Dear Minister Chiarelli,

I have taken your advice to heart and made sure my energy literacy meets with the latest knowledge and understand of my electricity bill by reading all of the latest instructions posted on all of your recommended websites as well as using all of your calculations according to your math.  Somehow my cup of Tim Horton’s coffee seems to cost me more.  Could you please let me know where you get these special deals at Tim’s?

Honestly I really do agree that we should focus on conservation.  I have done that to the point where I actually decided to leave my house and live outside of the Province where I can use the same amount of electricity, but at a much lower rate. That should really help conserve electricity in Ontario!  Unfortunately I did have to leave minimal electricity on so my pipes would not freeze over the winter.In spite of all this conservation, when I received my first bill, it was still a shocker.  Perhaps I need a little more instruction from you personally. 

I am sending you some details so that you can do your math magic and make everything more comprehensible. First off, even though this SMART METER was installed on the pole near my house where the old meter used to be, my bill informed me right at the top:

“We read your meter XXXXX054 on November 22, 2013     053313.4500
We read your meter on October 24, 2013                      -052377.1380
The difference in meter readings                                   000936.3120

Metered usage in kilowatt-hours (936.3120×1)=936.3120 kWh “Wow! 

That is some smart meter to compute all of that. Now from the meter reading the bill also tells me that since summer rates are effective until October 31, according to my meter reading I am receiving 7 days of the “summer rate” and the remainder is billed at the “winter rate”.This smart meter also seems to know exactly how to split up the usage of 936.312 kWhours between ON-Peak, Mid-Peak and Off-Peak rates as well as the amount of kWhours used on summer rates and winter rates. 

That is some SMART METER.  And, even though my bill says Hydro One read my meter, there was not even a person that had to come to the house physically to check on this. 

I guess SMART METER knows best!

Now I won’t bore you with the details of the breakdown.  Suffice it to way I really work on conservation when my off-peak is only half as much as my on-peak and Mid-peak is less than half of my on-peak.  I could of course persevere and use ALL my electricity during off-peak leaving much more available for all those factories that need it during the daytime on-peak hours, especially since all those turbines generate power at night when we can’t possibly use all that power and have to beg others to please take it “cheap”.   Of course then my pipes would freeze, especially in the winter when global warming still does not keep daytime temperatures above freezing.

So when I add up all the various prices charged for electricity and look at my total bill, I discover that the Delivery charges, the Regulatory charges and the debt retirement charge along with HST are 2-1/2 times as much as what I pay for electricity.  Incidentally the bill is not as SMART as my SMART METER.  I had to total this up on my calculator.

Now, isn’t it nice, the Ontario government is taking 10% of my bill from some other tax payers (not me hopefully) that have been added to Ontario’s treasury via revenue streams and giving me this as a credit on my bill!  That almost pays for that miserable HST!  Now for some reason when the last rate adjustments were made it left something stranded that I didn’t have to pay for right away, so there is this little $11.39 amount left hanging there at the end of my bill.  This seems to be on every bill, but it does not tell me when it will stop or when I finally have to pay or get this adjustment???  Perhaps I have to go through all my bills and figure this one out. While I am informed that this is Real-Time Billing Payment Plan with $0.00 remaining, it still extends $11.39.   I don’t think you could answer this just off the top of your head?My bill also has little * to make sure I understand that there is electricity lost somewhere along the wires.  It really does not tell me how much, but that this is accounted for in the delivery charge so I just have to trust you and Hydro One on this.  The charges I am told are fixed, but not ALL fixed and some are variable depending on how much electricity I use. 

Do you perhaps know how the breakdown is calculated?  And then I am certainly relieved that a) the electricity costs billed to me are the part that is subject to competition, and b) that the regulatory charges help to maintain the reliability of the grid, include costs associated with funding the Ministry of Energy (which surely includes your salary and your pension) considering all the hard work you are doing in trying to make us energy literate, not to mention that although no one consulted me to see if I am in agreement, but

I certainly am contributing via my bill payments to infrastructure (I am assuming all the poles, wires, transformers, etc.) and not least of all the wonderful renewable energy programs which even though we can’t use all that electricity that renewable energy provides we should be proud to make our contribution – even if we now have to pay extra for a lot of these to be shut down do not produce electricity.  That last part will no doubt help preserve a few bats and eagles from being sliced up.I certainly hope you can tell me how I could conserve better, or even if I used NO electricity, would I still have to pay to nevertheless maintain Ontario’s infrastructure, power lost on the lines before it never got to my house, and certainly to keep all the blades spinning on those big towers that produce electricity that is not needed and have to be shut down, but so these companies don’t lose any money and might leave Ontario or go bankrupt, we still have to keep paying them to not produce electricity. 

I guess all those charges would still be on my bill – did I hear somewhere this was a global adjustment assumingly factored into the delivery charge?    It does not really mention that term on MY bill.If you have a problem answering my questions perhaps you could first refer to advice you may not have read yet.  You could link in to these and you might find them helpful since it states you are firmly in charge of our hydro bills:http://ep.probeinternational.org/2013/12/12/parker-gallant-minister-of-energy-bob-chiarelli-firmly-in-control-of-our-hydro-bills-2/or if all else fails, perhaps you will find some experts here:http://freewco.blogspot.ca/2013/12/energy-planning-in-ontario-who-do-we.htmlI am certain Parker Gallant has written quite a few letters and columns that surely would augment the recent suggestions made by Ontario’s Auditor General.Then again, I was just reading the China’s renewable energy seems to have problems with both solar and wind on life support.
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2013/12/09/why-chinas-renewables-industry-is-headed-for-collapse/Perhaps you feel that China needs help from Ontario and your long term energy plan has backed off nuclear and wants to include lots of wind and solar. 

That certainly is generous and the some 130 wind turbines recently added within several of projects newly approved should help out with China’s production /sale problems.  No doubt China will extend their gratitude and certainly your advice on how all the people of Ontario should better manager their power consumption are also grateful to you for your generous advice.If Ontario has a problem with revenue streams, certainly the World Bank will stand by to help and the IFM is known to also give good advice on how to better manage our consumption of everything. 

Perhaps they would like to take part in the next Webinar.  They might help better than all those engineers that worry too much about engineering and science.  They perhaps can certainly help with financing all those new projects.

With best intentions, Your faithful contributor in Taxation
and without malice

Karen Breitbach

PS—Not for me, but all those people who save on electricity by not using their clothes dryers during the winter,  do you have a good advice on how best to handle frozen clothes?