A new report by the Fraser Institute on the pitfalls of wind and solar power has national implications and reads like a textbook example of the electricity disaster that occurred in Ontario under its previous Liberal government from 2003-18.
It was a disaster that, according to the study, resulted in residential electricity prices more than doubling in Ontario between 2008 and 2017, raising the cost of power per kilowatt-hour from 5.2 cents to $11.55.
Authors Pierre Desrochers and Andrew Reed note that use of wind and solar power — where the fuel costs are free — can work in limited amounts if governments understand what they’re doing.
The problem, warns Desrochers — a U of T geography professor — is that they often don’t, he writes in the report titled: Generating Electricity in Canada from Wind and Sunlight: Is Getting Less for More Better than Getting More for Less?
Everything that Desrochers and Reed cautions can go wrong with wind and solar power went wrong in Ontario under the 15-year regime of the Dalton McGuinty and Kathleen Wynne Liberal governments.
They ignored advice from their own experts that they didn’t have to raise prices for wind and solar power as high as they did to achieve the government’s goals.
They made the energy grid less efficient when they demanded wind and solar power had to be purchased first, ahead of other energy sources.
This resulted in absurdities like dumping green hydroelectric power in favor of wind and solar or paying wind and solar developers to not produce electricity.
They failed to appreciate that wind and solar have to be backed up by more reliable forms of energy because they can’t provide baseload power to the grid on demand since the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine.
In Ontario, the Liberals opted for natural gas — a fossil fuel — for this purpose, ironically culminating in their gas plants scandal, which cost the public $1 billion and led to the jailing of a top government aide for illegally destroying records.
Not all of the increase in electricity prices was the result of wind and solar power.
When the Liberals came to power in 2003, the transmission grid was badly in need of repairs, which contributed to the costs.
Because the electricity system needs to have excess capacity to deal with sudden power demands, natural gas suppliers also had to be paid for not producing electricity.
That said, Ontario’s auditor general reported in 2015 that because of the government’s mistakes, electricity consumers would pay $9.2 billion more for wind and solar energy than necessary over 20 years because the Liberals approved projects without properly vetting them.
She also noted Ontario electricity consumers were paying two times the U.S. average for wind and 3.5 times the average for solar, in a time of falling prices.
The Liberals claimed they replaced Ontario’s coal-fired electricity — 25% of the grid — between 2003 and 2014 by using wind and solar, at a time when the contribution of wind, solar and biomass power to the grid was only 7%.
The Liberals actually used nuclear and natural gas to replace coal.
Their multi-billion-dollar wind and solar boondoggle wasn’t necessary.
Basically, the Fraser report — and the real-world experience of Ontario’s electricity disaster — arrive at the same conclusion.
Don’t do what Ontario did, because its electricity consumers will be paying for it for decades to come.
Read more at Toronto Sun
