Blue Heron in Waterloo, Ontario, by Leslie Bamford
ORA asks the IESO to apply the methodology it adopts to every resource class, and to publish the result for each. Hydroelectricity has been treated differently for a long time. The IESO stated its effective capacity in megawatts in 2024 and stopped. It credits hydroelectricity at roughly half to two-thirds of nameplate in its auction and has not explained how that relates to the value it will use in procurement. The one worked capacity study it has published covers battery storage and no other resource. Its public pages describe hydroelectric generation as steady and around the clock, while its own planning documents record that dependable output falls overnight and in dry periods. Ratepayers fund these contracts for 20 to 40 years,21 and they are paying for effective, dependable capacity that nobody has validated or been shown.
The IESO publishes these figures for its auction. It has not published them for procurement, and it has not published a forward-looking value for hydroelectricity at all. Nor has it shown how it derived any of them. The one-megawatt figure on the record counts pumped storage inside the hydroelectric total. The auction factor rests on five years of past output in 200 hours a season. Neither comes with a derivation a ratepayer can follow. The IESO opened this engagement on a principle of its own choosing, that its work be “Traceable”, meaning to “Allow everyone to follow the path that is being taken”.
ORA asks for that path: the inputs, the assumptions, the stations counted and the stations left out, set out so the figure can be checked by someone who does not work for the IESO. Adopting the recommendations in this submission would give hydroelectricity the same scrutiny the IESO has already applied to battery storage and would demonstrate an openness and transparency on hydroelectric generation that is long overdue.