[Rita Van Geffen] tapped her retirement nest egg to build her ground-mounted solar project, spending just over $100,000.
The Ontario Power Authority had conditionally approved their projects in 2010, but they were later rejected by the local utility, provincially owned Hydro One. As a result of these and numerous other cases, the province revised rules in December, 2010, no longer issuing conditional offers before a grid connection was secured.
“I believe in green energy and I thought it was a safe investment,” said Ms. Van Geffen, 63, a former sheep farmer. With the legislature prorogued and the governing Liberals searching for a new party leader, she is worried a resolution will be delayed further.
“It’s been two-and-a-half years since I started this,” she noted. “I just want to get out. I just want to get my money out and put it into something else.”
You’d think she’d know a sheep when she sees one.
Related: Why Everyone Is Losing Hope For Green Energy
h/t North_of_60
If you live in Canada, almost all of which is above 45 degrees north latitude, and think you can economically get energy from the sun with today’s technology, you deserve your fate. Stupidity occasionally carries consequences.
She fell for a double whamming. Believing in green energy and relying on the government to allow it with ease.
Any energy projects require deep pockets so you can buy the government you need to allow you to do what you want. Some crappy solar paneling is bound to be held up.
Poor lady. Shouldn’t have been a leftist I guess.
I take it the “This is Odd” headline is ironical. To me it’s: “Quelle Surprise!”
U can spot the lefties around here by the solar panels on the roofs and mounted in the yards:-))))
Kindaf nice to see mostly leftards reaping the “benefits” from the glorious socialist parties. You a%$hats want sympathy? It’s in the dictionary, between s^&t and syphillis.
““I believe in green energy and I thought it was a safe investment”
Simplified English translation:
I was dumb enough to believe in the Eco Greenie Glowball Warming Con and did the “fools and their money thingy”
Enmax here in Calgary has an offer to install, maintain and connect solar panels mounted on your house to the grid. Problem is, when you crunch the numbers it wouldn’t save any money on your electricity bill over the life of the equipment. Would be better if they advertised it as an alternative to shingles with a bonus of running LED security lighting with a battery bank.
Is green energy a fad that has run its course? The investment community seems to think so. RENIXX® World, the Renewable Energy Industrial Index of the world’s top green energy companies, hit an all-time low below 146 on November 21, down more than 90 percent from the December 2007 peak.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/climatism-watching-climate-science/2012/dec/6/so-hows-your-green-energy-stock-doing/
Could someone please pass me the Kleenex box, as I need to wipe away the tears for this poor woman.
Green Energy = Red Ink
As the price of energy is dropping, especially for natural gas and oil, due to the shale oil/gas discoveries, the world’s poor benefit disproportionately more than the wealthy.
That’s where the oft neglected, moral argument will take us.
Meanwhile the post apocalyptic visionaries continue their worship of the sun and the wind and the volcano, just as did their animist ancestors in stone age cultures of pre-historic times.
One can only hope that these delusional greenies who trusted “government”, end up penniless, and shivering in the dark.
Comments after the G & M article are pretty much like SDA comments. Does this mean there’s hope for the centre of the universe?
I have no sympathy for this woman. She, like countless other rent seekers took advantage of a government program, that they knew was paid for on the backs of the taxpayers of Ontario. This alone should have sent warning signals to those thinking of investing in this scheme, as it was not sustainable. A warning to all, if it sounds too good to be true, even from government, then it probably isn’t.
Whatever happened to, “if it sounds to good to be true, it probably is”?
mike
According to National Geographic, there`s a new mental disorder named “range anxiety.” That`s when you`re driving a full electric vehicle and your become anxious when you batteries are low and there`s no charging station in sight.
I guess the solution would be to have a small Honda genset in the truck so that when you`re in an isolated Saskatchewan area, you can pull over and charge the batteries.
