Mining Power Issues

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Mark Winfield is an associate professor of environmental studies at York University, and co-chair of the University’s Sustainable Energy Initiative.

Ontario’s Liberal government stands to waste a lot more money if it doesn’t change its approach to energy policy, writes Mark Winfield.

The unfolding saga of the Liberal government’s decision to cancel, at an apparent cost approaching $600 million, two natural gas-fired power plants in Mississauga and Oakville is opening a series of questions about the province’s approach to planning and managing its electricity system.

The government of McGuinty’s successor, Kathleen Wynne says that it wants to make sure something like the gas-plant fiasco doesn’t happen again. At the same time it seems lost in terms of what to actually do, beyond requiring the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) to engage in more effective public consultation before siting decisions about power generation facilities are made.

The gas plant situation reflects much deeper problems than arguably poor facility siting decisions. Rather, the situation represents the culmination of an increasingly explicit politicization of decision-making about the province’s electricity system over the past decade.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

“Instead of the blooming green economy promised by political leaders and activists, Europe
is facing a competitiveness crisis and an economic nightmare with almost 27 million people
out of work and many countries facing bankruptcy.”

“Instead of investing in the energy-expensive EU, they [Europe’s manufacturers] are pouring
hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. where energy prices have fallen to a third of
those in the EU…” (Benny Peiser)

Benny Peiser is the director of the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Limits to growth ideology a self-fulfilling prophecy

The European Union’s utopian scheme of transforming itself into a green energy powerhouse is faltering as its fantasy plan is colliding with reality. As the EU’s economic and financial crisis deepens and unemployment continues to rise, what used to be an almost all-embracing green consensus is beginning to disintegrate.

The spectre of green stagnation, the loss of competitiveness and economic decline has replaced 20 years of collective wishful thinking. The green folly was founded on two apocalyptic fears: firstly, that global warming was an urgent threat that needed to be prevented at all cost, and secondly, that the world was running out of fossil fuels, which meant that oil and gas would inexorably become ever more expensive. Both conjectures, however, turned out to be bogus.

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Premier Kathleen Wynne and past premier Dalton McGuinty were so full of it in their testimony about the Liberals’ gas plant fiasco, that some final observations on their absurd arguments are warranted.

First was Wynne’s statement the government needs to develop better ways of listening to communities when it comes to locating gas plants, and McGuinty’s claim he cancelled the Oakville and Mississauga plants because he listened to local health and safety concerns.

In the real world, if McGuinty and Wynne gave a fig about community concerns, they wouldn’t have rammed industrial wind turbines down the throats of rural Ontarians, while taking away the rights of local municipalities to have any say on the issue.

McGuinty’s hypocrisy is particularly astounding, given that he called anyone who objected to industrial wind turbines a “nimby”, unless they were doing so for legitimate safety and environmental reasons, all of which his government rejected as invalid.

In fact, people claiming adverse health symptoms caused by noise and low-level vibrations from wind turbines were told by the Liberal government they were the only ones complaining, when in actuality hundreds of complaints were pouring in from across the province.

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Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Premier Dad was in vintage form.

Testifying about the expensive cancellation of gas-fired power plants, Dalton McGuinty offered his old chestnut about it never being too late to make the right decision. He spoke of government officials as “people with all their noble strengths and human frailties.” He cited advice that his mother gave him on his wedding day. Recalling his prorogation of the Ontario Legislature as a necessary “time out” that would allow everyone to “cool down,” he stopped just short of reaching across the table and patting opposition MPPs on the head.

It was an assured performance before the legislature’s justice committee, and a reminder of the political skills that allowed Mr. McGuinty to spend nearly a decade in his province’s top job. It was also a reminder of why he finally wore out his welcome.

Looking less jittery than Kathleen Wynne a week earlier, Mr. McGuinty did his best to absolve his successor of responsibility by reiterating she hadn’t been in the loop on the cancellations. For that, and for avoiding making much other news about the controversy, his fellow Liberals were surely grateful.

