Mr. Premier, 135 is greater than 80

Green energy costs will drop: McGuinty | Toronto & GTA | News | Toronto Sun

Here's what Ontario's premier said:

“Think about the original price of a calculator — of a VCR, a DVD player, a flat screen TV, or a cell phone,” McGuinty said, standing in front of three electric cars.
“What happened to the price of our technologies over time? With innovation and imagination on the part of people, we found a way to bring those costs down. Whether we’re talking about wind turbines, solar panels or electric cars, we know which way those costs are going.”

It is nice to take successful technologies to illustrate reduced costs with increased production, but most expensive products fail. A responsible energy policy probably wouldn't continue to throw money at things that shows no indication of being successful in any market.




Here's a summary of pricing, taken from the April 7th, 2011 CNSC hearing testimony of Mr. Jennings, who was noted as "the Assistant Deputy Minister of Regulatory Affairs and Strategic Policy Division at the Ontario Ministry of Energy"

...in Ontario, wind is paid thirteen and a half cents a kilowatt hour, and that is up from, I guess, about five years ago when we first did procurement for wind. The first procurement was about eight cents a kilowatt hour, so that’s -- that’s turned out to be a higher cost than -- than the original procurements.

The government response to the 66% inflation, in only 5 years, was to call for 5 times more wind supply in the Supply Mix Directive (SMD).

Here's another example:

And so I guess maybe to start off, it is often suggested that combined heat and power is very cost effective, very easy to do and there is a lot of potential for it. This competitive RFP was for 1,000 megawatts. They ended up only getting 414 megawatts of responses, so those were all taken.
In terms of the cost in that plan, they ranged. The cost of the products procured ranged from about 11.5 cents up to about 24 cents a kilowatt hour, so these are quite expensive projects.
There have been negotiations with some individual proponents since then. They would tend to be at the higher end of that range

In this instance the government  reiterated it's demand, through a directive from the minister, to procure more CHP regardless.


Green energy prices may very well drop - but it is unlikely these 'green' sources will, and more unlikely they would under the leadership that has run the prices up in the past 4 years.