OPA
Parker Gallant: why is our electricity bill so high?
More meetings on the large project procurement process
The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) will be hosting four regional community meetings to receive additional feedback and input on the development of the LRP program. The sessions will be held in the evenings from 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. at the following dates and locations (presentation at 6:30 p.m.):
Chatham
Date: January 15, 2014
Location: The Retro Suites Hotel, 2 King Street West, Chatham, ON N7M 1C6
Date: January 20, 2014
Location: The Radisson Hotel, 85 Ste. Anne Road, Sudbury, ON P3E 4S4
Date: January 29, 2014
Location: Mariposa Inn & Conference Centre, 400 Memorial Avenue, Orillia, ON L3V 6J3
Date: February 4, 2014
Location: Strathcona Paper Centre, 16 McPherson Drive, Napanee, ON K7R 3L1
Ontario Power Authority
Ontario energy planning “heavy handed” says energy specialist lawyer
George Vegh who is the head of the energy regulatory sector practice at law firm McCarthy Tetrault, has published a paper titled Energy Planning: the case for a less prescriptive approach.
Elegantly written, the paper is nevertheless as rebuke of Ontario’s energy policy and, in advice reminiscent of University of Toronto law and economic professor Michael Trebilcock, Vegh pretty much says Ontario has gotten everything wrong. He is hoping, he says, that the new Long Term Energy Plan, soon to be released, has some “fairly dramatic potential course corrections, particularly with respect to the role of renewable power, new nuclear facilities and conservation.”
Trebilcock’s refrain is that governments should never be picking winners in technology as Ontario did with its power sector; Vegh says “although dictating specific supply mixes may have been necessary to get through the coal phase-out transition starting in 2005, the completion of that transition, and the dramatic changes to the technological, social and economic climate for energy projects since that time, have made that approach unnecessary and unproductive.”
“It was once thought that siting gas-fired generation plants was easy and that environmentalists would support the wind facilities required to ‘green’ the electricity grid. If those assumptions were ever true, they are clearly not true today.”
Vegh goes on to say that “making resource decisions based on long-term demand forecasts is a high-risk activity.”
A less prescriptive approach, Vegh says, is the answer, and he encourages Ontario’s apparent and new openness to allowing imported power. “For some reason, Ontario has, until now, insisted upon electricity self-sufficiency.” [Editor’s note: Liberal MPP Yasir Naqvi, speaking to TVO’s Steve Paikin on a show based in Ottawa, with the Ottawa River and Quebec in the background, suggested that Quebec was unstable politically and Ontario didn’t want to buy power from that province!]
Addressing wind power specifically, Vegh said “..commercial developments will follow their own path without regard to societal costs. For example, in the 2007 IPSP [Integrated Power System Plan], the OPA [Ontario Power Authority] recommended the development of at least eight transmission lines to ‘enable’ renewable power. This was based on identifying optimal locations for wind facilities by reference to the societal costs of wind development. However, wind developers have chosen wind sites that bore virtually no relation to the sites that the OPA models thought were optimal.”
So, get real, Ontario Vegh seems to say, and lay off the heavy-handed supply planning.
Parker Gallant: Hydro One and Ontario Energy Ministers–smarter? You judge
Hydro One and our Energy Ministers: Getting Smarter? You be the Judge!
Three bills in three weeks from Hydro One and a new line on the bill: “Miscellaneous Adjustment” got this writer wondering, why? The first bill came with an insert with the heading “Important Information about your enclosed Hydro One bill” and went on to explain that after they had “changed the meter at your premises, we experienced an issue which prevented the data from your meter from being processed in a timely manner in our system.” The meter they changed was a “smart meter” Hydro One installed a few years ago, so I assume this is a “smarter” meter. Calling the number on the insert allowed me to confirm with Hydro One that the meter change was due to a “communication problem.”
