Smitherman elephant herd grows;
We have an excess of electricity. You can’t store it, so the only way to get rid of it is to spill water that could be used to generate electricity for two cents a kilowatt-hour at Niagara.
Instead, until now we paid more than 80 cents a kw/h for solar and 13.5 cents for wind. Bentley announced Thursday those prices are going down–to 54.9 cents for solar and 11.5 for wind.
Dropping dollars to pick up nickles.
The idea that you would not run your hydro @ 100% all the time so that you can run wind/solar/gas/coal/nukes at all is just crazy.
Why wouldn’t you want to be profiting on the low cost hydro when ever possible. And you can’t claim its a ‘green’ thing, because hydro is as green as it comes when your talking the Niagara.
The reason that government should not be in the energy business or any other for that matter.
When a private entrepreneur makes a bad investment he loses his own money and is gone.
When the government makes a bad investment they loses our money, throw more money at the problem and it never goes away. One mistake just compounds another.
We seem to be a few years behind what Europe has already learned.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/06/germany-in-skeptical-turmoil-on-both-climate-and-windfarms/#more-56069
Math really is hard…
What’s $300 million? (Hint: a mere 3% of the annual interest payment of $10 billion McGuinty’s Liberals have managed to saddle you poor bastards in Ontario with.) If Hudak hadn’t been such a pussy in the last election, you might have had a chance of getting out from under.
mcguinty is a pathetic, dumb ass deer caught in the headlights. he knows he’ll go down in history as one of the worst premiers in the history of the province unless the green idiocy pays off. So he hangs on, screwing millions of people in the process.
Let’s see.
Step 1. Chug-a-Lug the Greenie Kool-Aide
Step 2. Make terrible policy choices based on Eco-Greenie Gaia worship
Step 3. Foist the policies on taxpayers, without any environmental approvals, without local inputs, just because “I know” is a policy justification to a a Liberals.
Step 4. Inflict massive energy costs on Ontario industry and residential consumers.
Step 5 Turn Ontario from the economic heartland and powerhouse of Canada into a Have Not Province forced to beg for table crumbs from Ottawa and paid for by Western Canada.
Ontarions are fighting back . . .
http://morecoldair.blogspot.ca/
We have an excess of electricity. You can’t store it, so the only way to get rid of it is to spill water that could be used to generate electricity for two cents a kilowatt-hour at Niagara.
Not the only way: Ontario has been paying Quebec to take excess energy built up as a consequence of the recent warm weather.
Duffman, it’s not nuclear, coal and gas blocking hydraulic, it’s wind. Particularly this time of year when demand is down from winter peaks. Nuclear plants are having to get backed off as well at times, and that’s very costly.
As far as Green goes, large hydro is not included in so-called Green energy sources. That’s true just about everywhere in North America including most of the states in the US. It’s why Hydro Quebec built windfarms in Gaspe. By adding in some wind, they can get around US non-tariff trade barriers against Canadian hydro exports.
“mcguinty is a pathetic, dumb ass deer caught in the headlights…”
Posted by: wyatt ironbridge at March 26, 2012 2:36 PM
Maybe. But he’s a genius compared to the intellectual slugs who voted for him.
This is another huge debacle for Ontario taxpayers, courtesy of confirmed bachelor George Smitherman.
I don’t know how he got his reputation as an “expert” politician. He screwed up eHealth, where a bunch of consultants got rich, he screwed up ORNGE, where a bunch of his buddies got rich, he screwed up electricity, where a bunch of connected people got rich, and the poor, dumb farmers who invested in eggbeaters found out their rural lines couldn’t handle the output, so their contracts were cancelled without compensation. How does this guy escape without criticism, and keep showing up on the public dime?
Could it be because he turns viciously on anyone who criticizes him? “Smitherman was nicknamed “Furious George” for his aggressive and often abrasive manner”. Or is it because the avid pianist tars all criticism as “homophobic”?
However, I put no credence to the scurrilous rumours that his high strung nature results from the occasional enjoyment of party favours popular with the bathhouse elite.
The climate change calamity jig is up. The rent seekers will continue to suck money out of the system, but their momentum is stalled.
Ditch wind (what birdbrain actually believed this could work?) and put solar back to the experimental phase and continue to work on it for the next 50 years, then something may develop.
Continue to find ways to make fossil fuels more efficient and less polluting. Concentrate on clean air and water.
Take a fraction of the money that’s going/gone to “climate science” and find an alternative fuel to replace fossil fuels (hint: it will take quite a while 50-100 years). Get on with it.
Tell China they won’t have to cover their entire country with frickin windmills (though they do control 40% of the world market) because the oil the US enviros don’t want us to sell them is now available at sky high world prices.
Now Canada can take the massive money they make selling fossil fuels to China, India and yes, the US, etc, develop the next fuel, and continue to be energy superstars for the next 100 years.
Sarcasm alert. I know, but how would that crush capitalism?