Interesting to note that the new Tesla S that retails for just under the $100,000.00 mark has a range of 235 miles. Enjoy the fantasy while it lasts!!
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/energy/2011/03/110310-electric-car-range-anxiety/
The President of Hydro One told the government back in 2008 that the grid could not accommodate all of the applications then pending. Then-Energy Minister George Smitherman had him fired.
This debacle was a long time building, and it will be a long time clearing up this mess.
Interesting note. The government guarantees solar and wind producers an 11% ROI. It only allows its own Ontario Power Generation about 7.5% ROI even though OPG is effectively subsidizing the household residential rate.
Plainzdrifter, no doubt about it. Those that partake of the Green Kool Aid have low batteries.
To paraphrase:
Lie down with the government and you wake up with fleas….and rags.
I hope she gets creamed financially. These were built to sell electrons at 80 cents and not the market price of 3.9 cents. Enjoy using the sheep manure for food and heat. You get what you deserve, leftist toady.
I can’t believe nobody has brought out the headline, “Sheep Farmer Fleeced”.
I had this conversation with some of my left leaning friends back in 2008. They were gushing about how green energy was the future and that people were going to make a bundle putting up solar panels in their yards. I told them they were f#cking retarded to think that this whole thing was even remotely feasible or legitimate. especially with “E-health” Slitherman involved. I guess when I go to Ontario for Christmas I’m gonna have to tell them I was right about my suspicion that it was all a scam.
You have to wonder about the mentality of somebody who wants to put a heavy duty solar generation system on a skinny little rural hydro line out the back of nowhere. You have to wonder more about the son of a BEEOTCH from the utility who “conditionally approved” it. That utility guy could I think quite reasonably sued for fraud.
It isn’t like the transmission capabilities of copper wire are not well understood, is it? Nor is its price per linear foot.
Never the less, there are a whole bunch of these solar panels around my part of Ontario, cluttering up people’s yards, not generating electricity for the grid. Because they got put in at the owner’s expense, and then not hooked up.
Class action lawsuit waiting to happen, I’m thinking. Clear and obvious malfeasance.
So, in the fullness of time, I will be taxed to pay for that too.
Oh joy.
“I just want to get out. I just want to get my money out and put it into something else.”
TRANSLATION TO PLAIN ENGLISH: “I just want to get out. I just want somebody else, not me, to pay for my losses so I can get my money out and put it into something else.”
We can safely presume she didn’t intend to share any profits with the taxpayers, so why should the taxpayers eat her loss???
I just don’t want to miss the video…when one of these investors finally loses it.
Hopefully it’s near Queens Park.
Quick the tissues, I’m laughing so hard i’m tearing up.
But the best is yet to come, at the inflated rates Hydro one has to pay for GREEN electricity, Ontarions too will be forced to reward scammers, running stadium lights off the grid and selling the electricity generated by the solar panels under these lights at a profit.
And by people running diesel gensets at their windfarms and selling the power as GREEN.
Its already happened in Europe, before Squinty even stuck Ontario with the Clean Green scam.
Am I supposed to feel sorry for her and others like her or something?
The wind blows clothes on a laundry line dry and the sun grows plants. I’m not willing to harness either for industrial use as they don’t work when thusly applied.
If people want to put up solar panels it’s OK by me, as long as they do it on their own dime.
Instead of complaining about it, they should simply put in a battery bank and inverter, and live off-grid, at their own expense of course.
So she was just another lefty willing to gorge herself at the expense of the Ontario taxpayer.She could hardly wait to sell the power produced by her solar panels to Hydro One at .83 cents an hour when the going rate was .039 cents per hour.Now when the promises made to her by her socialist liberal pals start going south she wants to transition from budding millionaire to unfortunate mislead victim.You drank the Kool-aid lady so suffer the consequences.
