Hydro-Quebec rates go up
Hydro-Quebec rates have just gone up by 0.9%, topic of a protest Monday downtown. TVA notes that the coming of April means 50,000 clients may have the plug pulled for non-payment, a means of leverage the utility is forbidden to use in wintertime.
What happened to that $1.5 billion Hydro-Quebec has wrongly pocketed? I’d be happy if they used some of that to pay up the arrears of residential customers before divvying it up and giving us all a break with it. Or is it just going to quietly be shuffled away into government coffers?
Kevin 10:52 on 2019-04-02 Permalink
The extra money collected was placed into general coffers.
To compensate, Hydro increases were well below the rate of inflation for the past three years.
Hydro went up .7% in 2017, 0.3 % last year, and 0.9% this year, while inflation has been about 1.5% each year.
In other words, everyone already got their discount, but because the individual amounts involved are so small nobody noticed.
Douglas 11:26 on 2019-04-02 Permalink
Hydro Quebec doesn’t have any competition for energy supply. Its a shame they get to do whatever they want.
Kate 11:40 on 2019-04-02 Permalink
Douglas, is it not sufficient that Hydro floods vast areas of northern Quebec for its dams and puts pylons wherever it likes? We don’t need multiple utilities competing to despoil the landscape.
We pay less for electricity here than almost anywhere. My complaint is not with the rates, it’s that after having it clearly demonstrated that Hydro over-collects, it just sits there like a dragon on its pile of gold.
Competition is not always the golden calf.
Faiz Imam 14:02 on 2019-04-02 Permalink
It also shows a lack of knowledge to other jurisdictions with more private power companies.
All sorts of jurisdictions have private power, from single private entities that own everything from the generation to the home, to more complex systems where production, transportation and last mile metering are separate. With payments being made for various services rendered.
Sometimes its effective, but often its less safe, more expensive and poorly managed than how we do it.
Also, we are not a completely private system either. If you want to build your own wind farm, you can do it and sell your power to HQ and make a profit, a number of groups are doing just that, with various amounts of subsides.
Brett 09:03 on 2019-04-04 Permalink
If they’re doing it with subsidies, that can’t mean that they’re making a profit. Otherwise whats the point of the subsidy?
Faiz Imam 15:38 on 2019-04-04 Permalink
The idea of a subsidy is mostly for early projects. major development in windfarms basically didn’t exist a decade ago, so there was little experience and little appetite to take on the risk to try it.
But now that a bunch of them are up and running, the idea is we can reduce or eliminate the subsidies and the industry can sustain itself.
Also, prices for wind energy have gone down dramatically in the past decade, which also increases its competitiveness and reduces need for help.
Raymond Lutz 09:08 on 2019-04-05 Permalink
“But now that a bunch of them are up and running, the idea is we can reduce or eliminate the subsidies and the industry can sustain itself.” Like the nascent oil industry? Canada Leads The G7 In Oil And Gas Subsidies