… in Ontario:
So let’s review. Gas power is good until someone says it’s not, then it’s cancelled. Wind power is hated and expensive and, oh yeah, only works when it’s windy, so you need gas power as a backup … and those are getting cancelled. So we could go to solar power, except McGuinty already backtracked on that, making a lot of potential investors nervous. And our plans to build nuclear reactors to pick up the slack are on hold. Well, then. I guess we should count ourselves lucky that the population is “only” projected to grow a mere 36% over the next generation.
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How can you headline this as “rudderless”?
I think that McGuinty, just like Obama, knows exactly what he’s doing.
Are we supposed to use candles then?
I saw this on Neatorama:
http://www.neatorama.com/2010/10/12/surprise-global-warming-will-freeze-all-of-us-to-death/
@Osumashi: “Are we supposed to use candles then?” No, but the left would like to decide who to extinguish.
I hate this province and can’t wait to move.
It’s easy, Unicorn farts and good intentions. Okay you will have to give up toast and businesses will close but it will be greener than anyone else.
the best part is the 36% increase will mostly be immigrants from places that they havent had much electricity .or cold , or air conditioning or toilets. or skills or money.
thanks lieberals
What has transpired under McGuinty and Smitherman in the Energy and Health portfolios would make the Maclean’s article on Quebec corruption look like small potatoes. These guys have literally thrown our money to the wind.
But why should we be surprised? After all, that’s what Liberals do. Yet you would think that even a Liberal would get embarrassed by incompetence of this magnitude but no; Smitherman is actually running for Mayor of Toronto based on his “experience”.
McGuinty dishes out uber-helpings of schadenfreude to anyone who was ever the least bit envious of Ontario prosperity or galled by Torontostan smugness.
ITs not accidental, and its not stupidity. Its fraud. Let’s just say the Old Boy network is alive and well, and heavily invested in wind turbine construction and servicing businesses.
Gurney missed an important point here:
So we could go to solar power …
… except the sun only shines a few hours per day, and that only some days, so for every kW of flaky solar, you need a kW of installed capacity from some kind of real power plant as a backup.
Fixed.
Re: Opposition to gas turbines; nothing a good prolonged blackout/brownout won’t cure – prefereably in those communities most vocal in their opposition.
You guys do realize they are shutting down, generating capacity in Ontario, right? There’s surplus capacity thanks to the shipping of all manufacturing jobs to Kentucky and then to China.
The real problem is they haven’t expanded the Toronto/GTA grid to keep up with the massive population increase in Hogtown. Its pretty much hanging by a thread these days. that blackout in the summer was because -one- (1) transformer blew up from too much loading. There’s no backup pathway in case of failure or overload condition.
Obviously adding surge-creating, line drop-creating wind turbines to this rickety grid is double-plus ungood. So basically the turbines go up and then pretty much SIT THERE, generating bupkis.
Fraud. Not stupidity.
I’ve been watching what Ontario is doing with its power company with a mix of disgust and disbelief. The only possible outcome for the path they’re on is blackouts, crippling electricity prices, and unreliability. This is what happens every time government gets the bright idea to turn utilities from a business into a into social science experiment.
If you live in Ontario, buy a generator and have it properly installed. It sure looks like you’ll need it in the near future.
Do you think that energy rationing is on your horizon in Ontario? You know, electricity alternate week days, natural gas only on Friday. Saturday night bath night? Laundry Tuesdays?
Buy your own generator? Hmmm, expect a knock at the door if you fire up that thing to escape the Green Shirts Power Police (GSPP). You can only purchase a generator and the fuel to run it if you are an emergency response person or an MPP/VIP. A fine the first time, jail and confiscation the next, third strike, well “no pressure”.
Of course Ontario is headed for energy rationing. The OPA’s own plan showed that even if all the conservation and renewables worked as the dream merchants claimed it would, Ontario was still facing an absolute power shortage at the end of the decade. That’s why Georgy-boy stifled the plan and told the OPA to start over. He didn’t like what the numbers told him, so he told the OPA to make up some better ones, and the OPA has been silent ever since.