So she was just another lefty willing to gorge herself at the expense of the Ontario taxpayer.She could hardly wait to sell the power produced by her solar panels to Hydro One at .83 cents an hour when the going rate was .039 cents per hour.Now when the promises made to her by her socialist liberal pals start going south she wants to transition from budding millionaire to unfortunate mislead victim.You drank the Kool-aid lady so suffer the consequences.
All kidding aside, two comments that are both good and true:
Larry, 7:56p.m. —
But on your moral argument suggestion, just remember how that’s all going to work out for us: the leftist “for the 99%” do-gooders will do their level best to muck about in the marketplace (regulate and subsidize diseconomies) to the point that your first statement will never happen (they just can’t help themselves…)
cgh, 9:35p.m. —
May I humbly suggest, my friend, that these particular facts rather support the case for, er, privatization?
Phantom, Ontario Power Authority is NOT a utility. It owns and operates nothing. It’s an office building, nothing more, and it only approves things based on their paper business plans in accordance with government directives.
David, no it does not. This disaster was inevitable regardless of ownership. The reason is simple. There are now about nine bodies concerned with electricity supply in Ontario.
1 OPG and OH1 are the two entities that actually own and operate generating and transmission assets. They function as well as can be expected, given the shambolic mess below.
2 There’s IESO that controls grid dispatch.
3 There’s Ontario Hydro Corporation which handles the stranded debt from the old Ontario Hydro but is in fact used to subsidize customer rates.
4 There’s Ontario Power Authority which is supposed to be responsible for system planning.
5 There’s the electricity conservation office which is supposed to be responsible for Ontario’s electricity conservation programs.
6 There’s the Ontario renewable energy office which is run out of OPA but does not answer to OPA. It’s the group which actually contracts for all these insane projects.
7 There’s the OEB, supposed to be an independent regulator but in fact acts on the orders of the Premier and Energy Minister.
8 There’s Energy and Infrastructure Ontario, which is supposedly doing the purchasing for new nuclear power and which does the negotiating with Bruce Power for contracted rates from refurbished and restarted Bruce units.
This is an insane, chaotic mess. Even if all the actual assets were in private hands it would be just as disfunctional as it is today.
Half of this is Harris’s fault for the initial breakup, and half of it is McGuinty’s fault for creating another four electricity agencies.
This is about mandate, David, not ownership. Why do you think it is that when Harris broke up Ontario Hydro and put it up for sale, they could sell off nothing except a couple of northern hydro dams? Simply because business understood that the government had created a disfunctional mess by the way it had split everything up.
If anything, it’s a huge argument against privatization if this is what it looks like compared to the old Ontario Hydro.
Frankemm at December 11, 2012 12:13 AM
Yup. Screw thy neighbour.
cgh said: “Ontario Power Authority is NOT a utility. It owns and operates nothing. It’s an office building, nothing more, and it only approves things based on their paper business plans in accordance with government directives.”
Be that as it may, I have no doubt that some ambulance chaser will figure a way to sue the Ontario government for millions, seeing as how this solar panel deal really was an horrific scam from start to finish. And I, the Ontario taxpayer, will get stuck with the bill. As usual.
I have this theory that Ontario is actually an experiment in social theory put on by the Liberal Party. They’re trying to see how completely they can destroy the economy before taxpayers wake up. Early results suggest we will all be banging rocks together to start our cow dung fires before Toronto votes Conservative.
cgh, David:
I happened to work for Ontario Hydro Energy during 2001. This was supposed to be the ‘free market’ arm of Ontario Hydro, using their expertise and systems to offer other services including residential electricity contracts (such as many people have for natural gas). It was a complete mess, including outright fraud on the part of its door-to-door sales people. And when the problems were pointed out to Elaine Clitheroe, she just stepped back into her chauffeur driven limo, and fled. So I have zero faith that an institution, long coddled by the government, can make a successful transition to the private sector.