The upsetting part of the final bill is that when the all-in price of my power is calculated (including the costs of electricity, delivery, regulatory and debt retirement charge) it turned out to be 29 cents a kilowatt hour (kWh) and when I looked at my bill from November 2008 the all in charge was 16.5 cents a kWh. So in less than five years, the price had risen by 81%.
We’re doing our best to be responsible power consumers: we consumed less power than before and 71% of the billed electricity was in “off-peak” hours.
If one looks back this is what then Premier McGuinty said in his Throne speech of October 12, 2005 about smart meters: “Consumers can look forward to getting smart meters that will help them save money by telling them when they can pay less.”
An 81-% increase? Sounds like another broken government promise!
Those who have Hydro One as their local distribution company (LDC) will recall that only a few months ago, they sent another insert about a “new billing system” which allows them to bill on a “real time” basis. In effect this was a $160-million grab from ratepayers, perhaps to ensure their profits grow and that they can continue to pay dividends to the Province ($370 million in 2012). Profitability however, doesn’t cover off employee pension and benefit requirements as noted by DBRS, the Canadian bond rating agency, who listed Hydro One as # 8 on their recent list of worst funded pensions in Canada. Perhaps they should be funding their pension fund instead of making big dividend payments to the Ontario Ministry of Finance, but that might force Finance Minister Sousa to make some tough spending decisions.
My comments on “smart meters” are not new: back in July 2010 I pointed out that in a 3,400-page submission by Hydro One for a rate increase, the installed cost per smart meter was $700.54. That was confirmed by an exchange with a Hydro One officer. Now, the smart meters are having to be replaced? And not for the first time: Hydro One has needed to replace smart meters back in 2010 when the Newmarket Era carried an article about meter replacement in Keswick, Sutton and Mount Albert. My suspicion is that the form letter in our recent bill wasn’t the only one: who else in Prince Edward County and other parts of the province got it?
So, now, one wonders about the promises made for those smart meters. At $700.54 cents per meter the cost of replacing the old analog meter at our place is now $1,400.00; the Hydro One 2012 Annual Report indicates they are charging $1.52 per month as a recovery cost. At that rate, it will take them 76 years to recover their costs. Will Hydro One be spending hundreds of millions each year on “smart meters” instead of upgrading the important infrastructure such as transmission lines, transformers, etc.?
An interesting story recently came out of Germany: the German Federal Ministry of Economics published a study by Ernst & Young which basically concluded, no rollout for smart meters. Why? Ernst & Young did a cost/benefit study and concluded:
“The study comes to the conclusion that smart meters in particular for small consumers are not cost-efficient, as the potential savings would be well below actual costs of smart meters and their operation.”
In Ontario we seem to do things differently as was pointed out by the Auditor General in his 2011 report. Jim McCarter said that the initiatives behind the Green Energy and Green Economy Act were not based on a cost-benefit analysis. While not speaking directly to the issue of “smart meters” and their installation throughout the province this writer believes that the conclusions of a cost-benefit analysis would have reached the same endpoint as the Ernst and Young study completed for Germany.
When the McGuinty government gave its Throne Speech in 2005, the Ontario Energy Minister (Dwight Duncan) had already issued a directive to the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) dated July 14, 2004 to Howard Wetson, Chair, of the OEB (the Ontario Power Authority did not exist at that time) which instructed them to “implement a plan to achieve the government’s objectives for the deployment of smart electricity meters.”
No cost-benefit study was considered and Minister Duncan’s directive to the OEB simply had to be “formalized” before the media picked up on the government’s manipulation of the electricity sector without going through the legislature or a hearing before a legislative committee! With a single signature Duncan committed Ontario’s ratepayers to pick up a bill for at least $2 billion!
Several years after that 2005 Throne Speech and the Dwight Duncan directive, Tyler Hamilton (the “expert” commentator as noted by Alicia Johnston in e-mails recently released by the government and commented on by Tom Adams) wrote an article for the October 7, 2010 Toronto Star. The article was all about “smart meters” and the wonders they would perform for all of the ratepayers in Ontario. It contained quotes from an IBM “technology consultant” including this one: “ ‘Right now, Ontario is a world leader in the smart grid and smart meter systems,’ he explained. ‘Dozens of utilities around the world are watching what’s going on here. In a way, we have become a micro lab for the rest of the world.’ ”
Later on in the article Hamilton makes this comment: “With smart meters…we have a tool that helps us to at least manage our electricity bill and help offset electricity rate increases.”
