Electric power statistics, October 2015
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Released: 2015-12-21
Canada's demand for electricity declined 2.8% from the same month in 2014 to 40.7 million megawatt hours (MWh) in October. Meanwhile, electricity generation decreased 0.7% to 44.7 million MWh, largely driven by declines in Ontario.
Exports of electricity to the United States rose nearly 20% to 4.6 million MWh in October, primarily driven by larger exports from Manitoba and British Columbia. This was the 12th consecutive year-over-year increase in exports to the United States. Imports declined 17.2% to 0.6 million MWh on lower receipts from British Columbia.
Chart 1
Electricity generation and consumption
In Ontario, generation levels declined 20.2% from the same month in 2014 to 9.7 million MWh. Outages at nuclear power plants led to a 26.9% decline in generation to 5.9 million MWh of electricity. Hydro generation declined by more than 10% to 2.6 million MWh. To supplement lower generation levels, Ontario purchased 1.1 million MWh from other jurisdictions—the most electricity purchased by the province since July 2008.
Conversely, Quebec's generation levels rose 10.0% to 15.5 million MWh in October. The gain was widespread across all types of generation. While nearly one-third of the increase was used to meet higher demand within the province, the remaining portion was used to increase deliveries to both the United States and other provinces—predominantly Ontario.
Note to readers
The purpose of this release is to produce a consistent monthly indicator of the supply of electricity in Canada, a key input in the calculation of monthly gross domestic product.
Total net electricity generation for Canada, the provinces and the territories combines all of the electricity generated from all sources, including hydro, steam, nuclear, internal combustion, wind, solar and tidal.
Total available electricity is the total electricity generation, minus deliveries, plus receipts of electricity.
All data on imports and exports are provided directly by the National Energy Board.
Data for June to September 2015 have been revised.
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