That said, the breakup of the system did make sense. Power generation and transmission are unrelated activities, just as making widgets and trucking them to stores are. Certainly it helps to co-ordinate activities, but somehow widgets keep showing up on store shelves, so I suspect that different companies do find ways to co-ordinate and co-operate.
Given that the vision was the private sector would step in and provide new power generating facilities, the IESO was a necessary agency. Does anyone believe, in the IESO’s absence, that Hydro1 would not show a marked preference for OPG power over others? And, since I used to look at their quite detailed stats pages, I have to say the IESO was doing an excellent job until hamstrung by the McSquinty Liberals.
I don’t disagree that the remainder of the alphabet agencies are probably redundant and/or harmful, but one could make that argument in virtually every area of government. Do we really need local, regional, and provincial school boards, a ministry of education, and OISE to ruin our children? But the breakup of Hydro was correct in principle.
A little bird told me that TransAlta (from Alberta) seriously looked into moving into co-gen and generation of power in Ontario. They decided there were good business opportunities but the regulatory environment was too political and subject to rapid change. Not a good environment for long-term, large scale, capital projects.
Based on that, I decided I didn’t want anything to do with the Ontario govt’s green energy project, for my farm. I just didn’t trust them.
In a similar vein, I beleive my friend in Toronto, an investment dealer by trade, is about to or has already taken, a financial bath on some wind turbine projects of his. I didn’t push for details but he implied that the (political)support that existed in the beginning was no longer apparent. Two weeks after we visited his drop-dead gorgeous summer home in the Muskokas this past summer he sold it.
Rita Van Geffen is not as smart as the sheep she raises.
Chris R. “A little bird told me that TransAlta (from Alberta) seriously looked into moving into co-gen and generation of power in Ontario. They decided there were good business opportunities but the regulatory environment was too political and subject to rapid change. Not a good environment for long-term, large scale, capital projects.”
I did work for TransAlta in securing a site for a gas fired generating plant. We had a site pretty much secured and TransAlta had done the required consulting work with the municipality, etc. when the Liberals cancelled the request for proposals prior to the 2007 fall election. Too politically sensitive (remember the Oakville and Mississauga plants that were cancelled). TransAlta pretty much pulled out of Ontario and I lost a good client and several months’ work down the drain.
I have little sympathy for Van Geffen and her ilk. Apart from the rent sesking, she should have waited until she had a signed contract with the OPA in her hand with the confirmation the grid had capacity. It was pretty well known that the area running from the Bruce down to S.W. Ontario had grid restrictions (maps used to refer to the “big orange blob”)
KevinB: “But the breakup of Hydro was correct in principle.”
No it was not. During the time of Ontario Hydro, comsumer and industrial electricity prices were low and stable. Grid reliability was high. There was no stranded debt, and all facilities including transmission and distribution were fully funded.
Since the breakup, the reverse has become the case.
“Power generation and transmission are unrelated activities”
No they are not. Because electricity cannot be inventoried. It must be delivered at the instant of generation.
“Certainly it helps to co-ordinate activities”
Certainly true. In fact it’s necessary. And it’s best done under one roof.
“This was supposed to be the ‘free market’ arm of Ontario Hydro.”
This took place after the breakup, not before which occurred in 1998. This was the stupid mandate handed to what had formerly been known as Ontario Hydro International before it was dissolved.
“And when the problems were pointed out to Elaine (sic) Clitheroe, she just stepped back into her chauffeur driven limo, and fled.”
Bookkeepers like Eleanor have no busines running electric utilities. Another in a string of political appointments to run Ontario Hydro during the 1990s and early 2000s that was utterly unfit for the post.
cgh and KevinB:
Based on my own fairly extensive experience in the industry, I agree with many of the points that both have you have made. I disagree with some of cgh’s assertions and with one statement in particular that Kevin made (“I have zero faith that an institution, long coddled by the government, can make a successful transition to the private sector”).