Understand this very clearly, the enviros have taken over most of the key posts within government bureaucracies a long time ago. And they’ve been feeding this garbage to every minister who came along for the past 20 years. Ministers last about 18 months at best. Bureaucracies last forever. Guess who wins?
Of course Ontario isn’t rudderless. It’s being steered firmly and with confidence right onto the rocks.
Ontario residents are forbidden to install a backup generator for power outages? Really? I know that, on average, Ontario residents (SDA posters being above average, of course) tend to be a submissive bunch but who would willingly agree to be completely dependent on Ontario Hydro.
LC, there is no Ontario Hydro.
It was dismantled in 1997,
and the power system has been a shambles ever since.
McGreenHell
It is incomprehensible to me that the Liberals, big ansd small L, can adopt insane policies … oh, wait a minute.
Thanks ,cgh, I know but I was too lazy to Google the names of the new entities.
Basically, as I understand it, the original company was broken up into separate business units. Instead of working as a team, these separate companies now trip over one another to see who is the most wasteful and incompetent. The government, meanwhile, writes insane rules/acts/regulations that make it impossible to have a efficient, affordable and reliable generation, transmission and distribution.
The only possible solution, at this point, is to redirect any remaining funds into increasing tie lines to neighboring states and provinces.
Posted by: John B at October 12, 2010 5:08 PM
Re: Opposition to gas turbines; nothing a good prolonged blackout/brownout won’t cure – prefereably in those communities most vocal in their opposition.
…AND IN WINTER …
“The real problem is they haven’t expanded the Toronto/GTA grid to keep up with the massive population increase in Hogtown.”
But, but, isn’t the grid Mike Harris’ fault, or Sir John A’s or someone other than McGuinty/Smitherman?
As the real story gets out, the Liberal eEnergy policies will make eHealth look like a walk in the park. Taxpayers are beginning to grasp the scandalous behaviour on the energy file and the pitchforks will come out even in sedated Ontario.
“Fraud. Not stupidity.”
Good clarification.
“buy a generator and have it properly installed”
Yup, putting one in now. Gas is not only reliable, we will soon get these Liberal fraudsters out of power and hopefully remove the obstacles to start drilling thru the shale.
Dragged that natural gas generator from our country home to our new location in the city. Plan to hook it up this week-end. They will have to take me screaming and kicking to jail if they want to confiscate it. Plan to use it if those hydro bills become unmanageable. Trying to find a muffler that won’t keep my neighbours awake and have the cops at my door. Sick to death of the little Marxist that is running this province. He figures to be the first in Canada to take us into the new world order.
Some head’s up on something dolly…
Depending on your electricial set up running the generator may well still register on the smart meter. You’ll be paying to create the power plus pay Dear leader Dalton for the power.
The Phantom
[…..ITs not accidental, and its not stupidity…]
And it’s not that new or novel…..
“Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.”
– Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
“The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.”
– Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
– Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong, founder of the UN Environment Programme
“The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.”
– Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
“Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.”
– Professor Maurice King
“My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.”
-Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
LC: it’s actually worse than that. It’s not that they are wasteful and incompetent. It’s that the legislation that created them prevented them from being independent units. For example, Hydro One is responsible for building and maintaining transmission and distribution lines. But dispatch on their system is controlled by the IESO. Ontario Power Generation is responsible for building, operating and maintaining the publicly owned power stations, but they dispatch power according to the dictates of the IESO.
Worse, they have all had rates of return set at much less than 10%. That means all of them are essentially starved of capital. They have just enough money coming in to pay the workforce and service their debt. Anything else means they have to apply to the Ontario Energy Board for extra funds, and that means effectively the Ministry of Energy (or more correctly the Premier’s Office) gets to decide everything of a capital investment nature. THEY are the ones who are blindingly incompetent.
