Posted by Q: How does a Torontonian change a lightbulb?
A: He just holds it up to a socket and waits for the rest of Canada to revolve around him.
My friend’s colleague, a recent economic refugee from the failed economy of Ontario, full of left-wing condescension asked him, “how do you people live like this? How can you still be burning coal for electricity?” Yes, our good hippie friends in our liberal heartland of Toronto like to think they are one with mother earth and proudly call their electricity invoices a “hydro bill” to burnish their green credentials to the world. It happens to be a lie.
The simple truth is that hydro makes up less than a quarter of electricity generation in Ontario. In fact, nuclear power (like the Bruce Power Plant in the photo above) makes up more than half of electric power generated in Ontario. Nightmares of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima must haunt officials of Hydro One and the Ontario government; that’s why they lie to their citizens and keep calling it a hydro bill when a nuclear bill is far more appropriate. At least in Quebec and British Columbia, hydro power does account for more than 90% of electrical power generation so the name hydro bill is justifiable. What they call their bill is the least of their problems in Ontario; it’s the numbers on that bill that is causing the government and its citizens headaches and heartaches.
“People have told me that they’ve had to choose between paying the electricity bill and buying food or paying rent,” Ontario’s Liberal Premier, Kathleen Wynne said. “It is unacceptable that people in Ontario could be facing that choice. So our government made a mistake. It was my mistake. And I’m going to do my best to fix it.”
It brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s classic quote. “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Everyone makes mistakes, but to think the idiots who created the problem in the first place (despite all the warnings to the contrary so ignorance is not an excuse), is very much akin to setting the fox to watch the hen-house. To help the consumer, the Ontario government now says it will eliminate the 8% provincial tax on electricity starting in January 2017. This is the same as using their right hand to give you money while stealing your wallet with their left hand. The government still has to pay for electricity either through other taxes or a further increase in its already crippling deficit of $5.7bn. Hydro One also announced on 25 November that it was implementing its winter moratorium on cutting off clients, one week ahead of normal. Too little, too late as more than 60,000 Ontario families have had their power cut off this year. That doesn’t just mean no lights and internet; in the case of Ontario this often also means no heat. That’s OK, I’ll just get a wood stove and go off the grid, what can be more back to mother nature and living in harmony with Gaia than that? Think again… The eco-hippies don’t want you burning wood either.
While the media concentrates on the impact on consumers and human interest stories of families literally left in the dark, the problem of higher electricity costs doesn’t end there. It has a huge impact on the economy and is one of the contributing factors to the continued hollowing out of Ontario’s historically strong manufacturing sector. Essentially, the liberal intelligentsia believes everyone should be cramped together in big cities, working in high-paying, eco-friendly, white-collar jobs with occasional bicycle trips to the fair trade sourced coffee shop and locally grown organic food supermarket. The rest of you, if you are unemployed, starving and freezing in the dark; well that’s the price we have to pay to get to that utopia.
http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/ontarios-job-killer-business-sounds-alarm-over-soaring-electricity-prices
Why is Ontario’s power problems so acute despite most of it already coming from non-carbon emitting sources? First, Ontario generates too much power and, like so many other jurisdictions, operates under a take-or-pay system where the government has agreed to purchase the surplus electricity produced and then sells the excess to the U.S. for a loss. Greenpeace’s solution to over capacity is to take the nuclear power plants off-line. Nuclear power is expensive because the up front capex is huge, early retirement would undoubtedly cost a huge amount in opportunity loss and compensation. The truth is Ontario’s eco-nuts under Premier Wynne caused the problem by rushing to shut down fossil-fuel fired electrical plants while pouring government money and subsidies into green power projects when there was no need. The cheapest way would have been to phase in wind and solar projects as coal and nuclear plants came to the end of their natural life.
In September, the government decided to cancel plans to spend a further $3.8bn on renewable energy contracts. This was derided by the usual left-wing eco-nuts including my favourite fruit-fly scientist, David Suzuki as being short-sighted. Hundreds of thousands of people without power and all he and his low-fat, soy-milk, gluten-free, fair-trade, latte sipping crowd can do is continue to beat their save the planet drum while flying a few thousand delegates across the planet to attend yet another environmental forum. The Canadian Wind Association warned the cancellation will make it hard for Ontario to meet its greenhouse gas reduction targets. Seriously WTF? Nuclear power is pretty much emission free so this is a massive lie; or is it as Al Gore would call it, an inconvenient truth.
The real inconvenient truth is despite all the lies about how awesome renewable energy is and how much cheaper it has become, they are still not economical without huge government subsidies. Wind, solar and bio-energy account for only 6.3% of power generation in Ontario but account for 16.3% of generation costs. The auditor general reports that Ontario pays, “double the market price for wind and 3½ times the market price for solar energy”.
Our socialist NDP government in Alberta is hell-bent of massive carbon taxes and eliminating coal-fired electricity plants. They try to sell it to the public by saying it won’t cost anything as it will be paid for by corporations (i.e. big oil and gas companies) and we can all feel better for saving the planet. However, even the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation (CBC) reports in October that, “Phasing out coal-fired electricity in [Alberta] could cost from $4 billion to $8 billion by 2030″ Here’s the lesson from Ontario:
Electricity rates for homes and small businesses in Ontario jumped 70 per cent between 2006 and 2014 as coal was being phased out. The province’s auditor general said the Liberal government’s planning and implementation of new power generation as it moved to replace coal cost consumers an extra $37 billion during that time — including an extra $9.2 billion for green energy projects — and was expected to cost another $133 billion from 2015 to 2032.
If you want to move to an all renewable energy electrical power grid, go ahead. But be realistic about how long it will take and how much it will cost. Stop lying to the public who ends up paying the bills years down the road. It’s easy to justify everything with pithy phrases about saving the planet; no sane person would say screw the planet. But be upfront about what is the price is to achieve this and how we will pay for it. Nothing is ever free or in the case of renewable energy, even cheap.
Look at British Columbia (on the left-coast of Canada) where hydro electricity already accounts for well over 90% of the total. The pot smoking hippies in Victoria and Vancouver surely must need to see their chiropractor’s often after all their back-slapping over their success in eliminating fossil fuels. But hold on. GLOBE Foundation estimates B.C.’s total energy consumption is approximately 317,500 GWh while BC Hydro reports it generates between 43,000-56,000 GWh. That’s because electricity is only one part of the energy consumption mix as we have other major uses including industrial, heating, and transportation (cars, ships, planes). So hydro electricity is only 17-18% of the total energy consumption in uber green B.C. with 33% coming from non-gas fossil fuels (oil and coal), 26% natural gas and 20% in burning waste biomass in industrial facilities.
I pretty much guarantee that the current high-end estimate of $8bn cost to phase out coal in Alberta will end up being far short of the actual cost. Even using this number, that’s $2,000 for every man, woman and child in the province. I’ll write a cheque for $8,000 to pay for my family of four today. But there are a lot of retired, unemployed, and poor people who can’t afford it. Do we really have to see thousands of Albertan’s without power before we see this? Hopefully not, but it’s still almost three more years before we can get rid of Notley and her crew of socialist incompetents.