Did Tyler Hamilton, the “expert” commentator, really understand what he was endorsing? I believe most ratepayers in the province have received absolutely no benefit from either “smart meters” or the “smart grid” –neither one has done nothing to improve the aging infrastructure in the Province or “help offset electricity rate increases.”
Germany, whom we copied on the FIT and MicroFIT programs apparently didn’t see it with the clarity of Tyler Hamilton or that IBM technology consultant.
Mr. McGuinty is now at Harvard and presumably living in Massachusetts where the average cost of power is about half of what I am being charged. I wonder if he and former Minister Duncan now appreciate the “green” mess they created.
Worse, power utilities around the world must now be laughing up their sleeve at the wasted money Ontario’s ratepayers are forced to absorb. The “microlab” referenced by the IBM technology consultant has turned out instead to be an incinerator for our hard earned dollars!
Parker Gallant,
September 7, 2013
Next time, we will look at the “smart grid”
The opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent policies of Wind Concerns Ontario.
CBC: wind turbines a “hot” topic at municipal conference
Here is a link to a CBC story on the recent Association of Ontario Municipalities conference. We should add here what Enniskillen Mayor Kevin Marriott said: “a year from now, in August 2014, wind power is going to be the hot topic in the Ontario municipal elections.”
Turbines in Windsor-Essex region
Amherstburg, as well as several municipalities in Lambton County, have put their foot down when it comes to wind turbines.
Amherstburg is among 64 communities that are on an “unwilling hosts” list. Those municipalities don’t want any more wind turbines going up. Another 33 municipalities have “expressed concern” about turbines. Leamington is on that list.
Currently there are more than 100 hundred wind turbines in the Windsor Essex Region and like Amherstburg – Leamington may soon join the “unwilling” list as well. A recent proposal to ban wind turbines in the Leamington area was brought to council last week.
Along with solar power, wind energy is hailed as the way of the future but this type of power generation has many in the province divided.
Until a recent trip to Ottawa, the Ontario government may not have been listening to the concerns of municipalities, according to Leamington mayor John Patterson.
“We had no authority, no power to say where solar farms or wind turbine products could be located,” said Patterson. “Now we have a say … but if the government determines that it’s viable they will probably approve the farm.”
But after attending the Association of Municipalities of Ontario Conference last week, Patterson says the government is willing to listen to concerns from across the province.
Patterson was glad to hear that, because some residents say turbines are a drag on the municipality.
“Property values are driven down because wind turbines are established everywhere and driving down our tax base. There’s an argument on both sides of that point,” he said. “Knowing past discussions on this when there was a proposal to put 750 turbines out in Pigeons Bay, it caught the attention of every tax payer in both communities. I suspect the same kind of feeling may exist on council in regards to turbines on the land.”
The OPA: Gone without the Plan
Ontario Merging Energy Agencies
Ontario Merging Energy Agencies:
The new agency would eliminate duplication and save ratepayers up to $25 million a year.It would allow for a more seamless and co-ordinated approach to planning as Ontario integrates new renewable energy projects into the grid and shuts down its last coal-fired plants by the end of 2014.
You could read the full release here
Ontario Liberals set to announce merger of energy-planning agencies
Ontario Liberals set to announce merger of energy-planning agencies :
The Ontario government appears set to announce a merger of its two big energy-planning agencies.
Sources say that Energy Minister Chris Bentley, who has scheduled a press conference for Wednesday morning, will unveil a merger of the Ontario Power Authority and the Independent Electricity System Operator.
While the merger is likely to produce limited savings, it stands to have considerable symbolic value as Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals try to show their commitment to getting the province’s troubled finances in order.
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