What’s up with Smart Meters?
The total impact of the smart metering program on the ordinary household bill is in the range $50/year and then declining after that. The Green Energy Act impact on that same bill by next year will be well over $100/year and increasing after that.
Premier McGuinty says that he is looking at cutting the night time power rate. The massive wind power program he is pursuing and the return of two big Bruce reactors next year is driving up the cost of power at night. Any rate reduction in night time power rates will have a knock on effect on daytime rates.
Ontario’s smart meter program will provide some benefits like reliability improvements that help to offset some of the costs. The smart metering program is more visible to consumers than obscure issues like feed-in tariff and so smart meters are getting attention.
Consumers are getting ripped off by a host of bad policies, but smart meters are at worst a minor part of the problem.
There are additional comments in the Ottawa Citizen, September 16th.
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/technology/Hudak+vows+give+voters+break+smart+meters/3531916/story.html
I’ll trust you, but both the line loss and delivery charges on my bill escalated at the same time the smart meters were being installed.
Either the gov’t doesn’t believe you, or they are hiding other expenses in the delivery and line loss charges
Almost every element of your bill is soaring, including delivery costs, simultaneous with the introduction of smart meters but smart meters are not a major cost driver. I am not surprised that line losses costs are rising because that cost is driven by rising energy cost. If the line loss ratio is worsening, that would not be driven by smart meters.
Just across the river in Quebec, my Father in-law got his power bill for the month of August. The amount of power he used was double the power he used at his property in Ontario over the same period. His Quebec bill was $35.00. His Ontario Bill $102.00!
The actual cost per KWH on an Ontario hydro bill is about 1/3 the total amount of the invoice. A few cent’s/kwh on only a portion of that 1/3rd can only make a small difference. As most other charges on the bill have increased and are continuing to increase, TOU will unlikely result
in any savings sufficient enough to cause a change in the power consumption patterns of the people. Even if Dalton drastically reduces the off peak price or more likely, drastically increases the peak price.
TOU is actually moot anyway because; businesses are unlikely in the extreme to shift their consumption patterns at all. It is people going to work, school, etc that increases power consumption, not daytime increases in residential use. If this was not the case, weekends would be peak times. They are not. Thusly, businesses will be doing one of two things in response: They will pass these increased costs onto the consumer or they will leave the province. In either case, the people pay!
As our off peak consumption rarely falls below 11,000MW, this can be entirely met by our nuclear generation assets. Better management of dispatchable generation assets, mostly in the form of hydro and natural gas, will ameliorate the surplus baseload problem far more effectively then smart meters and wind turbines!
TOU and GEA/FIT are contradictory policies that will both cause electricity rates to skyrocket well into the future, further degrade the environment and devastate the economy.
Why do I know this? Because that has been the effect to date and more is coming down the pipe!
Sean Holt.