Alarming News
I recently completed a solar design for a client located in rural Ontario. By rural I mean not within a city but within an hour of Toronto’s borders. I was completely shocked to discover that this individual is paying 29.8 cents per kWh for electricity delivered to his home in Canada. Canada is a world leader in Energy supply from domestic resources. When you compare to a non-contiguous state such as Puerto Rico, one would expect that an island nation would pass on much higher utility costs to its customers. Not so. Even when considering that majority of the elements or prime movers for electricity production in Puerto Rico are obtained from shipping fossil fuel from the mainland. Currently, residential electricity prices in Puerto Rico are between 26 and 29 cents per kWh with business rates 4 to 5 cents higher. This is approximately two to three times the United States and Canada’s average blended rate other than Ontario, it seems.
Puerto Rico is rapidly moving towards diversifying its energy sources from its traditional dependence on expensive and polluting oil to cleaner, healthier, more reliable and affordable renewable energy. In Puerto Rico, although it’s credit worthiness is challenged, its utility is attempting to implement green energy alternatives. It has convinced developers of solar and wind to enter into long term power purchase agreements that yield a solid return to the developer and enable the utility to purchase the power generated at wholesale rates cheaper than they can currently produce their own power. The average PPA rate is paying 15- 17c per Kwh.
In Ontario, we are still struggling with the government’s decision for its early contract rates for its green energy initiatives. We are paying outrageous contract prices for solar roof top generation and large scale grid ready solar fields of between 35 and 89 cents per Kwh. Not to mention the people of Ontario are paying heavily for the botched agreement of the Liberal government where we were penalized for a Natural Gas power plant that was never built. Our penalty was in excess of 2.4 billion dollars. In natural gas terms, 2.4 billion dollars would have built a power plant equivalent to 2000 MWs, or enough power to provide for 2,000,000 homes. Had we followed or even considered the concept of purchasing power for a price less than we could produce it for we would not be facing another 40% rate increase in September.
So what’s the solution? Be aware efforts are afoot in various regions to start to penalize or tax home owners & business owners who exercise their right to remove themselves from the government and utility debt issues by producing their own power. There is nothing magical or concerning about stepping off the grid and reducing your costs. The security you have applying todays power production technologies allows you to sleep at night knowing you have invested in your own security. Gone are the concerns or considerations of being without power as our grid ages and continues to fail. Todays markets allow us to provide Solar hybrid systems at reasonable rates generating a 20% return on investment. Check out www.dsbmanagment.com for our consortium approach to energy alternatives.