Now this ridiculous corporate structure was created by the Harris government, and it worked badly from the get-go. It’s even killed people (through changes to the dispatch orders for Hydro dams.) Yes, all of this initially was Harris’s fault. He created the loophole for future governments in Ontario to drive through all this green energy stupidity by breaking up the one entity which could block it all, the old Ontario Hydro.
So yes, it part is is Harris’s fault. He had good intentions, but we all know what’s paved with that. Go back 13 years and look at who was cheering him on in breaking up OH. Every stinking enviro group under the sun. And all the hardline rightwingers swallowed the bait, hook line and sinker.
McGuinty made it so much worse. Where there were four crown entities created by the 1997 legislation, there are now seven: the OPA and two concerned with renewables and conservation. Given such a plethora of agencies, no one can be efficient and effective.
And the stinking government likes it that way. Now they control the power system and not the crown utility. And they do it oh so badly.
It’s all about power and competing bureaucracies, and it always has been.
Wow. They really have managed to FUBAR Ontario Hydro and Ontario residents. To be fair, I remember SaskPower mulling over something similar, splitting up the utility and selling off the generation side, back in the 90’s. Harris must have gotten steamrolled by the same VIP salesman (bureaucrats, experts, etc.) as SaskPower’s government appointed executives. Harris and Ontario Hydro’s execs. just happened to be more successful at implementing the poorly thought out idea.
You sound all so cheerful dispensing those little nuggets of information and placing blame.
How about some input on how to fix the problems at the various energy behemoths in Ontario, to get the province and it’s taxpayers back to being the little engine of Confederation?
What does your little hopeful, Mr Hudak need to do to get things working again? Providing of course that he actually wins the next election.
Like the old conservative attack ad; “Dalton McGuinty still not up to the task”.
po’ed: Who said I was cheerful? You cannot begin to solve the problem until you create coherence in policy. You can only do that by dissolving all of the various crowns and agencies that were created and recreate something similar to the old Ontario Hydro. That can only be done by passing something similar to the original Power Corporation Act and repealing all of the legislation subsequent to 1997.
None of this is ever going to happen. Electricity system chaos in Ontario is the new normal and it’s going to stay that way. Neither Hudak nor anyone else is going to fix this any time soon.
LC: The Harrisites did this because they believed in the ideology of free markets without understanding the complexities of a fully integrated electricity system. They looked at what had happened in Britain, liked what they saw, and tried to copy it.
The difference they didn’t understand was that Britain had had a hideously inefficient system, the old CEGB. Any reform would make some serious improvements, at least in the short term. Britain’s electricity become cheap because they substituted cheap gas for British-unions produced coal, and not because of the theoretical benefits of free enterprise. Now the gas is running out, and Britain is experiencing both real shortages and huge increase in costs.
The longer term result for the British is that their deregulated, privately owned electricity system is now being taken over piecemeal by a foreign state corporation, in this case EDF. Electricite de France is succeeding where Napoleon and Louis XIV failed. For more than 15 years now, the French have been selling the full equivalent of two nuclear reactors’ worth of electricity into Britain day in day out. EDF now owns a significant part of the British electrical distribution system.
And another French state corporation, Areva, is going to supply Britain with its new reactors.
Private sector takeover is impossible in Ontario, because the government politically cannot sell off any of the hydraulic assets. The Premier who did so would be asking for a public lynching. The provincial government discovered that in 1996 with the MacDonald hearings, and it came as a rather unpleasant shock to them.
There’s one great political advantage to creating all of these agencies that I forgot to mention. There’s no accountability. When anything goes wrong, as it always does, no one agency is actually solely responsible for a system failure.
in the words of my hero Lucien Bouchard(whore of whores!)
“this is a provocation!!!!!!”
The problem isn’t public versus private generation. The private sector can and in fact does a good job generating and distributing electricity given the right conditions. However when political ideology leaps to the fore with corrupting subsidies of inefficient methods of generating the consumers of electricity suffer.
i dunno…when me and my baby snuggle up under the sheets…and sometimes start doing that THING you knows i don need no propellers or solar panels and stuff to keep warm…hell no baby…we’s natural and ectoplasmically pure and so on…
Nice synthesis of the problem, cgh and Joe.