Where he was less successful was in defaulting to a familiar father-knows-best defence of his policy choices – one that rang hollow because the cancellations stand as the best evidence of him allowing his own interests to overtake his concern for those of the public.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

The Ontario Liberals are currently under fire for grossly underestimating, willfully or in blissful ignorance, the cost of relocating two gas-fired power plants — one in the lead-up to the last provincial election campaign and the other in the thick of it. It was $190-million for the plant in Mississauga and $40-million for the one in Oakville, the Liberals said once; as of this week a combined figure in the neighbourhood of $600-million is in play.

Goodness knows they deserve the beating they’re getting over this. The only caveat I would add is that spending $230-million in public funds to shore up a party’s chances in a few ridings is no more defensible than spending $600-million. It’s like the old joke about prostitutes: We’ve established what the Liberals are. Now we’re just haggling over the price.

That said, the ultimate cost of this fiasco is relevant — at least I dearly hope it is — because people seem to draw a distinction between corruption that takes place behind closed doors, or is clearly illegal, and corruption that takes place out in the open where everyone can see it. (I almost find the latter more appalling; it’s like Dalton McGuinty smiling at you and patting your head — “good citizen; such a pretty Ontarian” — as he steals your wallet and tosses it to his campaign team. But clearly mine is a minority view.)

But there must be some level of expenditure so obscene, so grotesque, at which even quiescent Ontarians would rise up in fury at the Liberals’ actions, even if they see them as merely an extreme form of politics-as-usual. If it wasn’t $40-million or $190-million or $300-million, is it perhaps half a billion? The full billion? Two? Surely we must be approaching that level of waste, if we’re not there yet.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Ross R. McKitrick is a Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute and author of Environmental and Economic Consequences of Ontario’s Green Energy Act. Kenneth P. Green is Senior Director, Energy and Natural Resources at the Fraser Institute.

The province could soon top North America in electricity costs

In 2009 the Ontario government passed the Green Energy Act (GEA), with the aim of increasing the province’s use of renewable energy such as wind and solar power, biofuels, and small-scale hydro. The centerpiece of the Act is a schedule of subsidized electricity purchase contracts – called Feed-in-Tariffs – that provide long-term guarantees of above-market rates for power generated by those renewables.

The GEA may have been well-intended but a recent Fraser Institute analysis, called The Environmental and Economic Consequences of Ontario’s Green Energy Act, demonstrates that it is driving up Ontario’s energy costs and poses a threat to economic competitiveness for the manufacturing and mining sectors. What little environmental benefit it is expected to generate could have been achieved at a fraction of the cost. Unless the province changes course, the GEA will saddle Ontarians with needlessly high energy costs for decades to come.

As our study demonstrates, the GEA will soon put the province at or near the top of North American electricity costs.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Kathleen Wynne insists that she didn’t know.

For 90 minutes, minus the time she was deftly addressing the muffin-soft questions lovingly served up by Liberal members of the Standing Committee on Justice Policy, the Premier said in many different ways that she was no more aware of the true cost to the Ontario public of cancelling two gas-plant projects — a number that keeps being ratcheted higher, and went from $315-million to $585-million on Tuesday alone — than was the Ontario public.

When the plants were killed, did she, as a member of the Liberal cabinet, have any idea of the scope of the resultant costs?

“I didn’t have access to any of those numbers,” she said. Did she, as a vice-chair of the Dalton McGuinty-led re-election bid in 2011, realize the dollars that were involved in cancelling the Mississauga plant in the middle of the campaign?

“I was not part of the strategy discussions around that decision,” she said. Why did the Liberals continue to cite figures of $190-million to cancel and relocate the Mississauga plant, and $40-million to do the same with the Oakville facility, even as critics, media and analysts said the numbers would easily be much, much higher?

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