The Long Term Energy Plan for Ontario is under review.There is much discussion these days about how Ontario’s demand for electricity should be met; Municipal Staff and Council are providing input. As a resident, business owner in Ontario your input is wanted also. The least time demanding way for residents and businesses to provide input is to complete the online survey. If you have time you can provide more input by providing input on the Environmental Registry. Here is the survey link. Here is link to Registry. Deadline for input is Sept. 16.

At September 09 meeting Council will consider a report from Staff reviewing input for Minister of Energy and its agencies.As reviewed in the report there are several reviews underway,each with a different focus. You can read the report here.

I think the Long Term Energy Plan is very important as apparently the “big” power plant concept is finally being considered obsolete/old thinking; we are going to move to smaller, localized sources. I believe the latter are critical if we are to move to the concept of a “smart grid.” With the latter you eliminate the long power corridors, and thus eliminate a number of problems: high cost maintenance; inefficiencies as electricity is lost as it is distributed; and finally, the vulnerability of a large number of people to weather conditions damaging the power corridor. Our total quality of life is not going to be much improved if we end up with small sources of electricity being thoughtlessly located where ever there is space. There needs to be a comprehensive plan.

The Long Term Energy Plan MUST include conservation with a much higher priority than previously. Last I read Ontario is still an energy hog as our consumption continues to be 50% greater than New York state.

Finally, this review of the energy plan has given us good opportunity to comment on the current process for siting generation locations. Given our experience with the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) exercise to site a gas fired generator in Northern York Region, we have significant feedback on the current process for selecting a site. As summarized the Environmental Screening Process is simply inadequate. The dynamic of a municipality having to assess and deal with multiple proponents is unacceptable. The focus on price for selecting a “winner” and yet expecting municipalities to negotiate municipal benefits(which will cause a proponent to increase price to recover cost of those benefits) is not productive. And the segmenting of the infrastructure required to actually deliver the electricity into separate studies is poor.

In summary: there is clearly opportunity to improve how new sources of electricity are brought on stream.