Rural Ontario is becoming radicalized. We’ve got 2 protests coming up, one on Apr 3 where the carpetbaggers and Green Welfare receipients gather at the Toronto Convention Centre for a “FIT” convention. The other is the rescheduled protest of the CAW turbine in Port Elgin. It’s developing into a powderkeg here.
Furthur info here;
http://quixoteslaststand.com/
Bentley is referring to new applications. That does not include the 75% of the total 10,000 + mw planned which is already established or have begun the initial process.
Simply put, Chris Bentley is the McGuinty governments version of “Comical Ali”.
The truth is that solar energy technology is on the verge of some major breakthroughs using graphene in both the cells and batteries to store them.
The problem is when government gets involved. They distort the market creating bad investments. If solar cells are to succeed they have to let the market work.
http://cleantechnica.com/2012/03/17/make-your-own-supercapacitor-with-an-ordinary-dvd/
It is becoming difficult to even keep track of the $ millions displaced by uesless wind turbines.
From having to sometimes pay US customers to take surplus power, this article from FP outlines how Ont. replaced reliable inexpensive hydro power, with wind generated power. The estimated waste in 2011 about $400 m. This is financial insanity, yet McGuinty continues full speed ahead for the wind program, bringing another 1000 turbines to
rural Ont. And the NDP is just fine with that, neither party represents rural Ont.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/03/15/ontarios-power-trip-wind-wastes-water-and-your-dollars/
Smitherman.
Just the latest in a long list of losers that the MSM got behind: Trudeau the Elder, Alan Rock, Georgie, Taliban Jack, and now Trudeau’s pup…
But, solar and wind are both still the energy sources of the future in the minds of many careless and/or stupid voters, and that trumps such banalities as a 40x cost disadvantage for solar vs. Niagara hydro.
Many voters have no idea whatsoever that cost per kilowatt/hr. determines their power bill, so it is useless to even argue the point. They don’t see the connection.
small c con:
That’s why I thought the PC campaign in the last Ontario election was so weak. They spent all their time slagging McSquinty, instead of educating the public. It wouldn’t have been difficult – one ad with a bar chart, run over and over, just as they did with McLiar ads (which frankly, even I was getting sick of by the time the election came around). Electricity is the one issue guaranteed to hit every household in the province in the pocketbook, and Tim Who-dat? and his handlers all but ignored it.
The election was the PC’s to lose, and lose it they did.
Look at the real cost of alternative energy. Put your wallet up to your ear while reading to hear that sucking sound.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2012/01/04/the-real-costs-of-alternative-energy/
The hydro utility hasn’t been mismanaged this badly since Boob Rae let his Uncle Moe run it into the ground by extracting millions from it to finance his own Carribean rain forest hotel development.
Ontario’s hydro resource is a cash cow, letting leftwing refimes have accrss to it is inviting rape via electric bills.
@Kevin@3:37, sorry but the Cleantechnica article is rubbish. It won’t change the basic nature of solar PV which is dependent upon the energy levels of photons. This development, note that it’s not yet published so it’s just hype, doesn’t change any of this.
For the last time, people, stop being fooled by the green morons. You can’t change the basic energy output of the Sun. Since the begining of time people have been trying the con of perpetual motion machines, curburetors that would let you get 300 mpg with a Ford 150, etc. Energy is energy, and the three laws of thermodynamics are the iron laws of physics.
cgh
The article in question is about a new battery technology not solar but there are other advances in graphene research that improve solar cells dramatically as well. The major problem with solar is being able to store the electricity for use later at a reasonable cost. My main point is that this current venture by the Ontario government is giving solar a bad name and that is no reason to throw it out completely. If it can be proven to work economically than let it compete fairly with the alternatives in an open market. If you have proof that this will not work than sources please.
I’m proud to say Vic Fedeli is my MPP (Nipissing) He could give Hudak a few lessons.
But Suzuki likes it……..
and it appears that there’s no ‘manmade gorebull warming’ after all…this is at least as accurate a measuring stick as looking at selected tree rings and then ignoring the ones that don’t fit into the required results to ‘hide the decline’…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2120512/Global-warming-Earth-heated-medieval-times-human-CO2-emissions.html
Is this finally proof we’re NOT causing global warming? The whole of the Earth heated up in medieval times without human CO2 emissions, says new study
Evidence was found in a rare mineral that records global temperatures
Warming was global and NOT limited to Europe
Throws doubt on orthodoxies around ‘global warming’
Current theories of the causes and impact of global warming have been thrown into question by a new study which shows that during medieval times the whole of the planet heated up.
It then cooled down naturally and there was even a ‘mini ice age’.
A team of scientists led by geochemist Zunli Lu from Syracuse University in New York state, has found that contrary to the ‘consensus’, the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ approximately 500 to 1,000 years ago wasn’t just confined to Europe.
In fact, it extended all the way down to Antarctica – which means that the Earth has already experience global warming without the aid of human CO2 emissions.
I agree with Jamie. People are stupid. They’ll vote for McGuinty again. Maybe give him another majority.
@ gardener at March 27, 2012 11:57 AM
I live here and you are correct.
🙁