Q4 Reliability Outlook Now Available
December 23, 2021
Ontario is well positioned to meet its electricity needs for the next 18 months, with adequate supply to meet demand growth.
Electricity demand in Ontario is continuing to rebound despite the ongoing challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Annual demand for this year is expected to top 133.4 terawatt-hours (TWh), an increase of 1.1% over 2020. Although demand has grown, it has not fully reached pre-pandemic levels due to supply chain disruptions and public health measures. As a result, that recovery has been pushed into 2022.
To maintain grid reliability over the Outlook period, the IESO secured 1,287 MW of capacity for summer 2022 and 842 MW of capacity for winter 2022/2023 through a capacity auction held earlier this month. While the province is expected to have sufficient supply resources, there are four weeks in the spring and summer of 2022 when reserves may not meet requirements, should extreme weather conditions materialize. However, these potential shortfalls are expected to be mitigated through outage management.
The full report is available on the IESO’s Planning and Forecasting web page.