Fedeli presses for answers on surplus power

Nipissing MPP Vic Fedeli
News Release

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QUEEN’S PARK – Nipissing MPP and PC Energy Critic Vic Fedeli pressed Energy Minister Chris Bentley in Question Period Monday on why Ontario is selling its surplus power at a loss to Quebec and the United States. Below is the text of Fedeli’s question:

Speaker my question is for the Minister of Energy...

Minister, we have a power problem in Ontario in that we're selling our surplus power to Quebec and the US for much less than it costs to produce - to the tune of $420 million in the first 10 months of this year...

At the same time we have a surplus, we're forcing intermittent wind and solar power onto the grid at
subsidy-inflated prices...

This is driving up energy prices for Ontario families and businesses that are already hurting...

Minister will you please tell Ontario families why you're driving up the cost of their energy bills to
produce renewable energy we simply don't need?

Supplementary:

Speaker, first the government piles up the cost from the cancelled Oakville plant...then the costs from the
now cancelled Mississauga power plant...now we have $420 million lost in surplus power sales to Quebec and the US...when adding stops we could very well have another billion dollar boondoggle on our hands...

We’re paying above-market prices for renewable energy that the grid doesn’t need, then selling it elsewhere when it’s not needed at below cost...this is sheer madness!

Minister...will you admit you jumped the gun on green energy and pull back from the FIT subsidies which have led to job-killing energy prices?

Rather than address the enormous costs of exporting Ontario’s surplus power, Bentley resorted to past rhetoric and mischaracterized the PC policy on coal-fired generating.

The PC party supports closing of Ontario’s coal-fired generating plants by 2014.

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Meanwhile, Fedeli said in the news release below that Ontario’s Auditor General confirmed what he believed.

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Nipissing MPP and PC Energy Critic Vic Fedeli says Ontario’s Auditor General has confirmed much of what he’s believed to be true about the province’s flawed energy policy, all along.

James McCarter said Monday hydro bills are poised to go up 8% a year in Ontario, with the majority of that increase due to bringing heavily-subsidized renewable energy on-line. He also stated the green jobs claims from the Liberals are greatly inflated, and that the Liberals never bothered to do any cost-benefit analysis of their $7
billion Samsung Deal.

“The Auditor also confirmed my long-stated belief that the Green Energy Act is responsible for between 50-60% of the increase in our hydro bills, and that wind and solar projects were fast-tracked without the normal oversight, to achieve their end-game,” said Fedeli.

When speaking of wind and solar, the Auditor also commented that “they can’t be connected to the grid … it looks like we don’t need the capacity anyway …plus they are not very reliable,” while noting the government is now reviewing its Feed-in-Tariff (FIT) program pricing.

“The Auditor was very clear that in other jurisdictions, the cost/green energy job is $300,000 and for each job created 2-4 jobs are often lost in other sectors,” Fedeli added.

The Auditor General also warned that Dalton McGuinty’s expensive energy experiments are killing thousands of permanent private-sector jobs in the broader economy, and that the province has collected more than $8 billion for the debt retirement charge.

“As I said in the campaign, they’ve collected more than the original amount of stranded debt that charge was designed to pay off,” said Fedeli.

Fedeli echoed the Auditor General’s call for the Finance Minister to come out and tell Ontarians exactly how much longer they’ll have to pay the debt retirement charge and how much they’ll be paying.

“The ratepaying public has a right to know.”

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