Editor;
We have been bombarded daily these last few weeks with news, opinion pieces and letters-to-the-editor about the global warming, climate change, green energy colossus. Several times I was ready to write in reply, but new events invariably intervened. I could, however, not invent a script in which all the above are as effectively pushed aside as they were by the report which Auditor-General Bonnie Lysyc presented to the Legislature of Ontario on December 9th.
It detailed a number of grossly mismanaged cases; a billion-dollar cost-overrun for the so-called smart meters (still hopelessly inoperative in many cases), another $85-million down the MArs Building sinkhole (now totalling $235-million), the provincial debt more than doubling in 10 years to over $300-billion.
But then came the bombshell that virtually no-one seems to have heard: By next December the cumulative losses in the Global Adjustment Fund, now on average the largest item on our hydro bill at 70 per cent of the total (to quote the Auditor-General) will stand at $50-billion, and increase a lot! That number bears repeating: $50-billion, not million. In 2013 it was already $7.7-billion, just for that year. It was over $1-billion just for the month of October (says the Independent Electricity Systems Operator, IESO for short, an official Ontario government agency).That's about $1,000 a year for every household in Ontario. That is set to increase quickly as wind turbines are springing up and contracts are being signed at a fast clip. This makes the scandalous gas-plant and e-health losses look like chump change.
Why have we not heard more about this? Partly because it bypasses parliamentary control and the budget: It goes straight from the debt column onto your hydro bill. Plenty of people have written about it as far back as two or three years ago, when the numbers began to go up alarmingly. The articles had little traction, and ministers kept talking about minuscule increases in the price of electricity as the Global Adjustment charge increased tenfold or more.
Yet there was no outrage in the media, not even last week. In fact, there was barely a mention of it until the Minister of Energy, Bob Chiarelli, attacked the messenger, the Auditor-General, for allegedly being poorly informed due to the complexity of this file. I quote the minister: "The electricity system is very complex; it's very difficult to understand." He later compared it to solving the Rubic's Cube, where, every time you change one thing, everything else changes. He allegedly also referred to Ms. Lysyc as "that woman." I watched the press scrum where he faced some very rough questioning, and can only confirm that it wasn't pretty.
Perhaps minister Chiarelli could explain to poor Rubics-challenged people like me how it makes sense to buy massive amounts of surplus electricity at around 13 cents per kilowatt/hour (more if bought from Samsung, and up to 80 cents per kw/h for solar), and then re-sell it at 1.5 or two cents per kw/h to our U.S. neighbours. Oh, and then to claim that the latter figure is actually a profit.
It's not Bonnie Lysyc who is out of her depth. It's the minister, and virtually everyone knows it. He is only the latest in a series of numerically challenged energy ministers who swallowed whole all they were told by the German energy gurus, the Green Energy industry lobbyists, the global warming prophets of doom and everyone who stood to make lots of money from this scam.
What will it take to stop the Green Energy monster from running the Ontario ship of state onto the rocks? Firing Bob Chiarelli would only bring another incompetent minister of energy. It's too late now to do the due diligence that was never done (to quote the last auditor-general).Too late to follow the advice of Don Drummond, who provided some very relevant advice when asked to do so by Dalton McGuinty. Too late also for this Liberal government to scrap the Green Energy Act, which, like an octopus, has tentacles into every nook and cranny of the Liberal establishment; friendships, I.O.Us, law firms, unions, corporations, promises made by and to party bagmen, written and unwritten commitments, a whole aquarium full of octopuses, every tentacle firmly glued to another tentacle leading to another octopus somewhere in that formless mass of Liberal protoplasm. Premier Wynne could not materially change the course of the Green Energy Act roll-out even if she wanted to. She clearly doesn't want to anyway.
But unless someone, somewhere, somehow can come up with a way to get premier Wynne to do just that, to make a decisive turnabout, and soon, we are headed for a catastrophe which will dog Ontario for generations. That's not hyperbole.
Andre Den Tandt
Meaford
