I would like to respond to Martin Regg Cohn’s Jan. 10 column in the Toronto Star (“Power generates more numbers than sense”) about my office’s value-for-money audit of Ontario’s electricity power system planning, specifically this statement: “According to the auditor, conservation costs us money, so we’d best keep burning fossil fuels up in smoke?” It is alarmingly inaccurate to describe my audit report as an endorsement of fossil-fuel-generated electricity.

My report noted that Ontario currently generates a substantial electricity surplus, and we expressed a concern that despite this surplus, the province continues to spend significantly on conservation efforts. Specifically, we raised the question of whether now is the time to be spending tens of millions on conservation programs – and adding that spending to our electricity bills – when we end up selling the current surplus outside the province at a price significantly lower than the cost of producing it.

Read also:Fun with numbers on your monthly hydro bill: Cohn

We appreciate that questioning conservation is somewhat akin to questioning motherhood, but we believe the cost/benefit issue needed to be raised. However, for Mr. Cohn to write that “according to the auditor… we’d best keep burning fossil fuels?” because we dared to raise this concern does seem disingenuous at best, and just factually incorrect at worst.

I also want to clarify the “computational dispute” Mr. Cohn refers to regarding how much more people will be paying for electricity as a result of the 20-year contracts the Ministry of Energy has signed with renewable energy generators.

We compared the price of procuring renewable energy before and after the introduction of the “FIT” (Feed-in Tariff) program in 2009. Our comparison showed that Ontario’s FIT contracts guaranteed suppliers significantly higher prices than the pre-2009 contracts, even though renewable energy market prices were rapidly declining worldwide by 2009. Further, we noted that in assessing renewable power needs, and in negotiating these contracts, the government largely ignored the advice of its own experts.

Looking at the actual dollar amounts in the contracts before and after 2009, we estimated the difference to be $9.2 billion over the 20-year life of the FIT contracts. Mr. Cohn states that this is “a figure that is, ah, 73.5 per cent higher than what the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) came up with,” and concludes that there is clearly a computational dispute between the two parties.

In actual fact, the IESO does not dispute this $9.2-billion difference in actual dollars over the 20 years, but it took the analysis a step further by discounting the $9.2 billion actual dollars to a lesser amount based on various assumptions in an attempt to recognize the changing value of money over time.

There is one thing that Mr. Cohn and I do agree on. With respect to electricity prices, he notes that “it’s not just that costs are rising inexorably” and “confusion keeps growing about how these prices are calculated, starting with the incomprehensible ‘global adjustment’ that gets bigger with every bill.”

I think that most electricity ratepayers, as well as this auditor, would be in wholehearted agreement with these observations. The two electricity-related audit reports in my 2015 Annual Report did attempt to shed some light on some of the reasons why Ontario ratepayers face such high electricity prices. But, equally important, we offered constructive suggestions on a go-forward basis to help ensure better value for money for the high electricity prices that households and our industrial, retail, and commercial sectors (which do create most of the employment in Ontario) are asked to pay now and for the foreseeable future.

The headline on the online version of Mr. Cohn’s column talks about “fun with numbers,” but when most ratepayers open their monthly hydro bill and look at the numbers, I strongly suspect that “fun” is usually not the first word out of their mouths.

Bonnie Lysyk is the Auditor General of Ontario.