Falling electricity demand and the impact on nuclear projects – An interesting article

 Today, Bruce Power announced that reduced operations to cope with reduced demand is the new short term reality.  See the following quote from the article linked here:

“Bruce Power officials say running at reduced capacity is the new reality for the nuclear plant for the foreseeable future, despite getting the green light to return a reactor to service after a 22-day shutdown due to a provincewide slump in energy use.

“This will have an impact on us, on our machines, our people — this is an ongoing situation that we’re going to have to work through,” Steve Cannon, a Bruce Power spokesman, said yesterday.

“At the end of the year we are going to take stock of this year and determine exactly how big the impact has been on our business plan . . . when we compare it to what we expected the market to look like, what we expected our generation output to be and what we expected our revenues to be.””

Hard to imagine but true.  In the short term, demand in Ontario has fallen to the extent that baseload generation has been affected.  It will be interesting to see how long it takes to recover and the extent of the recovery in demand.  How much of the reduction is due to the economy and how much due to successful conservation?  And if the economy, is there permanent structural change?

Thought this was worth adding after last week’s entry.  Would really like to hear from others about what is going on in their jurisdictions.