McGuinty ceded that his proposals to implement renewables were poorly planned and managed; renewable projects were taken over by deep pocketed oil companies that would foist them on people in notably contentious locations giving wind a bad name, high FITs that did not adjust to market forces over the long term, no comprehensive agreement with neighbours for better power sharing agreements, no power storage strategy, no coordinated conservation or efficiency plan that included distributed generation, CHP, microCHP, automated demand response management, and worst of all there was no options analysis of subsidies to various producers. Our electricity system is more enigmatic than ever in every way.

This brings me to my final point. Toronto is being advised to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Bremner Transformer Station by Navigant Consulting. Navigant Consulting owns Pike Research which has endless peer reviewed studies and reports that show the great economic benefits of various conservation based approaches. Options such as automated demand response, distributed generation (eg. fuel cells that produce little GHGs, run on reliable cheap ng, and is price competitive with other energy sources $0.09kWh, source UTC power), and larger CHP systems such as at the University of Toronto that has saved the university huncreds of millions of dollars (would be a good case study for any policy maker to look at). If Toronto can be duped into choosing the easy and expensive path by consultants that have mountains of their own data suggesting otherwise than the rest of the country is in deep trouble.

I implore all to take a detailed look at what groups such as the Ontario Clean Air Alliance are advocating to build a more progressive Toronto that will be more competitive, productive, profitable, and most importantly healthy, clean, and efficient.