Originally Posted By: turtlevette
Originally Posted By: OVERKILL
Originally Posted By: turtlevette
Originally Posted By: SatinSilver
Hi OVERKILL,
So much does your bill run each month approximately if you don't mind me asking?
I would bet less than the family cell phone bill.
Cell phone plan (with my wife on it) is $180/month, and I get half of that back through work, so actually no.
Once you back out your water and sewer? Anyway, the point you don't seem to want to concede is that value is still there. Most people pay as much or more for a phone/internet package and don't whine about that. An unregulated industry. But I trust Verizon to do the right thing. Is it because that's where your bread is buttered? I know you don't like me much because I'm so direct about these things but they need to be said. Somehow people feel the very important texting activity is as important as living a modern civilized life that power allows.
Utility costs are catching up with the rest of the economy. You had 20 - 40 year old plants at a tenth of the capital costs churning away producing very cost effective power. Now that modernization is creeping in, we have cost increases. You're not going to see any more cheap nuclear going in either. Or any traditional sources. You'd be seeing cost increases without any green sources.
As I said early on, the biggest impact is on rural ratepayers, not those living in urban centres, as they don't get boned on the delivery charge like rural folks do. I demonstrated that showing the difference between my urban bill, which includes water and sewer, and my buddy, who lives out of town, who gets neither of those things, but has a comparable bill. Obviously, I'm getting a lot more value for my $200 than he is.
Coal never made up the majority of our generating mix in the last 30 or so years, it has primarily been stapled by the nukes as far back as I can remember. One is planned on being shuttered (Pickering) the other two are going to be refurbished. Those costs are wrapped into the per kWh rate we pay OPG and Bruce Power. These facilities when coupled with Hydro Electric make up 85% of our power generation mix, yet account for just over 50% of our generating costs, as outlined in the opener.
You are right in the sense that I doubt we'll see major investment in thermals at this point besides natural gas. But I don't agree with your assessment that costs would have increased, which I assume to imply more than they have presently, which has been several fold above and beyond what they were before the GEA. There were a variety of ways that this could have been done less expensively, and paying wind turbines $0.14/kWh, solar $0.48/kWh and biofuel $0.131/kWh was definitely not the cheapest way to get there. The coal plants could have been converted to natural gas for example, heck, one of them was. We've continued to invest in hydro-electric, and we are exporting north of 20TWh a year now at a loss because of all the excess generation. That adds up. We were not in a situation where massive amounts of new generation was needed, particularly not on the timeline dictated by the party in charge.
Quebec has massively cheaper electricity than Ontario does because they invested in vast amounts of hydro-electric. Ontario lacks the water resources that Quebec has, which is primarily why we have so much nuclear capacity. It was deemed more cost effective back in the 70's than coal, and so that's what was built. The myopic fantasy to replace that capacity with wind and solar was thankfully short lived, otherwise we'd be in an even worse boat than we are presently (see Denmark and Germany's rates).
I don't expect costs to remain static. They need to increase, within reason, in order to deal with inflation, cover new builds/refurbishment, grid maintenance...etc. However, not only were rates driven up more than two fold, but delivery, to cover the connection costs, went up right along with it. My natural gas bill has remained reasonable this entire time. My internet cost has actually gone DOWN, as has my cell phone. How much would a 100Mbit connection have cost you even 5 years ago? Yet electricity has not gotten "better"; I'm not getting improved electricity for this increase in cost, which means that like gas, its price should remain reasonable, allowing for inflation. My hydro costs have quite literally doubled since 2007, and compared to a rural customer, my bill is still quite reasonable.
This is versus the rest of the country. You can see Quebec has managed to get it right:
8.1 cents per kWh, while more than what we were paying in 2010, would be welcome right now in this province.
