Power play: solving our energy woes
Re We love to gripe about power bills. Should we? Jan. 16
I agree with Martin Regg Cohn that electricity in Ontario has a complex past. The three main parties all bear some blame.
Mr. Cohn’s article focuses on electricity generation and its source. Both our neighbours’ natural topography allows for generation of abundant, naturally renewable, clean, reliable power. It’s also cheaper. Why do we need to reinvent the wheel? Just buy it, until an alternate source is proven.
Power generation caused most of the debt and was supposed to have been privatized in the 1990s. Yet, the provincial government continues to put billions into an energy source for which there’s no process to neutralize or renew the waste.
Now the transmission and distribution of electricity is about to go the same route. Don’t make the same mistake with Hydro One. Rob Goheen, Oshawa Martin Regg Cohn seems to forget that Ontario Hydro was created to supply Ontario with electricity at cost and was 100 per cent owned by Ontarians. Then under Liberal and Tory governments, the people lost their ownership and control of Ontario Hydro.
We had the David Peterson government that closed Hydro (water power) to go nuclear, and we had a large part of the provincial debt offloaded on to Ontario Hydro to make the government look good. Then we had the Tory government under Mike Harris break up and sell (privatize) the money making side of Hydro. Now we have CEOs making huge amounts of money and another Liberal government wanting to sell more of Ontario Hydro to please their Bay St. friends.
So yes we can expect Hydro rates to go up and the real reason is that, Liberal or Tory, it’s the same old story: we have another government working to help Bay St. not Main St. John Deamer, Wasaga Beach, Ont. What Martin Regg Cohn does not explain is the inefficient and high cost of operating Hydro One. I attended the last round of the Ontario Energy Board hearings as an independent intervener and suggested that the board require Hydro One to reduce its operating costs by 10 per cent before being granted any further rate increases. My suggestion obviously fell on deaf ears.
Hydro One also has many employees making over $100,000 per year. We are still paying for past debt but surely it is not unreasonable to demand that Hydro One be operated efficiently like any private business. I think taxpayers are entitled to an independent review of Hydro One’s operating costs. Patrick Hurley, Oakville