A peeve of mine! Likely a peeve of every resident of Ontario, Canada. Electricity Rates! Sky High!Was talking with GreenCrow about this last week.
- Penny said...
- WhoooohoooooJustin booed- yeah!I get a sense of anger all over the placeIn Ontario were getting hammered with very high electricity rates- as in ridiculous and extreme- and the irony of it all--- when the electricity that is created here is not used- Ontario pays other parties to take the electricity.In 2013 it cost us a billion dollarshttps://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2014/01/20/ontario_paid_1_billi… greencrow said...Hi Penny:Ontario is the home base of Ziofascism in Canada. Any wonder that issues like the electricity theft is going on?That's right Ontario, in 2013 paid over 1 BILLION Dollars to dump excess electricity- "Beleaguered Ontario ratepayers last year paid $1 billion to dump cheap electricity into neighbouring states and provinces, NDP energy critic MPP Peter Tabuns claims. “We’ve done the math, we found that last year (2013) Ontario subsidized power to people in the United States and Quebec and Manitoba to the tune of over a billion dollars,” the Toronto-Danforth MPP told reporters Monday.
“It is an extraordinary expense that people are carrying on their electricity bills. We think this is a broken system,” Tabuns said, adding that the cost to each of the 4.9 million Ontario ratepayers is about $220 a year.
This is not the first time that this kind of expensive power dump has been raised, including by Ontario’s auditor general. In 2012, the Council for Clean and Reliable Electricity published a paper stating that Ontario consumers subsidized out-of-province electricity buyers to the tune of $1.2 billion over the previous three years. While it costs 8.55 cents a kilowatt hour to produce electricity in Ontario, excess power was sold to five neighbouring jurisdictions — Michigan. New York, Minnesota, Manitoba and Quebec — for 2.65 cents/kwh, Tabuns said"
So readers from Michigan, New York, Minnesota, Manitoba and Quebec, you can thank people in Ontario, people like me, for subsidizing your electricity use. I'm not upset with you all. I'm disgusted and annoyed with the leadership in Ontario.( Leadership I didn't vote for choosing to formally, at the polling station, DECLINE my ballot) And I wasn't alone!Ontario is headed for a fatal future and only ending the renewable deals can prevent itI have a particular disdain for the army of giant wind turbines that spoil the lake shore and open fields in Ontario- Higher then the tree lines in so many places- Ruining the panoramic views of many open spaces. Killing birds. Making people sick.
Ontario was once the engine of the Canadian economy, a Triple-A-rated powerhouse commanding more than 40 per cent of the country’s GDP. Today this once-proud place is a have-not province whose credit rating is near the bottom of the pack, a loser that collects subsidies from the rest of the country.Ontario lost its lustrous Triple-A credit rating when Ontario Hydro went out of control, ending the province’s low-price advantage, making industry uncompetitive and sinking the province in a morass of debt.
Ontario’s credit rating then continued to sink, in tandem with continuing boondoggles in the energy sector that now leave Ontario the world’s most indebted sub-national jurisdiction. According to a 2012 MacDonald-Laurier Institute study by Marc Joffe, a former senior director at Moody’s Analytics, the province’s likelihood of defaulting over the next two decades is 43 per cent.
But there is a way to reverse Ontario’s downward spiral, likely the only way that avoids a painful and protracted retrenchment — by righting the province’s power sector, the biggest cause by far of its ruin. And there’s only one way to right the power sector — by rethinking Ontario’s Green Energy Act and rewriting the ruinous contracts that are responsible for most of Ontario’s power woes.
According to Bonnie Lysyk, Ontario’s auditor general, Ontarians paid $37 billion above the market price for electricity over the past eight years, and face an additional $133-billion overpayment by 2032. Industry and wealth-creation as a result are fleeing the province in what could become a death spiral — the more that industry leaves, in the process depriving the provincial treasury of tax revenues and the power system of sales revenues, the more that Ontario must make up the shortfalls by increasing taxes and rates on those who remain, which in turn convinces others to leave. According to an Ontario Chamber of Commerce report last year, soaring power bills are expected to shut down one in 20 businesses by 2020. Those that remain will simply avoid investing in Ontario — 40 per cent admit to having already done so. With Ontario now burdened with the continent’s highest electricity rates, and with the doubling of rates to date for most industrial customers on track to become a tripling, businesses can’t go wrong by looking elsewhere.
The government’s current direction is unsustainable. But it can change direction by admitting its mistakes, rewriting the ruinous contracts it entered into and clawing back the overpayments, which amount to several times the fair market price for their power.
Once Ontario industry is able to pay a competitive price for its power, industry will stay and expand in Ontario and the province will collect ever-increasing revenues from both employers and employees. With the province in recovery, its downward credit rating will reverse itself, rather than continuing a slide to the default that credit rating agencies like Standard & Poor’s now view as thinkable.
Can a province unilaterally rewrite a contract that it entered into? As every one of the multinationals who entered into one of those obscenely rich renewables contracts with Ontario surely knew, the Ontario legislature has — as every legislature does — not only the power to rewrite contracts whenever it feels so justified, but has done so numerous times over its history.
After the Ontario legislature rewrote a contract between government-owned Hydro One and its CEO, Eleanor Clitheroe, firing her and denying her much of the pension she had negotiated, Clitheroe sued her former employer.
In a 2009 decision, the court denied her demand to have her contract honoured, beginning its Reasons for Decision by reiterating the rules of the game: “In short, the Legislature within its jurisdiction can do everything that is not naturally impossible, and is restrained by no rule human or divine … there would be no necessity for compensation to be given.”
The 2009 decision was citing a century-old suit brought by the Florence Mining Co. that the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously dismissed. Since then, the right of the legislature to unilaterally rewrite contracts has often been tested and always been upheld. When Clitheroe in 2010 asked the Supreme Court of Canada for permission to appeal the lower court’s ruling, the Supreme Court dismissed her request.
If Ontario doesn’t rewrite the renewables contracts, virtually everyone in the province will suffer, now and well into the future, with the victims especially being those least able to afford the costs. If Ontario does rewrite them, the bleeding will stop and the ones to suffer, fittingly, will be those who knowingly took the risks of deals that were too good to be true.
WindOntario There were alternatives to this nightmare- Ontario choose to subsidize this monstrosity with an eye to selling it off. All on the backs of Ontario taxpayers and ratepayers.Remember Ontarians don't even use this electricity.Gone are the days of beautiful Ontario….“These wind projects will change this place more totally, more rapidly and more permanently than anything in the past 10,000 years”James Corcoran, South Huron, Ontario30 years experience, environmental assessments on behalf of developers.
The rendering below provides a perspective of Ontario’s new turbines. The building behind is 38 storeys.
Image included for perspective- the tallest turbine is what marches through OntarioWind turbines approved for eastern Ontario despite objections
