Oh, a _feed in tariff_. OK, so that's never going to make sense as a wholesale price because it isn't one.

At the end of the day, the system operator covers the program costs via higher prices for electricity consumers (the "global adjustment").

Somehow we've ended up with a "market" price of electricity of 2 cents/kwh, and another 10c/kwh for global adjustments (includes more than just solar and wind subsidies). This is before distribution and transmission.

http://ieso.ca/power-data/price-overview/global-adjustment

I looked into the details[1] here, it seems like a minority of these charges are from wind/solar, eyeballing it, it looks like 50% or so is from Nuclear and hydro, with something like 20% other (mostly nat gas), and 20% wind.

It seems to me like it's essentially a breakdown of marginal vs fixed costs.

1: http://www.ieso.ca/-/media/Files/IESO/Market-Summaries/2020/..., page 21

I just looked at the bottom of the page I linked. Solar looks contributes about 2c/kWh to bills in summer, less in winter because there’s fewer subsidies.

Subsidies are rife, but there’s far less solar energy produced compared to hydro and nuclear. The amount of generation we get for that solar subsidy is peanuts. Nuclear is a pesky beast, because shutting down is incredibly expensive too.

It's a little unclear to me, but I think looking at just output from generation is not fair to solar. Solar has 2000 MW of installed "embedded" capacity. This is cheaper for the grid since it doesn't have to go through as much of the distribution network, meaning it has less efficiency loss and doesn't require transmission capacity. Solar makes up 60% of the embedded capacity[1] (where is the embedded hydro coming from?? lmao). It seems embedded capacity reduced demand by 5TWh in 2019[2]. Comparing this to "actual demand" from the same chart shows that it was roughly 5/140 =~4% of the supplied electricity.

Let's say it was 20% of the GA in the summer and 0% in the winter for a sketchy 10% average of the fees. This doesn't seem too far out of line, although it is obviously a few times higher than the others, but it's not far enough out of whack that I think calling it peanuts is justified.

1: http://ieso.ca/en/Learn/Ontario-Supply-Mix/Ontario-Energy-Ca...

2: http://www.ieso.ca/en/Corporate-IESO/Media/Year-End-Data

The innovation comes after the demand for solar panels is sufficiently stimulated to warrant mass manufacturing.