rieder said.

“It is optional and we know it may not work for everyone.”

For example, if a customer has an electric vehicle it will be cheaper to plug the car in after 9 p.m., similar to Ontario's ultra-low overnight plan offerings, rather than immediately after returning home from a standard work day.

If approved, the time of use rates would only apply to customers who opt in to the program, whereas Ontario provided electricity relief during COVID-19.

During the pandemic, Ontario extended off-peak electricity rates to help households and small businesses.

The regulatory review process is expected to take about one year.

Other jurisdictions, including Ontario's ultra-low overnight pricing, currently offer off peak rates. One of the challenges is that consumers change in hopes of altering their behaviour, but in reality, end up paying more.

“The cheapest electrical grid system is one with consistent demand and the issue of course is our consumption is not flat,” energyrates.ca founder Joel MacDonald said.

“There is a 5 cent reduction in off peak times, there is a 5 cent increase in peak times, you would have to switch 50 per cent of your load.”

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U.S. power grid cyberattacks expose critical infrastructure to Russian hackers, DHS warns, targeting SCADA, smart grid sensors, and utilities; NERC CIP defenses, microgrids, and resilience planning aim to mitigate outages and supply chain disruptions.

Key Points

U.S. power grid cyberattacks target utility control systems, risking outages, disruption, requiring stronger defenses.

✅ Russian access to utilities and SCADA raises outage risk

✅ NERC CIP, DHS, and utilities expand cyber defenses

✅ Microgrids and renewables enhance resilience, islanding capability

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has revealed that Russian government hackers accessed control rooms at hundreds of U.S. electrical utility companies, gaining far more access to the operations of many more companies than previously disclosed by federal officials.

Securing the electrical grid, upon which is built almost the entirety of modern society, is a monumental challenge. Several experts have explained aspects of the task, potential solutions and the risks of failure for The Conversation:

1. What’s at stake?

The scale of disruption would depend, in part, on how much damage the attackers wanted to do. But a major cyberattack on the electricity grid could send surges through the grid, much as solar storms have done.

Those events, explains Rochester Institute of Technology space weather scholar Roger Dube, cause power surges, damaging transmission equipment. One solar storm in March 1989, he writes, left “6 million people without power for nine hours … [and] destroyed a large transformer at a New Jersey nuclear plant. Even though a spare transformer was nearby, it still took six months to remove and replace the melted unit.”

More serious attacks, like larger solar storms, could knock out manufacturing plants that build replacement electrical equipment, gas pumps to fuel trucks to deliver the material and even “the machinery that extracts oil from the ground and refines it into usable fuel. … Even systems that seem non-technological, like public water supplies, would shut down: Their pumps and purification systems need electricity.”

In the most severe cases, with fuel-starved transportation stalled and other basic infrastructure not working, “[p]eople in developed countries would find themselves with no running water, no sewage systems, no refrigerated food, and no way to get any food or other necessities transported from far away. People in places with more basic economies would also be without needed supplies from afar.”

2. It wouldn’t be the first time

Russia has penetrated other countries’ electricity grids in the past, and used its access to do real damage. In the middle of winter 2015, for instance, a Russian cyberattack shut off the power to Ukraine’s capital in the middle of winter 2015.

Power grid scholar Michael McElfresh at Santa Clara University discusses what happened to cause hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to lose power for several hours, and notes that U.S. utilities use software similar to their Ukrainian counterparts – and therefore share the same vulnerabilities.

3. Security work is ongoing

These threats aren’t new, write grid security experts Manimaran Govindarasu from Iowa State and Adam Hahn from Washington State University. There are a lot of people planning defenses, including the U.S. government, as substation attacks are growing across the country. And the “North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which oversees the grid in the U.S. and Canada, has rules … for how electric companies must protect the power grid both physically and electronically.” The group holds training exercises in which utility companies practice responding to attacks.

4. There are more vulnerabilities now

Grid researcher McElfresh also explains that the grid is increasingly complex, with with thousands of companies responsible for different aspects of generating, transmission, and delivery to customers. In addition, new technologies have led companies to incorporate more sensors and other “smart grid” technologies. He describes how that, as a recent power grid report card underscores, “has created many more access points for penetrating into the grid computer systems.”

