This is great…poor Howard….I wish I could have been there….
From Ben Polley:
Check out today’s National Post. A 17 year old who is working on our
local Guelph campaign took on Howard Hampton head-to-head yesterday in
TO and got some good licks in. The Post must have loved it! This kid
is a star and a future Premier in the waiting. You have to meet him
to know…or just read this article.
Howard Hampton schooled on energy policy by teenager
– James Cowan, National Post
A Sunday afternoon discussion with teenage environmentalists turned into a testy debate for Howard Hampton after the NDP leader was derided over his energy plan.
Billed as a “roundtable discussion,” the carefully coordinated event took place on the roof of a downtown co-op, with the building’s rooftop garden and Lake Ontario as a backdrop.
Mr. Hampton opened the event by reiterating his party’s promise not to build new nuclear plants if elected, a point he had emphasized during an earlier rally in Ottawa.
But the NDP leader was forced to drop his message of the day by Nick Annejohn, a 17-year-old high school student. The Guelph resident said it was “a terrible contradiction” that the NDP want to both cut electricity rates and promote energy conservation.
“It’s absurd to propose to further subsidize electricity, which will encourage increased consumption, which means your promise to close the coal plants will be impossible and just as empty as [Dalton] McGuinty’s promise in 2003,” Mr. Annejohn said.
Mr. McGuinty, the Liberal leader, promised during the last election to close the province’s coal-fired plants by 2007, but now contends it will take until 2014.
The NDP want to shutter the Nanticoke Generating Station, Ontario’s largest coal plant, by 2011. However, they have also proposed giving businesses a discount on electricity if the companies promise to stay in the province and meet other restrictions.
Mr. Hampton argued yesterday that lower electricity costs will allow companies to invest more money in energy saving technology. “If industries, businesses and even household consumers are paying these gargantuan bills, they have no money to invest in energy efficiency,” he said. “Simply driving up hydro rates will mean you have seniors on a pension who can’t pay their bill, people on a fixed income who can’t pay their bills and you’ll have hundreds of thousands of people out of work.”
But Mr. Annejohn said the NDP leader’s position defied “simple economics.”
“If electricity is cheaper, companies will use more electricity, they will automate more and they will not need to hire as many people,” he said. “If companies pay they real cost for electricity, then there will be more employment and less energy consumption.”
Mr. Annejohn later told reporters he is active supporter of the Green Party, which has proposed increasing energy rates over three years until they reflect market values.
Power rates are currently adjusted every six months to roughly reflect the cost of electricity while smoothing out any sharp hikes or drops in pricing.
After the meeting, Mr. Hampton said he welcomed the debate with Mr. Annejohn.
“Any time you get into a discussion with young people about climate change and the environment and issues like energy consumption, you’re going to get a lot of ideas,” the NDP leader said, adding, “And that’s good.”
A must read on what’s really going on with Ontario power generation
This is the article that Josie was writing about in the previous posts.
http://www.thestar.com/article/260940
Parties unplug debate on privatized power system
September 27, 2007
Paul Kahnert
There has been no debate about public ownership and control of Ontario’s electricity system during the current election campaign. There should be. The 20-year, $60-billion Liberal power plan announced Aug. 30 costs more than all the new spending on health care and education combined.
The Ontario Electricity Coalition, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union and CUPE National stopped the sale of Hydro One in court in 2002. Then opposition leader Dalton McGuinty went on the record on Sept. 5, 2003, promising public power and an end to deregulation. Most Ontarians thought the issue of electricity privatization had gone away.
Far from it.
Throughout most of Ontario’s history, the electricity system has been almost entirely publicly owned, controlled and regulated. But cost overruns at Ontario Hydro’s nuclear power stations – actually no worse than on privately-owned nuclear power elsewhere – opened the door for the Harris Conservatives to ram through a plan to deregulate and privatize Ontario’s power system.
When the Conservatives introduced legislation for a “competitive electricity market” in November 1998, there was a huge public relations campaign promising lower rates. At the time, the Ontario Electricity Coalition asked: “How can private, deregulated electricity be cheaper when you add in profits to generators, profits to distributors, profits to retailers, dividends to investors and commissions to commodities brokers?” The answer, of course, is that it’s impossible.
The promise of lower rates in a deregulated electricity market proved to be a fraud all around the world. Electricity markets tripled rates in Alberta; in Montana they went up five times; in California, 10 times, and here in Ontario the retail market had to be closed by Ernie Eves in just six months because of outrage over skyrocketing rates.
After the 2003 election, the Liberals created the Ontario Power Authority and put Jan Carr in as CEO, a well-known proponent of electricity deregulation. Carr is on record as saying, “The OPA is only a transitional entity until a mature, competitive, electricity market can be installed.”
In a speech to the Empire Club on Aug. 9, 2004, Energy Minister Dwight Duncan declared, “All new generation will be private.”
Duncan’s declaration is significant because most of the public generating system has to be replaced over the next 20 years. That means creeping privatization as public generation is replaced with private. Legislation also forbids publicly owned Ontario Power Generation Corp. from generating green power such as wind and solar, which means that private green power will end up helping to dismantle the public power system.
Tucked inside the 4,000-page Integrated Power System Plan unveiled Aug. 30 are proposals that will increase private electricity generation and continue Ontario’s experiment with electricity deregulation.
The plan calls for the “evolution of Ontario’s electricity sector towards a workably competitive market …” that “will lead to increased competition among suppliers and lower costs.”
This is exactly the same promise made by the Harris Conservatives, that a competitive electricity market will lead to lower prices.
The Ontario Electricity Coalition has good reason to call the Liberal power plan privatization and deregulation by “stealth.”
Private producers are building new natural gas plants. So-called “smart meters” have been installed but not yet turned on. Small and medium businesses are going to get creamed when they are activated: Power will go from 5.5 cents a kw/h to 9.3 cents a kw/h, a 70 per cent increase during the 10 hours a day when they need it most.
How many people know that, after the election, electricity market rate protection for cash-strapped universities, schools, hospitals and municipalities will be eliminated?
How many people know that the Liberals have failed to protect our municipal electrical utilities from the impact of Conservative legislation to force them into debt and eventual privatization?
Ontario with its industrial base has much to fear from electricity deregulation. A volatile, deregulated electricity market is the last thing industry needs.
The debate on deregulated electricity markets in the U.S. is over. Twenty-five states are in the process of closing electricity markets and re-regulating rates.
Most of the pressure to close U.S. electricity markets came from the business community after rates skyrocketed. Manitoba and Quebec don’t have deregulated electricity markets, why do we?
Given the worldwide failures of electricity deregulation and privatization, it’s amazing that the Liberals and Conservatives haven’t changed their electricity policy one bit. Their policies commit us to a deregulated electricity market and a very expensive private power future. Public ownership, control and regulation of electricity are very important both to the economy and now more than ever to the environment. We can’t leave these critical decisions to a profit driven market.
The public needs real debate on this issue during the election.
