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Ontario’s Liberal government on Tuesday announced it’ll scrap plans to spend $3.8 billion on new green-energy contracts, hoping we won’t need that electricity because the province’s climate-change plans will turn out to be only somewhat successful.
“Our decision to suspend these procurements is not one we take lightly,” Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault said. But we just don’t need the 1,000 megawatts of power we were going to buy, he said, pointing to a new report from the Independent Electricity System Operator, the agency that plans Ontario’s power grid.
Green-energy contracts are usually long-term, so the $3.8 billion would have been paid out over many years. The decision won’t cut electricity bills but it will head off future increases, Thibeault said, amounting to $2.45 a month on an average household bill.
The minister is making a bet. The planning report offered up four scenarios, without taking a position on which is the most likely to come true. If electricity demand declines or stays flat, we’ll have no problem meeting Ontario’s needs with all the generating stations we have now and can reasonably expect to keep functioning for the next 20 years. But if demand goes up a little or a lot, despite increased efficiency and conservation efforts, we’ll start to have trouble keeping up in the mid-2020s.
One thing that could increase demand? If a lot of Ontarians start using electricity to replace fossil fuels — like by swapping out gas and oil furnaces for electric heat, and buying electric cars. Which is what the Liberals would generally like us to do, to help reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions. The IESO isn’t sure that’ll happen but it used some optimistic forecasts to cover the next five years to be on the same side. Things get dicey more than 10 years out.
“Meeting this scale of electricity demand growth would require the coordinated deployment of multiple low-carbon options,” the agency’s report says. In other words, we’d need those windmills we’re not going to build. If we all get electric cars, it’ll be a big problem.
So Thibeault’s bet is on efficiency, conservation, existing nuclear and gas generating stations continuing to operate … and on his own government’s climate-change policies being sort of effective but no more than that.
If any of those things doesn’t play out as expected, demand will outstrip supply and we’ll be back to buying expensive power at peak times from our neighbours, or worrying about brownouts again. Exactly the problems the Liberals are proud of having solved, and reasonably so in spite of how expensive it’s been.
But that’s all in the future. Right now, there’s a 2018 election to worry about. Right now, not buying all that power heads off a whole lot of angry arguments in towns and villages where windmills would have been built to generate it. Not all the power would have come from wind — the cancelled purchases include solar, small hydroelectric and waste-to-energy projects — but those are the most controversial.
Six hundred megawatts, the share that was supposed to come from wind, is the capacity of three very large wind farms, or 15 to 20 more typical ones with 10 or 15 wind turbines each. Virtually every one of them an icepick in the back of a Liberal candidate.
That said, the decision doesn’t kill projects that are already well underway in places like Finch and North Stormont. It stops the government from doing deals for new generating stations in locations that hadn’t been chosen yet. Choosing sites, holding public meetings, contending with unhappy residents and municipal politicians all would have played out over the next two years.
Thibeault’s announcement prompted the closest thing to a compliment the provincial government is likely to get from Wind Concerns Ontario, a group that resists windmill projects. “Wind Concerns Ontario believes that in the light of unsustainable rises in electricity bills and the social crisis as energy poverty increases in Ontario, and in the situation where Ontario has surplus power, to proceed with the new contracts would have been indefensible,” its North Gower-based president Jane Wilson said in a quick written statement.
Shaving a bit off future electricity bills is nothing to dismiss, either. Thibeault’s announcement came literally minutes after a fresh report from the legislature’s financial accountability office, which ran the numbers and found out why hydro prices are such a political problem.
Poorer people spend less on home energy (having smaller places, fewer appliances and electric gadgets) but still about $1,200 a year, or 5.9 per cent of their household incomes on electricity and heating fuel. Richer people spend only 1.7 per cent of their incomes on energy, but in raw dollars that’s almost $3,700 a year.
So if you’re poorer, every dollar your hydro or gas bill goes up hits you really hard. If you’re richer, even small hikes in the rates lead to eye-popping increases in the dollar figure you write on your cheque each month.
