From the Sun:
"TORONTO - Ontario has had the fastest-rising electricity prices and its city dwellers paid some of the highest hydro bills in Canada over the past decade, a new Fraser Institute report found."
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This year, the Kathleen Wynne government launched its “Fair Hydro Plan” which promises to reduce residential hydro bills by an average of 25%.
Kenneth Green, co-author of Evaluating Electricity Price Growth in Ontario, said the provincial government has just covered up serious problems in the system by shifting the cost onto taxpayers and future hydro bills.
“Problem delayed - what they’ve done is they basically extended the contracts for power purchases and made them last longer,” Green said. “It’s much like refinancing your mortgage ... but you’re paying for an extra 15 years.”
What hasn’t changed in the electricity system are the government-driven decisions to favour costly wind and solar power purchased at above-market electricity prices, he said.
Those political priorities are the reason that Ontario electricity prices soared by 71% between 2008-17, while the average growth across the country was 34%, Green said.
Last year alone, Ontarians saw a 15% increase in prices over 2015, the report’s researchers found.
“As we show in our study, the electricity prices grew two and a half times faster than disposable income from 2008 to 2015, four times faster than inflation and four and a half times faster than the economy,” Green said. “So clearly, this is not about the cost of fuel, it’s not about the cost of technology, it’s about the cost of choices that were made in the Ontario power system.”
The Wynne government has said that the hydro system needed significant updating when the Liberals took it over from the previous Progressive Conservative government in 2003, and that the expense of those infrastructure improvements should have been spread over more time.
Ontario PC Leader Patrick Brown has vowed, if elected to govern in 2018, to immediately halt the signing of new energy contracts pending an “evidence-based” review of supply, accusing the Liberals of making “sweetheart green energy contracts” for insiders.
Green said the provincial government should break its existing long-term contracts for renewable power, and allow market forces, specifically cost, dictate how the system generates electricity.
Then the government could fund the research and development of more affordable, greener power sources, Green said.
