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Getting Zapped: Ontario electricity prices increasing faster than anywhere else
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Category Archives: Reforming Ontario’s Electrical Generation Sector
City's windfall may hike electricity cost
Toronto has plugged a $60 million hole in its 2005 budget by selling the city’s street lights and poles to Toronto Hydro – but electricity rates could increase as a result.
The city found some much-needed cash last spring during its budget deliberations when it hit on the idea of selling city-owned lights and poles to Toronto Hydro, which is owned by the city.
Putting in 'smart' electricity meters to cost $1B
Ontario’s 4.5 million electricity meters will be replaced by so-called "smart" meters by 2010 at a cost of $1 billion to hydro consumers, a key part of the power-starved province’s strategy to convince people to conserve electricity.
Advocates of energy conservation said they like the plan, but admonished the government for waiting more than two years to take its initial tentative steps towards conservation.
Coal comes clean
Once a dirty, low-tech energy source, the coal industry is reinventing itself, thanks to a scientific and engineering revolution that is sweeping the world. A new generation of coal plants, cleaner than most gas-fired plants, is now in operation in the United States, Japan and Europe, with even cleaner plants under development.
Power utilities looking for some juice from their customers
| Halifax: Nova Scotia farmer Mark McCormick loves watching his power meter racking up credits for kilowatts, as the windmill near his dairy barn sends power back onto the utility’s power grid. |
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| The McGuinty government is jeopardizing the province’s energy security by refusing to study new, clean coal technologies, says the executive director of Energy Probe. |
Saskatchewan ads prod Ottawa on energy
Regina: Saskatchewan is moving forward with a pointed advertising campaign it hopes will shake an energy accord loose from a federal government that could be at the polls in a matter of months.
Premier Lorne Calvert said this week he was outraged that his province and Ottawa still have not reached an energy deal when similar arrangements were signed with Newfoundland and Nova Scotia months ago.
Ontario keeping tight grip on OPG
The province wants Ontario Power Generation to operate as a commercial enterprise, but a new agreement reveals that the electricity utility is on a short leash, requiring it to shape strategic decisions according to government policy.
Everything from the prices the government-owned utility charges for electricity to its expansion plans is already controlled by Queen’s Park rather than OPG’s board of directors.
A shock to the wallet
It’s always galling when a government-owned monopoly announces fat profits, particularly when we have all had to share the financial pain to get it to that stage.
But there was Ontario Power Generation Inc. as last week ended ─ the company that supplies about 85% of all electricity consumed in Ontario ─ boasting that it had posted a whopping third-quarter profit of $181 million. That was a marked turnaround from last year when the provincially-owned power generator reported a loss of $15 million in the same June-September period.
Hydro users demand refund
Some of Ontario’s biggest power users say the provincial electricity utility should give back the $181 million in profit it made over the summer at their expense.
Roughly half the refund – about $90 million – would go to residential consumers, the Association of Major Power Consumers of Ontario said yesterday.
The corporate power users say soaring electricity rates are contributing to job losses and plant closings, particularly in the chemical and forestry sectors.
Growing Hydro debt a shocker
Toronto: Ontario’s electricity ratepayers have shelled out more than $5 billion to pay down the industry’s stranded debt, only to see it go up.
According to figures from a provincial agency’s annual reports, the Ontario Electricity Financial Corporation has collected $2.9 billion from the debt retirement charge added to bills since 2002 and another $2.2 billion from a preceding customer-funded "revenue pool residual" dating back to 1999 – a total of $5.1 billion.
Energy Probe 