No wonder the Progressive Conservatives smell blood, and the Liberals are doing everything they can right now to cauterize their worst political wound.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
“Our decision to suspend these procurements is not one we take lightly,” Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault said. But we just don’t need the 1,000 megawatts of power we were going to buy, he said, pointing to a new report from the Independent Electricity System Operator, the agency that plans Ontario’s power grid.
Green-energy contracts are usually long-term, so the $3.8 billion would have been paid out over many years. The decision won’t cut electricity bills but it will head off future increases, Thibeault said, amounting to $2.45 a month on an average household bill.
The minister is making a bet. The planning report offered up four scenarios, without taking a position on which is the most likely to come true. If electricity demand declines or stays flat, we’ll have no problem meeting Ontario’s needs with all the generating stations we have now and can reasonably expect to keep functioning for the next 20 years. But if demand goes up a little or a lot, despite increased efficiency and conservation efforts, we’ll start to have trouble keeping up in the mid-2020s.
One thing that could increase demand? If a lot of Ontarians start using electricity to replace fossil fuels — like by swapping out gas and oil furnaces for electric heat, and buying electric cars. Which is what the Liberals would generally like us to do, to help reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions. The IESO isn’t sure that’ll happen but it used some optimistic forecasts to cover the next five years to be on the same side. Things get dicey more than 10 years out.
“Meeting this scale of electricity demand growth would require the coordinated deployment of multiple low-carbon options,” the agency’s report says. In other words, we’d need those windmills we’re not going to build. If we all get electric cars, it’ll be a big problem.
So Thibeault’s bet is on efficiency, conservation, existing nuclear and gas generating stations continuing to operate … and on his own government’s climate-change policies being sort of effective but no more than that.
If any of those things doesn’t play out as expected, demand will outstrip supply and we’ll be back to buying expensive power at peak times from our neighbours, or worrying about brownouts again. Exactly the problems the Liberals are proud of having solved, and reasonably so in spite of how expensive it’s been.
But that’s all in the future. Right now, there’s a 2018 election to worry about. Right now, not buying all that power heads off a whole lot of angry arguments in towns and villages where windmills would have been built to generate it. Not all the power would have come from wind — the cancelled purchases include solar, small hydroelectric and waste-to-energy projects — but those are the most controversial.
Six hundred megawatts, the share that was supposed to come from wind, is the capacity of three very large wind farms, or 15 to 20 more typical ones with 10 or 15 wind turbines each. Virtually every one of them an icepick in the back of a Liberal candidate.
That said, the decision doesn’t kill projects that are already well underway in places like Finch and North Stormont. It stops the government from doing deals for new generating stations in locations that hadn’t been chosen yet. Choosing sites, holding public meetings, contending with unhappy residents and municipal politicians all would have played out over the next two years.
Thibeault’s announcement prompted the closest thing to a compliment the provincial government is likely to get from Wind Concerns Ontario, a group that resists windmill projects. “Wind Concerns Ontario believes that in the light of unsustainable rises in electricity bills and the social crisis as energy poverty increases in Ontario, and in the situation where Ontario has surplus power, to proceed with the new contracts would have been indefensible,” its North Gower-based president Jane Wilson said in a quick written statement.
Shaving a bit off future electricity bills is nothing to dismiss, either. Thibeault’s announcement came literally minutes after a fresh report from the legislature’s financial accountability office, which ran the numbers and found out why hydro prices are such a political problem.
Poorer people spend less on home energy (having smaller places, fewer appliances and electric gadgets) but still about $1,200 a year, or 5.9 per cent of their household incomes on electricity and heating fuel. Richer people spend only 1.7 per cent of their incomes on energy, but in raw dollars that’s almost $3,700 a year.
So if you’re poorer, every dollar your hydro or gas bill goes up hits you really hard. If you’re richer, even small hikes in the rates lead to eye-popping increases in the dollar figure you write on your cheque each month.
No wonder the Progressive Conservatives smell blood, and the Liberals are doing everything they can right now to cauterize their worst political wound.
dreevely@postmedia.com
twitter.com/davidreevely
查看原文...