5. It’s time to ramp up efforts

The depth of access and potential control over electrical systems means there has never been a better time than right now to step up grid security amid a renewed focus on protecting the grid among policymakers and utilities, writes public-utility researcher Theodore Kury at the University of Florida. He notes that many of those efforts may also help protect the grid from storm damage and other disasters.

6. A possible solution could be smaller grids

One protective effort was identified by electrical engineer Joshua Pearce at Michigan Technological University, who has studied ways to protect electricity supplies to U.S. military bases both within the country and abroad. He found that the Pentagon has already begun testing systems, as the military ramps up preparation for major grid hacks, that combine solar-panel arrays with large-capacity batteries. “The equipment is connected together – and to buildings it serves – in what is called a ‘microgrid,’ which is normally connected to the regular commercial power grid but can be disconnected and become self-sustaining when disaster strikes.”

He found that microgrid systems could make military bases more resilient in the face of cyberattacks, criminals or terrorists and natural disasters – and even help the military “generate all of its electricity from distributed renewable sources by 2025 … which would provide energy reliability and decrease costs, [and] largely eliminate a major group of very real threats to national security.”

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Russian cyberattacks on U.S. power grid exposed DHS warnings: Dragonfly/Energetic Bear breached control rooms, ICS networks, and could trigger blackouts via switch manipulation, phishing, and malware, threatening critical infrastructure and utility operations nationwide.

Key Points

State-backed breaches of utility ICS and control rooms enabled potential switch manipulation and blackouts.

✅ DHS: Dragonfly/Energetic Bear breached utility networks

✅ Access reached control rooms and ICS for switch control

✅ Ongoing campaign via phishing, malware, lateral movement

Russian hackers for a state-sponsored organization invaded hundreds of control rooms of U.S. electric utilities that could have led to blackouts, a new report says.

The group, known as Dragonfly or Energetic Bear, infiltrated networks of U.S. utilities as part of an effort that is likely ongoing, Department of Homeland Security officials told the Wall Street Journal.

Jonathan Home, chief of industrial-control-system analysis for DHS, said the hackers “got to the point where they could have thrown switches” and upset power flows.

Although the agency did not disclose which companies were impacted, the officials at a briefing Monday said that there were “hundreds of victims” including breaches at power plants across the U.S., and that some companies may not be aware that hackers infiltrated their networks yet.

According to experts, Russia has been preparing for such attacks for some time now, prompting a renewed focus on protecting the grid among utilities and policymakers.

“They’ve been intruding into our networks and are positioning themselves for a limited or widespread attack,” said former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Michael Carpenter, now senior director at the Penn Biden Center at the University of Pennsylvania, per the Wall Street Journal. “They are waging a covert war on the West.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration claimed Russia had staged a power grid hacking campaign against the U.S. energy grid and other U.S. infrastructure.

The report comes after President Trump told reporters last week during a joint press conference in Helsinki alongside Russian President Vladimir Putin that he had no reason not to believe the Russian leader's assurances to him that the Kremlin was not to blame for interference in the election.

Trump later admitted that he misspoke when he said he didn’t “see any reason why” Russia would have meddled in the 2016 election, and said he believes the U.S. intelligence community assessment that found that the Russian government did interfere in the electoral process.

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Puerto Rico Microgrid Regulations outline renewable energy, CHP, and storage standards, enabling islanded systems, PREPA interconnection, excess energy sales, and IRP alignment to boost resilience, distributed resources, and community power across the recovering grid.

Key Points

Rules defining microgrids, requiring 75 percent renewables or CHP, and setting interconnection and PREPA fee frameworks.

✅ 75 percent renewables or CHP; hybrids allowed

✅ Registration, engineer inspection, and annual generation reports

✅ PREPA interconnection fees; excess energy sales permitted

The Puerto Rico Energy Commission unveiled 29 pages of proposed regulations last week for future microgrid installations on the island.

The regulations, which are now open for 30 days of public comment, synthesized pages of responses received after a November 10 call for recommendations. Commission chair José Román Morales said it’s the most interest the not-yet four-year-old commission has received during a public rulemaking process.