Chris R.’s, 9:54a.m. contribution is pretty much on point, IMO:
“A little bird told me that TransAlta (from Alberta) seriously looked into moving into co-gen and generation of power in Ontario. They decided there were good business opportunities but the regulatory environment was too political and subject to rapid change. Not a good environment for long-term, large scale, capital projects.”
Despite any agreements or disagreements we may have, the question now, IMO, is about how we go ahead from this mess.
I have to say that I like Tim Hudak’s proposal, which would do a number of things, IMO:
– Provides cash to the Province (which should go to debt retirement, not to current operations, which is a difference that I have with Miss Roberts’s strategy),
– Provides long-term stable income to public-sector pension plans, which can then be matched actuarially against future pension obligations (which goes to Kevin’s point from the CNOOC-Nexen discussion),
– Sets up a model for further privatizations in Ontario, and
– Begins to address the need (correctly identified by Chris R.) of eliminating the Monty Python-like “Ministry of Silly Walks”, or “Yes, Prime Minister” decision-making chaos that I still believe that cgh was getting at last night, despite his (not too many) plainly painful contortions today: this is an absolute requirement that will not happen as long as the operating companies (OPG and HONI) remain in government hands (which statement on my part clearly ignores a pretty simple question: what government?)
There’s what should be done and what can be done. I’m only going to deal with what can be done. First, OPG cannot be privatized. It has been saddled with far too many mandates from government that have little to do with generating electricity. But the biggest and most damaging of these is the cross-subsidization from OPG to various other sectors through customer and industrial rates. In the past, OPG received very little income from its hydro and nuclear generation, so that this could be blended with very high cost renewables for a lower overall rate for the end customer.
We now have some TOU rates in Ontario, but this really only covers peak demand and not the high cost of wind and solar. At 7.5% ROI, OPG for the past 10 years has had enough money to run the plants and service its debt, and that’s it. It needs a cash infusion if it’s going to be viable.
As things stand right now, no private investor would touch it.
You fellows are both wrong about institutions coddled by government not being able to make the transition. Bruce Power proves precisely the reverse. The difference is that Bruce Power isn’t saddled with all the baggage that OPG has.
Second, one of the biggest purchasers of goods and services in any province is the electric utility. Nearly everywhere, this gives government enormous leverage to encourage the development they want through purchasing activity. This is why Canada no longer has a wire and cable industry, for example. We had 10 small companies scattered across the country that were all too small to survive when utilities stopped building T&D systems.
Governments no matter how well intentioned are always deeply unwilling to give up that kind of economic clout in the economy.
For the short term, the best things that can be done right now are the following:
1. Close down immediately the conservation and renewable energy offices and programs. The latter is obvious, but so is the former. The business of electric utilities is to make and sell electricity. It is utter nonsense for utilities to be in the business of paying people NOT to use their product. Efficiency and conservation are best done by being driven by market supply and demand for electricity.
2. Immediately merge IESO and Hydro One. We’re long past the time of pretending that we have an electricity market in Ontario, and OPG and Hydro One have long since grown far apart. You can’t run a grid company where someone else has direct control of all your switching stations.
3. Get Energy and Infrastructure entirely out of the business of buying new generating stations, particularly nuclear ones. It has utterly no expertise in any of this.
4. Repeal immediately the Green Energy Act. In particular those provisions which set aside municipal zoning laws for purposes of siting renewable energy.
Do these four things, and the situation in Ontario will improve considerably and with greater accountability given the thinning out of the pletora of useless government bureaucracies.
So all these solar panels I’ve noticed pop up all round eastern ONT in the last couple of years are not even hooked up to the grid yet?
Asked one neighbour (with a small farm) who had them installed last year and they said they paid about $60 grand for 2 panel sets. They told us that “within” 20 yrs or when paid off they get back all they put into it, every month – directly off their hydro bill, never thought to ask if it was ‘operational’ or not. Should have figured as much nothing the liberals do is ever on the up and up.
Ironically they also raise sheep.