Wynne's epiphany on costs of green energy comes too late

Former Ontario Liberal premier Kathleen Wynne has belatedly acknowledged one of her biggest mistakes was her failure to listen to warnings about how her government’s green energy policies would increase the cost of electricity.

Unfortunately, it comes too late to do the people of Ontario any good.

But it might serve as a warning to Canadians elsewhere about what happens to taxpayers and hydro consumers when their governments at both the provincial and federal levels pursue green energy policies without understanding the costs.

What happens is that everyone suffers.

In an interview with Paul Wells in Maclean’s magazine, Wynne, now an MPP who isn’t running again in the June election, was asked about issues where she felt she hadn’t been good at listening to advice.

“Well, I score myself very low on the electricity price,” Wynne said.

“I believed that the investments that we had made in the electricity sector were important … We were going to make big changes in terms of the supply mix and greening the grid and investing in the grid. I think it’s $50 billion that we invested in upgrading the grid. I believed in that.

“But I remember sitting beside Gerry Phillips (Dalton McGuinty’s minister of energy at the time) in many meetings and he would say ‘We’re piling up a lot of debt here. Electricity prices are going to have to go up. How are we going to pay for this?’ I heard it. But as a member of caucus and cabinet, I don’t think I took it seriously enough.

“Then when I was premier, obviously the fact I made the decision to sell off part of Hydro One fed into that — the conflation of those issues. It was absolutely a huge factor in my downfall.”

In Ontario under McGuinty and Wynne, their now-scrapped Green Energy Act contributed to a doubling of electricity prices in a decade, cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in the manufacturing sector and increased energy poverty.

That occurs when families have to struggle financially just to heat, light and power their homes, weighing those costs against other necessities such as rent and food.

According to two Ontario auditors general reports, the Liberal government, ignoring the advice of its own experts, overpaid $9.2 billion for green energy — buying it at two times the U.S. average price for wind power and 3.5 times for solar power.

Because the 20-year contracts it signed with green energy developers required that these expensive and intermittent forms of energy had to be purchased first by the system operator, before all other forms of energy, the electricity grid became less efficient.

Then the Liberals played election politics with taxpayers’ money, cancelling two politically unpopular natural gas power plants needed to back up wind energy.

That resulted in a billion-dollar scandal and the jailing of a senior Liberal political aide to McGuinty for destroying government documents.

The one thing the Liberals did right — eliminating the use of coal to produce 25% of Ontario’s electricity — was accomplished using nuclear power, which doesn’t emit greenhouse gases, and natural gas, which burns at half the carbon intensity of coal.

Wind and solar power weren’t needed to do the job. They were a hugely expensive boondoggle and paying for them will haunt Ontario taxpayers and hydro consumers for decades to come.

Given that, Wynne’s realization she should have listened to advice about what the costs would be, is too little, too late.