The goal was to sketch a clearer outline for a tricky-to-define concept -- the term "microgrid" can refer to many types of generation islanded from the central grid -- as climate pressures on the U.S. grid mount and more developers eye installations on the recovering island.

“There’s not a standard definition of what a microgrid is, not even on the mainland,” said Román Morales.

According to the commission's regulation, “a microgrid shall consist, at a minimum, of generation assets, loads and distribution infrastructure. Microgrids shall include sufficient generation, storage assets and advanced distribution technologies, including advanced inverters, to serve load under normal operating and usage conditions.”

All microgrids must be renewable (with at least 75 percent of power from clean energy), combined heat and power (CHP) or hybrid CHP-and-renewable systems. The regulation applies to microgrids controlled and owned by individuals, customer cooperatives, nonprofit and for-profit companies, and cities, but not those owned by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA). Owners must submit a registration application for approval, including a certification of inspection from a licensed electric engineer, and an annual fuel, generation and sales report that details generation and fuel source, as well as any change in the number of customers served.

Microgrids, like the SDG&E microgrid in Ramona in California, can interconnect with the PREPA system, but if a microgrid will use PREPA infrastructure, owners will incur a monthly fee. That amounts to $25 per customer up to a cap of $250 per month for small cooperative microgrids. The cost for larger systems is calculated using a separate, more complex equation. Operators can also sell excess energy back to PREPA.

Big goals for the island's future grid

In total, 53 groups and companies, including Sunnova, AES, the Puerto Rico Solar Energy Industries Association (PR-SEIA), the Advanced Energy Management Alliance (AEMA), and the New York Smart Grid Consortium, submitted their thoughts about microgrids or, in many cases, broader goals for the island’s future energy system. It was a quick turnaround: The Puerto Rico Energy Commission offered a window of just 10 days to submit advice, although the commission continued to accept comments after the deadline.

“PREC wanted the input as fast as possible because of the urgency,” said AES CEO Chris Shelton.

AES’ plan includes a network of “mini-grids” that could range in size from several megawatts to one large enough to service the entire city of San Juan.

“The idea is, you connect those to each other with transmission so they can have a co-optimized portfolio effect and lower the overall cost,” said Shelton. “But they would be largely autonomous in a situation where the tie-lines between them were broken.”

According to estimates provided in AES’ filing, utility-scale solar installations over 50 megawatts on the island could cost between $40 and $50 per megawatt-hour. Those prices make solar located near load centers an economic alternative to the island’s fossil-fuel generating plants. The utility’s analysis showed that a 10,000-megawatt solar system could replace 12,000 gigawatt-hours of fossil generation, with 25 gigawatt-hours of battery storage leveling out load throughout the day. Puerto Rico’s peak load is 3,000 megawatts.

In other filings, PR-SEIA urged a restructuring of FEMA funds so they’re available for microgrid development. GridWise Alliance wrote that plans should consider cybersecurity, and AEMA recommended the commission develop an integrated resource plan (IRP) that includes distributed energy resources, microgrids and non-wires alternatives.

An air of optimism, though 1.5 million are still without power

After the commission completes the microgrid rulemaking, a new IRP is next on the commission’s to-do list. PREPA must file that plan in July, and regulators are working furiously to make sure it incorporates the recent flood of rebuilding recommendations from the energy industry.

Though the commission has the final say when it comes to approval of the plan, PREPA will lead the IRP process. The utility’s newly formed Transformation Advisory Council (TAC), a group of 11 energy experts, will contribute.

With that group, along with New York’s Resiliency Working Group, lessons from California's grid transition, the Energy Commission, the utility itself, and the dozens of other clean energy experts and entrepreneurs who want to offer their two cents, the energy planning process has a lot of moving parts. But according to Julia Hamm, CEO of the Smart Electric Power Alliance and a member of both the Energy Resiliency Working Group and the TAC, those working to establish standards for Puerto Rico’s future are hitting their stride.

“Certainly over the past three months, it has been a bit of a challenge to ensure that everybody has been coordinating efforts. Just over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen some good progress on that front. We’re starting to see a lot more communication,” she said, adding that an air of optimism has settled on the process. “The key stakeholders all have a very common vision for Puerto Rico when it comes to the power sector.”

