Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty Throws Taxpayer Money to the Wind

by Dave Blount | January 22, 2010 1:29 pm

Appalling moonbattery[1] from north of the border, where Big Government and Samsung are teaming up to empty citizens’ pockets in the name of the flourishing polar bears:

In a dramatic move yesterday, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty struck a green electricity deal — allegedly the biggest of its kind in the world — that will transmit a subsidy worth as much as $10-billion into the hands of a Korean state enterprise and corporate giant Samsung. …

The subsidy means that over the next 25 years Ontario electricity users will pay 50% more for the wind and solar electricity produced under the Samsung deal than they would buying the same power from conventional sources. In return for the subsidy, the only thing the average consumer will receive is a warm and fuzzy feeling for having saved the planet from global warming.

Never mind that global warming may not be happening. Electricity consumers everywhere, but especially in Ontario, are often merely cash machines for scheming profiteers and politicians. Any excuse will do. If not global warming there’s always job creation, trade wars, subsidies, economic nationalism, local content rules, renewability claims — and the usual ugly business of buying voters with their own money.

The McGuinty electricity scheme masterfully incorporates all of the above.

Just how hard will this boondoggle hit the citizens of Ontario?

Over 25 years, the government says the Koreans will deliver 110-million megawatt hours at these guaranteed prices, equal to 110-billion kWh. Based on operating assumptions for the wind-solar balance, that means the Koreans will receive about a guaranteed $25-billion from Ontario electricity consumers at an average price of maybe 23:¢ per kWh. But the current price for new gas-fired power, with all costs accounted for, is maybe 12:¢ or about $13-billion. Ontario, in other words, will pay about $10-billion or maybe even $12-billion in subsidy to the Korean consortium over 25 years…

As for developing a mythical “green economy”…

The Samsung agreement will also squeeze out other wind and solar power producers from the market, thus eliminating competition and fairness from a power market already grotesquely distorted by the Green Energy Act and the Feed-in Tariff scheme. So not only will the McGuinty energy regime plunder cash from electricity consumers, it will compound the economic mess by squeezing other energy producers.

This corrupt alliance between unscrupulous government-linked corporations and still more unscrupulous authoritarian bureaucrats used to be known as “fascism.” But at least in the olden days, the State didn’t transfer its slaves’ money to corporations based in other countries.

Stories like this drive home just how intolerable it is that the USA now has even less economic freedom than Canada[2].

brad-duguid-and-friends.jpg
Energy Minister Brad Duguid helps sell out Ontario to some very happy Koreans.

On a tip from Stu. Cross-posted at Moonbattery[3].

Endnotes:
  1. Appalling moonbattery: http://www.financialpost.com/news-sectors/energy/green-energy/story.html?id=2470214
  2. even less economic freedom than Canada: http://www.moonbattery.com/archives/2010/01/america-now-les.html
  3. Moonbattery: http://www.moonbattery.com/

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