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Tag Archives: transmission lines Ontario

Ontario quashes citizen participation in electricity issues

04 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

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Bob Chiarelli, citizen participation Ontario, democracy Ontario, electricity bills Ontario, IESO, Independent Electricity System Operator, Ontario, Ontario Energy Board, transmission lines Ontario, Wynne government

Government halts assistance for citizens, community groups to present views on rate increases and more

Chiarelli's Bill 112: citizens lose the ability to hold utility monopolies to account [Photo Richard Brennan Toronto Star]

Chiarelli’s Bill 112: citizens lose the ability to hold utility monopolies to account [Photo Richard Brennan Toronto Star]

Toronto Star, January 4, 2016

By: Brady Yauch Published on Mon Jan 04 2016

Ontario’s desire for total control over all aspects of the electricity sector is nearly fulfilled.

The push to eliminate dissent and independent review of the province’s energy monopolies has been a decade in the making. Since 2004, many of the province’s largest and most expensive policies were implemented with little to no oversight — at great cost to ratepayers, as the Auditor General forcefully highlighted in her recent annual report.

But Queen’s Park is set to fully take over all decision-making regarding the province’s energy monopolies by solidifying its control over the province’s energy regulator, the Ontario Energy Board (OEB), with the recent passing of Bill 112. In doing so, Ontario is shutting down the last arena of independent public review of the billions of dollars being spent by the province and its many publicly owned utilities.

The legislation, “Strengthening Consumer Protection and Electricity System Oversight Act,” would deny independent intervenors the funds needed to hire the lawyers and experts needed at these hearings, effectively blocking their participation.

Prior to this legislation, any individual ratepayer or organization representing ratepayers — ranging from big, industrial groups to cottage associations or low-income organizations — could apply for funding and act as an intervenor in any rate application. The government would instead replace the independent intervenors with a new government-appointed consumer representative.

In other jurisdictions where this has occurred, the direct cost of this new bureaucracy has been far more expensive than the cost of reimbursing intervenors for their lawyers and consultants. The indirect costs of losing the ability to hold the utility monopolies to account by forcing them to justify their proposed rate increases before the OEB could be much greater still.

One study found that intervenors have been highly successful at paring back the monopolies’ rate requests, their lawyers and consultants costing ratepayers just 2 cents annually while helping to reduce rate increases by $28 per customer. Other studies found that intervenors account for 1 per cent or less of overall regulatory costs, which themselves are a small amount of total electricity costs borne by ratepayers.

Replacing these groups with a government-appointed consumer representative charged with questioning government-owned monopolies eliminates the last remaining voice of independent review of proposals by public monopolies to spend billions of dollars on capital projects.

The province’s new legislation also ensures that any new transmission line can be deemed a “priority project” by the ministry of energy and automatically approved by the OEB. In the past, the OEB would analyze such projects to determine whether they were necessary or cost-effective. Furthermore, the province is considering more legislation that will exempt all government-directed energy plans or projects to be exempt from the Environmental Assessment Act.

The province’s previous moves to sidestep independent review have been costly for ratepayers. The smart meter rollout — which cost ratepayers $2 billion and counting and still isn’t fully functional — was done without any review from the OEB or other regulators. Billions of dollars in contracts have been — and continue to be — given to renewable energy and natural gas generators without any review by the OEB or intervenors. And the long-term energy plans developed by the province’s own energy planning experts — the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) — were never implemented and, instead, were replaced with plans written by the ministry of energy that were, again, never fully reviewed at the OEB and were later criticized by the Auditor General as overly expensive.

More recently, the province collapsed the OPA into another energy agency, the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), which is in charge of operating the province’s wholesale electricity market, ensuring that even more political control is embedded in ever more parts of the electricity sector. There is no longer anything “independent” about the Independent Electricity System Operator.

In the end, the OEB and the intervenors were the last voice of criticism that wasn’t on the payroll of the province. By replacing them with a government-led consumer advocate, the province will control every step of decision-making on electricity policy and spending, those pesky checks and balances eliminated at last.

Brady Yauch is an economist and Executive Director of the Consumer Policy Institute (CPI). He has acted as an intervenor at the OEB.