Nisha Desai, a PREPA board member who is liaising with the TAC, affirmed that collaborators are on the same page. “Everyone is violently in agreement that the future of Puerto Rico involves renewables, microgrids and distributed generation,” she said.

The TAC will hold its first in-person meeting in mid-January, and has already consulted with the utility on its formal fiscal plan submission, due January 10.

Though many taking part in the process feel the once-harried recovery is beginning to adopt a more organized approach, Desai acknowledges that “there are a lot of people in Puerto Rico who feel forgotten.”

Puerto Rico’s current generation sits at just 72.6 percent, in a nation facing longer, more frequent outages due to extreme weather. The government recently offered its first estimate that about half the island, 1.5 million residents, remains without power.

In late December and into January, 1,500 more crewmembers from 18 utilities in states as far flung as Minnesota, Missouri and Arizona will land on the island to aid further restoration through mutual aid agreements.

“The system is getting up to speed, getting to 100 percent, but there’s still some instability,” said Román Morales. “Right now it’s a matter of time.”

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FERC Rejects Trump Coal Plan, denying subsidies for coal-fired and nuclear plants as energy policy shifts toward natural gas and renewables, citing no grid reliability threat and warning about electricity prices and market impacts.

Key Points

FERC unanimously rejected subsidies for coal and nuclear plants, finding no grid reliability risk from retirements.

✅ Unanimous FERC vote rejects coal and nuclear compensation

✅ Cites no threat to grid reliability from plant retirements

✅ Opponents warned subsidies would distort power markets and prices

A decision by an independent energy agency to reject the Trump administration’s electricity pricing plan to bolster the coal industry could lead to more closures of coal-fired power plants and the loss of thousands of jobs, a top coal executive said Tuesday.

Robert Murray, CEO of Ohio-based Murray Energy Corp., called the action by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission “a bureaucratic cop-out” that will raise the cost of electricity and jeopardize the reliability and security of the nation’s electric grid.

“While FERC commissioners sit on their hands and refuse to take the action directed by Energy Secretary Rick Perry and President Donald Trump, the decommissioning of more coal-fired and nuclear plants could result, further jeopardizing the reliability, resiliency and security of America’s electric power grids,” Murray said. “It will also raise the cost of electricity for all Americans.”

The five-member energy commission voted unanimously Monday to reject Trump’s plan to reward nuclear and coal-fired power plants for adding reliability to the nation’s power grid. The plan would have made the plants eligible for billions of dollars in government subsidies and help reverse a tide of bankruptcies and loss of market share suffered by the once-dominant coal industry as utilities' shift to natural gas and renewable energy continues.

The Republican-controlled commission said there’s no evidence that any past or planned retirements of coal-fired power plants pose a threat to reliability of the nation’s electric grid.

Murray disputed that and said the recent cold snap that hit the East Coast showed coal’s value, as power users in the Southeast were asked to cut back on electricity usage because of a shortage of natural gas. “If it were not for the electricity generated by our nation’s coal-fired and nuclear power plants, we would be experiencing massive brownouts risk and blackouts in this country,” he said.

Murray Energy is the largest privately owned coal company in the United States, with mining operations in Ohio, Illinois, Kentucky, Utah and West Virginia. Robert Murray, a Trump friend and political supporter, has been pushing hard for federal assistance for his industry. The Associated Press reported last year that Murray asked the Trump administration to issue an emergency order protecting coal-fired power plants from closing. Murray warned that failure to act could cause thousands of coal miners to be laid off and force his largest customer, Ohio-based FirstEnergy Solutions, into bankruptcy.

Perry ultimately rejected Murray’s request, but later asked energy regulators to boost coal and nuclear plants as the administration moved to replace the Clean Power Plan with a more limited approach.

The plan drew widespread opposition from business and environmental groups that frequently disagree with each other, even as some coal and business interests backed the EPA's Affordable Clean Energy rule in court.

Jack Gerard, president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, said Tuesday that the Trump plan was “far too narrow” in its focus on power sources that maintain a 90-day fuel supply.

API, the largest lobbying group for oil and gas industry, supports coal and other energy sources, Gerard said, “but we should not put our eggs in an individual basket defined as a 90-day fuel supply (while) unnecessarily intervening in private markets.”

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