BY CHRISTINA
BLIZZARD, QUEEN'S PARK COLUMNIST
TORONTO - There
are so many candidates, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly which boondoggle caused
us the most grief in our electricity bills.
Premier Bob Rae’s
NDP government used then-Ontario Hydro as a social program. His government
proposed fighting greenhouse gases by investing in a Costa Rican rainforest and
studying cow farts.
Then there was the
Homer Simpson moment, when it was revealed Ontario Hydro’s so-called dream team
of four American nuclear energy experts turned out to be more of a nightmare
for ratepayers. The Americans were paid close to $40 million for about four
years’ work at the Pickering nuclear plant around 1997.
Former PC premier
Mike Harris was going to open the market to competition in May 2002. That plan
ran into problems on several fronts: California was suffering from electricity
shortages due to market manipulation — the tip of the Enron scandal iceberg.
After the market opened, prices went from 4.3 cents a kilowatt hour to 8 cents.
The Tories took a hammering from critics and Harris’s successor, Ernie Eves,
backed away from the scheme. (Today’s price of electricity is 16.1 cents a
kWh.)
But the boondoggle
that really takes the cake is the mess created by former energy minister George
Smitherman with his Green Energy Act (GEA).
Back in March
2009, Smitherman wrote in this newspaper that the GEA “will shape not only the
way we do business in Ontario, but the way we think about energy and
consumption.”
He got that right.
The cost of electricity has soared. And we don’t do much business anymore
because companies moved south to the U.S. and Mexico.
He claimed the GEA
would create 50,000 jobs — a claim later refuted in a scathing report by
then-provincial auditor general Jim McCarter.
In 2011, McCarter
said the GEA was not just hiking the price of electricity, it was actually
forcing us to generate more nuclear and gas-fired electricity — to back up
unreliable renewables. And it didn’t produce jobs — it killed them.
“Because renewable
energy is very expensive, the impact of higher electricity prices on the other
job sectors actually has resulted in a net loss of jobs,” McCarter said at that
time. And he’s been proven absolutely correct.
In her most recent
report, auditor general Bonnie Lysyk painted a gloomy picture of how this
government’s mismanagement of the energy sector has added billions to our
bills.
Lysyk estimated
the so-called Global Adjustment (GA) — that’s 70% of your bill — cost us $654
million in 2006. In 2013, it gouged $7.7 billion from us.
What did we get
for this?
We must be
bursting with clean, green energy, right?
Wrong.
According to the
Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) website, on Tuesday at 2 p.m.
exactly 0.2% — (or 43 megawatts) of our electricity came from solar. A piddly
1.6% (326 MW) was from wind. The lion’s share of our generation — 55.6% — came
from green, reliable nuclear energy.
Good ol’
hydroelectric power — the only truly cheap green electricity — came in at 23.7%
and gas-powered plants were at 18.5%.
The hourly price
of electricity was just 3.02 cents a kilowatt hour. And the GA? A whopping 9.67
cents a kWh — three times the cost of the hydro.
So for all the
billions of your tax money that were flushed down the drain on so-called green
energy, solar and wind made up less than 2% of our power...More
