The March 2 hydro rate reduction announcement by the Ontario Liberal government was widely compared to converting a 20-year personal mortgage to a 30-year mortgage. Your short-term payments may go down but in the long run you end up paying a lot more.

On March 2, the Ontario Government announced its latest package of initiatives designed to reduce hydro rates. The key initiative in the package (the re-financing of the Global Adjustment) was widely compared to converting a 20-year home mortgage to a 30-year mortgage and amounted to little more than a cheap accounting trick designed to bribe Ontarians with their own money. The re-financing initiative was the latest in a series of Liberal hydro initiatives that set aside sensible electricity policy and instead, embraced private-sector style financial engineering in order to pursue political – as opposed to policy – objectives.

The purpose of this post is to provide some context and analysis to the March 2 announcement as well as other recent Ontario government initiatives on the hydro file.

Policy Context

To achieve rate reduction, the Ontario government had three broad approaches to energy policy to choose from. It could have:

• Dealt in a targeted way with the affordability challenges of those paying an unacceptably high proportion of their household income on home energy costs. This may very well have involved additional assistance for a good chunk of the ratepayer base but it certainly didn’t need to include an increased hydro subsidy for everyone;
• Dealt with the “structural” inefficiencies that have contributed to spiralling system costs and therefore steadily rising hydro bills; or
• Engaged in a range of complex financial engineering exercises that simply shift current energy costs to future generations of ratepayers and tax payers.

Clearly, a high profile measure such as the re-financing of the Global Adjustment (the key March 2 announcement) falls into the “financial engineering” category.

That said, the government has implemented several low-profile initiatives that deal directly with the real hydro affordability crises facing many Ontarians. Moreover, the government is beginning to explore some market design changes that deal with the “structural” inefficiencies that have driven up the overall costs of the system. Unfortunately, the perceived political need to dramatically reduce all Ontarians’ hydro bills in the short-term has won out. The result is that the more nuanced and targeted initiatives that address the real problems of affordability and unnecessary system costs are taking a back seat to the misguided (but splashier) financial engineering initiatives. Continue reading →

There is far more that the Wynne government can do to help Ontarians struggling with sky-high hydro bills. But will they do what needs to be done?

It will come as no surprise to Ontarians that according to a recent Nanos Research poll, the cost of hydro was the most important issue for 20.5 per cent of voters, eclipsing the usual suspects such as health care (15.1 per cent), jobs and the economy (9.6 per cent) and high taxes (7.3 per cent). And it will also come as no surprise that recent polls suggest that the popularity of Ontario’s Liberal Government is taking a beating because of the issue.

Undoubtedly, the government is frustrated by the electorate’s focus on the cost side of the hydro file and its relative lack of interest in what the Liberals see as a series of environmentally friendly energy policies (the closure of the coal plants, the Green Energy program, increased “clean power” imports from Quebec, etc.) that have dramatically reduced smog days and made Ontario a leader in North America in fighting climate change.

But if the Liberals are puzzled by the public’s refusal to give them much credit for their green energy initiatives, they only have to look as far their crassly political cancellations of the Oakville and Mississauga gas plants to understand why the public isn’t cutting them much slack on the hydro file. Politics is nothing if not a blood sport and if you want political credit for making tough decisions on a file, then it is probably best not to engage in a billion dollar’s worth  of political opportunism (the cost of re-locating the two gas plants) on that very same file. After all, that’s a billion dollars added to the hydro bills of the very voters that were already paying for the elimination of cheap, coal-generated power!

That said, it appears that Kathleen Wynne has gotten the message  (high hydro bills are “my mistake”) and has promised to announce new rate reduction measures over and above the already announced 8% HST rebate. Continue reading →

Ontario’s high hydro prices reflect a breakdown in the Ontario Government’s electricity planning process resulting in contradictory policies that add to costs.

On September 12, the Ontario Government announced in its Throne Speech that it was rebating the provincial portion of the Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) to residential and small business electricity users. The initiative is expected to cost $1 billion/yr. and is funded out of the provincial tax base. On September 15, Bill 13, the Ontario Rebate for Electricity Consumers Act, was tabled to implement the initative.

What the initiative means is that as of January 1, 2017, the Province will reduce residential and small business electricity bills by an amount equivalent to the 8% provincial portion of the HST.

Why the HST rebate benefits the affluent more than average hydro users

What is often overlooked is that the HST rebate provides a benefit proportionate to electricity spending meaning that the more you spend on electricity, the bigger your rebate. And, of course, the bigger your residence, the more you are likely to spend on electricity.

On September 27, Ontario’s Financial Accountability Officer (FAO) issued a report showing that the burden of home energy costs, as measured by share of income spent on home energy, falls more heavily on lower income Ontario households in spite of their lower overall energy spending. In 2014, the lowest-income 20% spent on average 5.9% of their pre-tax income on home energy, while the highest-income 20% spent only 1.7%.

Continue reading →