Piety, bromides, loving the earth mother....all this means that the big brains and the politicos will need to spend more money and exhale more rhetoric to defend the indefensible. Solar 'jobs' cost $200.000 in other people's money and generate zero electricity/power output. Wind Turbines have the same sad outcome. Unintended consequences of the Solar/Wind fetish includes a doubling of hydro rates, tens of billions of destroyed capital, and rolling blackouts.....

“Our study effectively finds that the ministry was remiss in not quantifying the knock-on effects of the push for 8,400 MW of industrial wind generation plants and the 2,600 MW of solar plants that are needed to achieve the goals outlined in the LTEP.

For example, the ministry did not adequately account for the fact that wind and solar require backup fossil-fuel generation to ensure no blackouts or brownouts occur. Solar will underperform when Ontario experiences cloud cover, and wind power underperforms when the wind dies down. Texas with almost 10,000 MW of installed wind capacity during a hot, dry and wind-deficient 2011 summer experienced rolling blackouts and had to restart mothballed coal plants. This provides real-time affirmation of the dangers in an Ontario system over-dependent on renewables.

Our study also brings out important issues such as the predilection of wind to produce power at the wrong time. Wrongtime delivery can be costly, causing Ontario to export power at a significant cost, to build expensive transmission facilities to manage wind and solar's unpredictability, and to spill cheap hydro. These all deplete revenues for Ontario Power Generation, thereby extending the time required before the province's "stranded debt" can be extinguished.

The Ontario Green Act promised to create 50,000 jobs. Our study concludes that each of those jobs will require a ratepayer subsidy of $200,000 annually, which effectively means that - as the LTEP reaches fruition - $10-billion will be extracted from ratepayers each year.

For the average ratepayer, an annual electricity bill will escalate from $1,700 per year to $2,800 by 2015 and by the time the renewables envisaged in the LTEP are largely in place (expected in 2018) an average ratepayer will be paying in excess of $4,000 annually - well over a doubling.”

Solar and Wind fetishism has been in vogue for 40 years. They produce less than 1 % of all energy output, yet they consume some $50 billion a year in subsidies and grants in North America. The only beneficiaries are the firms involved, the politicians who get kick-backs from the firms they 'champion' and fund, and those wonderful unions who get to expand their power whilst taking at least half of the $200.000 per annum, per job subsidy. Future pension costs should also be added to the above – sure to to total in the billions per annum as well. Jubilee. All for nothing, and all to blight the landscape with deformed non-functional and state subsidized green tech. One would have thought that the one-world, mother-earth wonders would be against the destruction of Gaia's beautiful face in the name of corporate profits and energy-Co2 consuming bureaucratic machines......