Consumer Electricity Costs

Over the last couple of days I have been trying to do a comparison of electricity costs for consumers in Canada, the US and Europe. Why may you ask? Ontario, where I live has in the past and continues to subsidizer of general tax revenue the sale of and delivery of electricity to the consumer. I have been trying to figure out by how much, and frankly the question that needs to be asked is why? The continued subsidy acts as a deterrent to the greening of the power market in Ontario and I would suspect Canada. But by how much?

I am in the process of trying to get hold of this information and will publish the results as I get them.

Ontario Looks to lift its moratorium on offshore Wind Farms

Ontario has leaked that the Ontario Minister of Natural Resources, Donna Cansfield is preparing to show leadership in wind power by dropping the moratorium on offshore wind farms. The moratorium was officially put in place to study the impact of these wind farms on migratory birds, bats, and marine species. The cynic would suggest that they did not want this an election issue in the recent provincial election -- there was considerable local resistance to a wind farm in Prince Edward County.

There are a number of sites planned for Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, a smallish site at the Scarborough Bluffs in Toronto (200 megawatts) and a much larger installation 15km offshore at Prince Edward County (700 megawatts).

I am assuming that now this has been leaked that the Ontario Minister will go ahead with the lifting of the moratorium -- unless of course there is widespread condemnation of the proposal. But this is green power and any local resistance will be attributed to NIMBY'ism -- and frankly it should.

I just got back from Europe and the landscape and seascape are littered with wind farms -- are they pretty -- not really -- but they do their job. And frankly give me some wind farms over a new nuclear reactor any day.