electricity

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The most advanced energy jurisdictions — European countries, a couple of dozen U.S. states, especially our neighbours in the northeast — are forging ahead with what’s called “customer-funded energy efficiency programs.” Amazingly, so are we. In fact, we apparently have one of the best in the form of Efficiency Nova Scotia, a fully fledged independent efficiency utility, funded by some $4.25 (shortly to increase by a dollar) monthly on your power bill. It’s the kind of thing the International Energy Agency says everyone should have.

It works. The latest to say so, it has just been revealed, is the Nova Scotia Energy Department in briefing notes to the new energy minister, Andrew Younger. It has proven to be an “extremely effective organization,” its savings greater than the cost of its programs and saving billions in avoided infrastructure costs that would be “far greater than an efficiency fee,” according to the notes. Since its startup in 2010, electricity use has gone down in Nova Scotia by nearly five per cent.

Younger groused that those notes were prepared by the NDP before he came to power. But they jibe with expert opinion on programs like this elsewhere. The calculation is that it costs three cents to save a kilowatt through efficiency measures whereas we pay 11 cents to use one.

Yet the new Liberal government keeps pecking at the hide of ENS over every little thing and seems determined to kneecap its independent funding and make Nova Scotia Power pay for it directly in order to fulfill an election promise to reduce power bills.

Younger claims he supports ENS’s work, knows what he’s doing and just wants to improve it. But if he’s really going to shift ENS’s funding to NSP, his claims are all in doubt. Breaking the “customer-funded” arrangement would bring about all kinds of warped consequences. Are Younger and the Liberals hell-bent to be penny wise and pound foolish to keep a misguided election promise?

Here’s some advice.

To the Liberals: break this promise. If you muck this up, you’ll drag your sorry butts to your political grave over four painful years, your power rates fetish biting you in the behind like Darrell Dexter’s jobs fetish did to him.

To the opposition: shut up about the Liberals breaking their promise. Let them break it in peace. Nova Scotia needs this promise broken. Besides, you guys are no strangers to broken promises. Indeed, in the wisdom of my years, let me proclaim this: if it weren’t for broken promises that shouldn’t have been made to begin with, we’d be far worse off than we are.

Again, for the Liberals: if the problem is the usual petty business of political credit (it’s someone else’s baby: the Rodney MacDonald Tories conceived it, the NDP got it going), here’s some more advice. In order to own it polititically four years from now, turn the jets of energy efficiency on full forward instead of into reverse. Your broken promise, more unwise in the making than the breaking, will be mostly forgotten.

Consider the upside of rising power rates. We’re rising to the challenge. It’s not all about ENS. A good part of our declining power consumption is simply as a natural reaction to rising rates. Around me here in Western Nova Scotia, heat pumps are suddenly the going thing quite on their own.

Indeed, a neighbour of mine, on electric baseboard heat, complained of power bills as high as $700. I suggested a heat pump. He had one installed, and his bill dropped by half — likely even more for the actual heating component — with a payback of maybe two years for the couple of thousand dollars it cost for the installation. “We can’t wait for our power bill now,” he said with a laugh the next time I saw him.

But he had to hear it by word of mouth. If everyone sitting there complaining about a $700 power bill — or a $700 oil fill-up every three weeks in winter — understood that they can fix the problem, we’d really be on our way. The reason they’re not is that politicians keep obscuring the real solutions by encouraging what I’ll call the waste-and-whine culture — waste it, then whine about the cost. The Liberals are not even the worst offenders. The Tories, in the last election campaign, would have frozen power rates for five years, revisiting the mess made by former premier John Buchanan, who blew $300 million between 1979 and 1986 doing just that and keeping energy policy in full catastrophic reverse. And the NDP lifted the provincial part of the HST on home heating energy, encouraging more waste and missing a chance to focus such help on the truly needy.

We haven’t even scratched the surface with this yet. We’re ahead with efficiency in Canada. Let’s stay ahead. It’s just up to the political class to show the way and stop encouraging waste-and-whine.

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Ralph Surette is a freelance journalist in Yarmouth County. This article was first published in the Chronicle Herald.

Photo: flickr/redjar

Ralph Surette

Ralph Surette

Ralph Surette is a veteran freelance journalist living in Yarmouth County.