It’s the Cost of the Power, Stupid

Parker Gallant's latest post to the Energy Probe website

It’s the Cost of the Power, Stupid | Energy Probe:

It’s been a flurry of activity around the Ministry of Energy’s offices over the past few days as the Energy Minister, Chris Bentley has announced two initiatives. The first announcement on April 12th was really more of the same but it was labelled Ontario’s “Clean Energy Economic Development Strategy” and included the appointment of a “Task Force” loaded up with the usual suspects that helped to shape the Green Energy Act and those who continue to benefit from it. The 14 members of this task force will reputedly work at “facilitating collaboration” to identify export markets for Ontario’s clean energy industry.  They will lead “cleantech” (what MaRS Discovery District calls it) trade missions” to Asia, the Middle East and the US.  The task force will also be responsible for “Delivering on the province’s “Smart Grid Fund”  to “spur innovation”.  This fund was a $50 million dollar taxpayer fund when set up but it appears the fund has been fully depleted as they no longer accept applications so it remains to be seen what the task force can actually deliver.  In the interim IESO has applied for a rate increase to the OEB to fund their $250 million initiative to monitor the information coming from the smart meters.  This is the forerunner to IESO’s spending on their smart grid initiatives which they previously said would cost $1.6 billion and additional to those costs are IESO’s wind forecasting expenses which ratepayers are already paying for.  We can expect the task force to come back from those foreign trade missions and announce that the benefits of the trade mission will possibly lead to hundreds of million of potential benefits and we can expect that they will continue to push for the addition of more intermittent, unreliable wind and solar power to the Ontario grid.

Read the entire article at the Energy Probe Website