Good for these students for calling attention to McMaster University’s hypocrisy! Is there a better word to describe installing carbon spewing gas generators running up to 100 hours a year when the Ontario grid is 94% emissions free to potentially save on their own electricity bill. The worst part is the article describes how the university is claiming they are trying to achieve aggressive emission reduction targets. I know of at least one other university who has done something similar, but at least they installed battery storage in addition to the generators.
In Ontario large power consumers like McMaster are eligible to become Class A customers. What are the implications of this change? Well essentially you pay a lower consumption charge than basically everyone else in general. Think of your residential overnight rates but lower than that! However, you then pay what is called a Global Adjustment Charge based on the top 5 grid demand hours in Ontario in a year. Those top 5 hours are then divided up between all of the Class A customers in Ontario based on how much they consumed doing those critical 5 hours. The amount varies but my understanding is it can represent 50% of your total bill. The idea was/is to incentivize large customers to reduce their demand during those peaks that strain the capacity of the grid.
Of course when money is involved people get creative (think cryptocurrency scams). What if you qualify as a Class A customer and then could detach from the grid completely for those five hours? Well then your total Global Adjustment Charge would be $0. However, you don’t know in advance exactly when those magical 5 hours will be. You can only guess based on a number of factors like weather, predicted use etc. So to err on the side of caution you might need to disconnect for up to 100 hours as the article describes.
“Fortunately” there are helpful companies that offer a turnkey solution for organizations like McMaster University. Essentially they make a lot of money selling carbon emitting generators to customers like McMaster. Those customers may or may not achieve the desired savings because regulations can change. The university is taking on the risk of the systems not working out as planned, not the company that sold them the system. You’ll notice that regulations can change because in the company’s description approvals were frozen during Covid because of reduced demand. We see enough failures with solar power systems, that I hate to think about how well these generators will work after a few years.
How does the university actually save money? Well by passing their previous portion of the Global Adjustment Charge to all the other electricity customers in Ontario not just Class A customers. As an added “benefit” they now have even less incentive to reduce their overall consumption through energy savings etc. because their consumption charge are so much lower than the rest of us.
I once saw a bumper sticker that said “If you’re not outraged you’re not paying attention”. Seems appropriate in this situation and thanks again to these students efforts. Maybe they can’t stop these particular generators but if enough people become outraged then the system will change!