In theory, there is some advantages to private generation and distribution. Alberta seems to be doing OK. The problem, as already identified, is when government cannot fully make the transition and insists on maintaining control in the worst possible ways (Green Energy mandates or divide and manipulate, for instance). Voters, understandably, feel quite vulnerable at the mere thought of change and/or loss of control of essential public utilities like power companies.
At this point, Ontario now faces a problem with no good solutions. I suppose they can always relocate to the West.
Thanks for too much info, Begley. BTW, by my math, that still leaves about 7 hrs 57 min +/- of needed heat generation unaccounted for in the average nights sleep. (I’d add a smiley face but, apparently, they’re passe)
Quite right LC. Thing is, the problem is not public vs. private ownership. All the US utilities are private except BPA and TVA. And the US private utilities, like the Swedish private utilities, are some of the most efficient in the world. The problem is when you disassemble the vertical integration of a utility. All of its parts, generation, transmission and distribution technically work best when they are all integrated together. That means it’s a monopoly, and thus has to be regulated, irrespective of whether or not it’s publicly or privately owned.
We’ve now been running a global experiment for about 20 years on vertically disintegrated electricity supply, and in the overwhelming number of cases, it simply has not worked. And it’s resulted in far too many middlemen adding transaction costs for no value added. Heh, remember Enron?
In the case of Alberta, it can’t do anything but OK. It’s got loads of dirt cheap surface coal, and there’s no cheaper source of thermal electricity than that.
“Relocate to the west”: well perhaps. To a certain extent Ontario will always be Canada’s manufacturing centre. Because of geography. It’s that part of Canada which has both ready and easy access to the largest manufacturing and consumption centres in the US, and also has direct access to the Atlantic. If energy is Alberta’s great natural advantage, geography is Ontario’s.
At this time however, industrial development is moving to Alberta, as Canada’s share of world oil production slowly rises over the next decade or so.
Oh and one other note, Ontario’s sensitivity about hydraulic ownership is only partly about electricity. It’s mostly about water rights. The mere thought of privatizing the national gem Niagara Falls would send the sans culottes (and indeed all the rest of us) tramping through the streets. There’s also a technical safety reason. Mostly the dams in Ontario serve as flood control and to a certain extent that can conflict with power production.
projected to grow a mere 36% over the next generation.
The Colonists, or Canadians & real immigrants?
McGuinty seems like a timid Obama. He too wants everyone to live in a grass hut. With an electric car that can’t get said electricity.
The Government deemed all power evil by the High priests of the green Religion. Therefore like North Korea we all bow to our respective Dear Leaders.
This is what you get for voting in communists.
Cgh, to support your excellent posts here is Parker Gallant on Hydro.
Ontario electricity consumers recently received fresh electricity bills showing that rates have continued their upward climb and there’s more to come. The bills, from Hydro One (H1) and Toronto Hydro (TH), also contained inserts that simultaneously try to deflect blame for the increases, point to all the wonderful things going on in the electricity sector. And explain why rates increased.
TH bragged that it had since 2005 “managed to help you reduce Toronto’s consumption” by 6,580,000 kWh hours. For consumers who don’t have calculators handy, the amount they helped Ontario consumers reduce was worth about $250,000 ($50,000 per annum or less than 8 cents per TH customer). These inserts probably cost more to print.
The TH insert warns the infrastructure is falling apart and that it is “moving quickly to address this issue.” After paying 60% of their annual net income to the City of Toronto since 2004 as dividends, ($234 Million) they tell us that the “falling apart” infrastructure needs to be addressed. Your rates are going to go up because they now have to spend money they gave to the city–on infrastructure. Great planning! TH has also applied for an increase of 18.2% to take place early next year.
