By Patrick Burles - Lethbridge News Now

Consumer advocate optimistic about future of electricity in Alberta

Feb 26, 2017 | 11:40 AM

LETHBRIDGE — Despite concerns across Alberta regarding the provincial government’s move away from the deregulated power market and phase out of coal, consumer advocate David Gray says the outlook is bright for Albertans.

The president of Gray Energy Economics and CEO of AIM Energy Pros, discussed the topicat SACPA (Southern Alberta Council on Public Affairs) Thursday afternoon.

“I think we’re actually going to have probably the smoothest transition of any of the electricity markets that have tried to move more towards renewables, for the reason that they’ve learned from the mistakes of other jurisdictions,” Gray stated before the session.

“The biggest thing that they learned from other jurisdictions, was that if you actually go out and have a procurement process that’s backed by the government and then competitive, you get very good results out of it, you get renewable energy at three-and-a-half to four cents a kilowatt hour,” he continued. “You saw this in Quebec, where they went out and procured about 4,000 megawatts of wind power, and they’re getting tremendous prices on it.

“You take advantage of the amount of competition there is world-wide to produce new generation — particularly renewable generation — in a way that keeps the cost down for the consumer,” Gray added.

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From there, he also touched on some of the major failures that have shaped the way our province has moved forward with the transition.

“Ontario was a great example of what not to do for procuring renewables,” Gray said bluntly. “They first had a program where they were paying 70 to 80-cents a kilowatt hour for solar, that was a disaster. Then they had another program where they sole-sourced it through their cabinet to a Korean consortium to build a bunch of wind power, that was also a disaster. You had on top of that, the ongoing debt charges they have for Ontario Hydro and particularly their nuclear fleet, and it’s added up to Ontario being one of the least competitive jurisdictions in North America for electricity, and it’s killing their industry.”

Wrapping up the conversation, Gray pointed out that the way our province did things before, wasn’t without its flaws.

“The long and the short of it is that the market design that we had, which was a energy only, really red and tooth and claw electricity market, had the potential — and we’ve seen it in the past — to drive prices up during times of shortage to very high levels, and the attitude of government was, if grandma can’t pay, then grandma can shiver.”