Queen’s Park to pass new legislation to ram through new hydro corridors: Ottawa Citizen

21 Thursday May 2015

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Ottawa, Wind power

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Bob Chiarelli, hydro lines Ontario, Hydro One, Hydro Ottawa, IESO, Ontario Energy Board, Ottawa, Quebec power, transmission lines Ontario

Pathways and green space along the Hydro corridor in the Bridlewood area of Kanata.

Hydro corridor in Bridlewood area of Ottawa: millions of dollars’ worth of new power lines needed

Ottawa Citizen May 21

The provincial government is preparing a new law to make it easier to build and expand hydro corridors, with the Ottawa area a prime target.

Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli told a summit of energy companies in Toronto in early May that he’s working on legislation that’s mostly about adjusting the way Ontario’s main regulator for the industry, the Ontario Energy Board, works once the province sells off a majority share in Hydro One, its main transmission utility.

But part of the new law, according to the text of his speech, will “give cabinet enhanced powers to designate key transmission corridors to expedite their construction.”

Chiarelli’s spokesperson Jennifer Beaudry explained by email that the idea is to let the politicians decide what’s “in the public good” and remove a stage where the energy board makes its own determination about whether a transmission project is really needed. The regulator would still go over costs and decide who should pay what share of them, she said.

A key transmission corridor could be one that brings electricity to a remote First Nations reserve, one needed to power northern mines, or one that’s needed for “enhanced intertie capacity with neighbouring jurisdictions to support clean energy import,” the text of Chiarelli’s speech says.

And that means Ottawa, which is a major transfer point for electricity Ontario buys from Quebec’s hydro dams but where our existing wires are nearly maxed out.

“At present the firm import capability that could be relied on for all hours on the Quebec — Ontario interties is quite restricted due to transmission issues in the Ottawa area,” says a report prepared last fall by the Independent Electricity System Operator, the provincial agency that monitors and forecasts the flow of electricity around Ontario.

Lines that run through Ottawa carry power into Ontario both from northern Quebec and from the big Beauharnois dam near Montreal. Electricity doesn’t travel all that well, so a lot of the energy we use here comes from Quebec, especially in the summer.

A shortage of transmission capacity will be a big deal in the North, where the eventual development of Ring of Fire mines and related industries will take a lot of electricity. It could even affect Toronto, which has a lot of heavy-duty power lines around its outskirts but only a webwork of little ones serving its condo-packed downtown. But it’s here that the clock is really ticking.

Within five years, the agency says, there’ll be no capacity to move electricity from Quebec through Ottawa to the rest of the province unless we build hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of new power lines; all the juice we can suck in, we’ll be using locally. At a minimum, keeping the system functioning means replacing existing lines that run past backyards in Kanata and Orléans with heavier-duty ones, a $325-million project that would only keep the power supply in Ottawa stable, not give us any to spare.

The most ambitious scenario the IESO considered would cost more like $2 billion. It’s a list of things we’d have to do if Ontario wants to make a major deal to buy Quebec electricity in quantity. We’d have to do major work on just about all of Ottawa’s high-voltage lines, but especially on the ones that run through Orléans because they mainly carry electricity from an “intertie” with Quebec at a hydro dam in Masson-Angers to Ontario’s main power grid. It would also mean building a new eight-kilometre line through Kanata, connecting transfer stations at South March and Terry Fox.

As Ontario knows well by now, new electricity projects are rarely popular. Usually, they benefit other people more than those who live nearby — a wind farm is good for the company that runs it and for whoever leases or sells the land, and (arguably) for the province as a whole, but not for the neighbours who have to look at it.

Same thing with a hydro corridor. We need high-voltage wires but nobody has yet found a way to make them pretty. Plus the science is pretty compelling that they don’t pose a health risk, but there’s no convincing some people. There’s really no way that high-tension wires carrying Quebec power past your house in Ottawa’s suburbs toward Toronto are a selling point. Which is why the cabinet will want the authority to shove them down people’s throats.

dreevely@ottawacitizen.com
twitter.com/davidreevely

 

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