{"id":14695,"date":"2012-04-19T10:08:46","date_gmt":"2012-04-19T15:08:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=14695"},"modified":"2012-04-19T10:08:46","modified_gmt":"2012-04-19T15:08:46","slug":"ontario-is-on-track-to-have-the-highest-electricity-prices-in-north-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/04\/19\/ontario-is-on-track-to-have-the-highest-electricity-prices-in-north-america\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Ontario is on track to have the highest electricity prices &#8230; in North America&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/fullcomment.nationalpost.com\/2012\/04\/18\/scott-stinson-all-aboard-ontarios-efficiency-bus\/\" target=\"_blank\">Scott Stinson<\/a> explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>It\u2019s no secret that Dalton McGuinty\u2019s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in 2003 \u2014 the average cost of a kilowatt of electricity was more than 30% higher last year than it was five years ago \u2014 the Liberals have somewhat masked this fact by handing a 10% rebate back to consumers with the euphemistically named Clean Energy Benefit, which also happens to utterly contradict the conservation incentive that should be part of a switch to a greener grid.<\/p>\n<p>Electricity costs, though, are set to spike.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOntario\u2019s power system is fuelled by consumers to the tune of about $16-billion a year,\u201d says Tom Adams, an energy consultant who has written extensively on electricity and environmental issues. \u201cThat number is headed for $23-billion or $24-billion soon, by 2016,\u201d he says in an interview.<\/p>\n<p>[. . .]<\/p>\n<p>Mr. Adams notes that when the Green Energy Act, with its guarantees of above-market rates for wind and solar electricity known as feed-in-tariffs (FIT), was introduced in 2009, the Liberals said electricity costs would only be impacted by about 1% annually. We now know that rates for consumers are rising by 9% a year. \u201cThe government says about half of that is due to Green Energy, but if they were being honest it would be more than that,\u201d Mr. Adams says.<\/p>\n<p>The coming increases, meanwhile, which can partly be attributed to locked-in contracts for renewable energy, are also a result of a host of other factors, from new generation capacity being introduced to phase-out costs of existing facilities to new transmission capacity being added to the energy grid.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scott Stinson explains why Ontario consumers are facing huge price hikes for electricity over the next 18 months: It\u2019s no secret that Dalton McGuinty\u2019s Liberals have placed a huge bet on growing a green-energy sector by subsidizing the production of renewable energy. Although energy bills have been steadily rising since the party took power in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,25,65,84,15],"tags":[640,584,497,793],"class_list":["post-14695","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-economics","category-environment","category-government","category-technology","tag-alternativeenergy","tag-daltonmcguinty","tag-electricity","tag-subsidies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3P1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14695"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14696,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14695\/revisions\/14696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}