H1′s insert was much more detailed and states delivery rates “for a typical residential customer” are up 8% and the delivery line of your bill is “about 40%” of its total. H1 have a chart with 6 service types that give each an idea of the increase ranging from 5.8% to 15.5% (average increase of 9.35%). H1 blames the increase on 5 factors of which the first two echo TH’s message about replacing and upgrading infrastructure. The 3rd and 4th are both related to green initiatives and the money spent on “smart grid installations” and to “connect renewable generation”. The final reason is to tell us about all the remaining costs like “capital costs” (the first four are all capital costs) and “compensation.”
H1′s insert goes on about the other increases; 8% for Regulated Price Plan customers, Time-of-Use prices (no percentage provided), the HST (13% will replace 5%) and a “Special Purpose Charge” in the “Regulatory Charges on your bill” line. H1 even advises the recipient that they will let them know about their 2011 delivery rate increase “later this fall.”
Finally, H1′s insert also tells us they paid the Province $188 Million in dividends in 2009 but what they don’t tell you is that they paid the Province $259 Million in 2008 and that they have only paid the Province $19 Million (down $116 Million) for the first 6 months of the current year. Green spending reduces their ability to both provide a return to the taxpayers and to reduce the “stranded debt”.
So, Ontario electricity consumers, brace yourselves for more super sized rate increases.
Parker Gallant is a retired Canadian banker who looked at his Ontario electricity bill and didn’t like what he saw.
Dave, it’s a double whammy. That’s 6.6 million kWh that TH didn’t sell to consumers, thereby also reducing their revenues by that amount.
Of course the infrastructure is falling apart. The utilities don’t have the financial resources to keep things going. As an example, we had an outage this year because of a transformer overload. Up to the 1980s, this was no big deal. The standard for all TS was to operate at an average of 50% load. So, if you lost a transformer, you simply switched over to the other one while fixing the outage.
By the early 1990s, the average Transformer Station in Ontario was at 75% load, and it’s much worse today. However, the situation was much worse in Toronto. Typically the TS load was over 90%. Thus any TS outage meant blacking out customers if they were unable to switch to other lines.
Just look at the chaos regarding a new TS on Queen’s Quay. TH and OH, later H1 went through over a decade of EAs and local public opposition to siting the new TS, with opponents citing a whole load of rubbish about EMF and every other silly fetish under the sun. The whole area was being fed by rather low voltage feeders from considerable distance and highly unreliable by Nth Am standards.
The insanely stupid local residents didn’t realize they were literally slitting their own throats with respect to their electricity supply. And how they sniveled and complained when the power went out across the province in 2003. And like ancient, raddled, diseased pimps, the media pandered to their querulous opposition shamelessly.
In short, people get the electricity system they deserve. At one time, Ontario Hydro was the wonder of the industrial world. Despite having no local fossil fuel and no remaining untapped hydro, for more than five decades OH rates remained stable or declining on a constant basis. It fueled the industrial growth in Ontario at a time when many other nations were losing their industrial base. Ontario led the world in system reliability and predictability of costs over both the short and the long term.
And now it’s gone, because of three governments: the criminals (Rae, Mo Strong and the NDP), the stupid (Harris and the Tories) and the insane (our current Dear Leader).
I must demur on only one point of your excellent exposition, cgh.
McGuinty is not insane. The windmill thing is a scam. Typical Liberal behavior actually, its what one should expect when Liberals get elected.
My question is, what needs to be done to get it fixed? What envirowankers need to be chucked out of which corner offices? What crown corps need to be shuttered, what regulations changed to allow free enterprise to get in on things again?
Could we go back to the old Ontario Hydro model, or is it impossible now in our present corrupt political environment?
I do realize the conversation is moot until there’s some political will created. That won’t happen until we’ve had a string of blackouts in Toronto. I hope for summer blackouts myself, less people die of heat than freeze to death.
All very good questions, Phantom.
First, I think the government is insane, because it actually believes in all this green stuff. They genuinely don’t think they are foisting a scam. This is what makes it so difficult. Good scam artists cut and run after the game’s been found out. True believers defend to the bitter end.
