Ontario Prepares to Launch it's next illegal energy program

Two stories leading to a future one.

Ontario's Minister of Energy is ratcheting up the excitement over an electricity pricing incentive to lure new industry.

Bentley announces new industrial power incentive

A new province-wide industrial electrical incentive will be launched in January, according to Ontario Energy Minister Chris Bentley...
Bentley said at the outset larger industries will be invited to take advantage of the program, which will provide electricity at a discounted price. The program will eventually be made available to smaller firms.
Although details of the program were sketchy, Bentley said it will offer two-thirds off the regular price of electricity to companies willing to start up a second or third shift to create jobs.
Bentley said Ontario has a good supply of electricity...

The entire article can be read at The Chatham Daily News.  The background is that continued contracting of supply, particularly intermittent renewable supply, continues to drive up total cost while driving down the market, HOEP, rate; which has lead to the current situation where 2/3rd's of the commodity charge in Ontario is for the 'global adjustment' charge which recovers the full cost of contracts from ratepayers, and a charge now being manipulated to drive down price for industry.

...meanwhile in the land that dictated Ontario's Feed-in Tariff Policies, Germany, the pricing scheme is under threat from European trade watchdogs, because the EEG (the mechanism through which the cost of contracts is recovered from ratepayers) is now heavily gamed to exclude more and more industry - taking it from being tolerated to being increasingly seen as a subsidy.

EU may consider German EEG "state aid"

German economics daily Handelsblatt reports that it has received a three-page memo from Brussels to the German government. The bone of contention is not feed-in tariffs themselves, as was the case a decade ago, but rather industry exemptions. From the beginning, the EEG has always allowed for large energy-intensive industry facing international competition to be exempt from the EEG surcharge in order not to scare such industry out of the country. But Merkel's coalition has a widely expanded the practice, with the number of firms applying for such exemptions ballooning from 700 to more than 2,000 this year.
Apparently, Brussels has had enough and decided that the German government is picking and choosing some firms over others – which, in fact, it is. Unfortunately, Handelsblatt writes (in German) that investigations into whether the revised EEG of 2010 now constitutes state aid could lead to the complete abolishment of the EEG, which would then be replaced by "a quota system"...

The entire article may be read at Renewables International

Update: as soon as I'd posted this the excellent German Energy Blog posted Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) Compliant with EU State Aid Rules?

The Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) is under review for compliance with the EU state aid rules, various newspapers reported. The EEG promotes renewable energy sources by stipulating fixed feed-in tariffs. Due to the costs involved, the EEG feed-in tariff scheme has seen many revisions over the last years. Yet the EEG surcharge for consumers has risen by 47% to 5.277 ct/kWh in 2013, as recently announced.
The Commission is reportedly looking into the feed-in tariff scheme as well as exemptions of energy-intensive companies from the so-called EEG surcharge with which consumers pay for the difference between the fixed feed-in tariffs paid pursuant to EEG for renewable energy fed into the grids and the sale of the renewable energy at the EEX energy exchange by the transmission system operators (TSOs).

 Continue Reading at the German Energy Blog