I also ask the advocates of nuclear power to ask themsleves what they would want as compensation if they were one of the 100,000 people in Japan who will not go back to their homes for a generation or more. What possible reason is there to go nuclear, when wind, solar, natural gas, hydro, and energy conservation offer a future without waste disposal, cost over runs or risk of accident.

I have written a couple of times to the Provincial government suggesting we need an open consult with the power sector providers to develop various renewable and nuclear scenarios for Ontario and have extended public consultation on what the people of Ontario want. I know what I want, but I do not beleive the bulk of people in Ontario have seen realistic options, they have just heard noise without supporting data.

Nuclear power as an alternative to renewable energy fits the conservative mindset well, in that it is the antithesis of progress.

Cheers

Of course nuclear, wind, and hydro are not interchangeable, in part because of technical characteristics that affect their availability and in part because of contracts that say whether they have to be paid for electricity that is too expensive to use at that time. People get hung up on the HOEP price, but really relatively little electricity is produced at that price. Most nuclear has a guaranteed floor price, and is resistant to most economic dispatching, meaning sometimes you would like them to produce less even if you pay them for it but they won’t. Wind is increasingly dispatchable and most wind is pre-FIT and therefore 8-9 cents. Coal plants get paid not to produce, and some gas plants. Some hydro also has resistance to dispatching. Among the rest, many of them are willing to accept a zero or negative price which makes us look bad in times of surplus baseload. Consumers, unaware that they too are getting that electricity for free, believe that they must be paying the difference and there is a small accidental grain of truth behind that misunderstanding.

The myth of the low price of nuclear comes from a misunderstanding of the contracts. You can get it at that price but not when you want it, and you will have high fixed costs. The contracts will drive technology to allow new nuclear to follow load better. Expanding Hydro is also a misunderstanding. Remote hydro sounds cheap but the line losses from northern Ontario are about 30-35%. You pay them 10 cents but it costs you 14 by the time it gets to you. Most of the cheap hydro is already in use.

You can’t have a decent election question on energy. Very few people know what is the impact of different technologies on price or reliability. We have had decisions based on health and environment objectives and there’s nothing wrong with that. Those were achievable and were by and large achieved. It would be economically more efficient to embody those health and environment decisions within a carbon price and let the market deliver them but let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that there is a market in electricity. Maybe the next step would be to create a market by eliminating most of the price negotiations in contracts, whether nuclear or FIT and let the market take care of minimizing the price. Maybe the first step would be to cap & prorate the Global Adjustment.

I work in the renewables industry. I am not a “Tree-Hugger” or a paid up member of “The Bikenstock Brigade”. I AM a concerned member of the public. I AM a parent. I do think about the legacy our generation will leave for the future. I AM a taxpayer who is sick to death of having whichever party is in power basically toady to an “old boys network” when itcomes to the province’s power supply.

We have just had our sector shut down for an entire year by the Liberal Government and the OPA…(Don’t you DARE tell me that they are as behind the program as you might think they are, or the 200+ companies I deal with that went out of business over that time would still be in operation!)

We have just seen the tariff rates reduce: Residential rooftop solar (Only a small fraction of the program) from 80.2¢ down to 54.9¢ -32%, Megawatt sized commercial solar rates have dropped 22% from 44.3¢ to 34.7¢ and wind rates are now as low as 11.5¢ reflecting a nearly 15% reduction.

The renewable sector has created thousands of direct and indirect jobs since 2009. It has produced literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in immediate economic stimulus, ALL USING PRIVATE SECTOR CAPITAL. The costs of the equipment and the power is automatically ‘amortized’ over the 20 year contract period to the public (Unlike the cost of a nuclear plant where the debt costs simply balloon over the subsequent generations, putting us in the mess we are in now with the costs of Bruce, Darlington and Pickering).

A privately owned solar panel or wind turbine facility does not require seven or eight “sweet-deal” public service employees/union members due to demarcation or work duplication to operate and maintain it, when only one or two private sector employees can perform the same tasks (at a lower cost too I would likey guess).

I can continue….but I think I have begun to make a point.

- More jobs per dollar invested, or per MW generated.
- Distributed power stabilizes the electricity grid. Rooftop solar, in particular, requires negligible transmission costs.
- Free fuel for the life of the equipment.
- Non-polluting fuel, compared to nuclear’s lethal waste and weapons proliferation.
- Construction times of renewables are a small fraction of that for nuclear power.