To start, abolish the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure, and have it go back do doing what it used to, building hospitals and schools. The sum value of the Energy Ministry over the past 30 years has been negative. Energy policy in Ontario was entirely decided by the Premier’s Office and Ontario Hydro, and to a lesser extent Finance. So, Min E has to go; it’s a useless appendage.
Next, the overwhelming evidence around the world is that, irrespective of public or private ownership, vertically integrated electric utilities work by far the best. As I think I mentioned in previous posts, I can drag up several dozen examples of both public and private that work superlatively under the old model.
That said, repeal all the enabling legislation since 1997 and abolish the separate renewable and conservation agencies. If the government wants these things they can run it as a government makework program and not burden the power system with it. Have you ever heard of an industry insane enough to pay people not to buy their product? That’s what government makes the electric utilities do.
Keep the OEB as a separate independent entity. It can determine the rates that NUGs, especially big ones like Bruce Power, are paid for their production and can determine the dispatch rules for the recreated OH and all of the existing NUGs. It can also set the rules for new private generation entering the system.
The very minimal step is to push the IESO, OPA and H1 together with the first two becoming departments of H1. Separating dispatch from grid operations from power planning was utterly insane, and that was Harris’s doing.
And if you want large scale private sector involvement, sell off all of OPG’s nuclear assets to Bruce Power. That would create one large, powerful nuclear generator in the province instead of two weaker ones. And sell it, don’t just lease it the way we do now.
None of this can happen of course until the province stops dithering over the coal plants. Every government since Rae has said they would close them. McSquinty gave firm dates. And none of it is real. The province cannot do without those plants until it builds about 5-6000 MW of new generation, about 2/3 nuclear and the rest gas, particularly given that Pickering is gone in 10 years, and there goes another 3,000 MW.
That said, Ontario can do without all of this stuff, if its manufacturing base never recovers from its current depressed level. So you could say that the provincial government is actually planning for a permanent industrial recession in the province. Sooner or later, that will get them thrown out. If and when industrial load picks up the government’s present strategy is doomed.
Given the restraints on hydraulic operation in Ontario, probably a crown corp structure will work the best. Look at all the other provinces in Canada. Except for Alberta, they all have vertically integrated utilities, and they’re not having the problems that Ontario has with either rates or reliability. So you can simply dump the hydraulic stations in with H1 as well.
Whether we like it or not, some things lend themselves only to a monopoly structure. Electricity, like water works, is one of them. You can only have one set of lines going down a street. You cannot substitute anything for electricity. Demand has to be met instantly. And electricity cannot be inventoried in any meaningful way. All of these things mean that free market structures tend to fail for electricity, and in this respect it is a unique manufactured product.
What experience with actual generation has shown over the past half century is that the cleanest environmental solutions, and the highest reliability, and the lowest system costs all happen when electricity is generated on a very large scale. That means you need big entities to afford that kind of large scale capital investment. Without it, you have the kind of primitive patchwork that existed in Quebec until Lesage unified all the provincial utilities into Hydro Quebec in the 1960s. Rene Levesque’s doing, that one.
But our generation has been raised to believe for the past half century that small is beautiful and big is ugly. The private sector scam artists don’t like any of this, of course, because they’re not big enough for this kind of capital formation. And the big financial institutions don’t much like it because there’s no role for them to play Enron-in-the-middle middleman.
So that’s my answer, Phantom. Some version of the old Ontario Hydro has to be recreated. And the large central utility has to be back in the role of power planning, not the ignorant morons in Energy.
Can it be done? Well it takes leadership, huge leadership. Adam Beck type leadership. And like 1906 it will take a severe crisis to bring it about.
In closing, I have to tell you one story that may support your contention that the government is crooked and not insane. About three years ago, McSquinty went on a trade mission to Japan. He wasn’t wasting time visiting the government. He met with all the big automakers. His message was simple: build your NorthAm assembly plants in Ontario. Why? Because Ontario’s building nuclear reactors. Yet at home, the message is all about green power and the Green Energy Act. So the question is, to which audience was he lying?