ERO #019-8307 I do not…

ERO #019-8307

I do not support this proposal to amend the Ontario Energy Board Act, 1998.
I do support the Ontario Energy Board’s groundbreaking decision to eliminate the existing subsidy for the installation of gas lines for new residential and commercial businesses starting in January 2025.

At the 2023 UN climate negotiations (COP28), countries around the world collectively agreed on the need to leave oil, gas and coal in the ground. This acknowledgment that we must phase out all fossil fuels and scale up renewable energy to effectively tackle the climate crisis is long overdue and extremely significant: Business as usual is no longer an option. The proposal by Enbridge Gas to increase customer fees to subsidize new gas lines flies in the face of everything we are trying to achieve to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

We are also in the middle of an affordability crisis. We should be incentivizing builders to install heat pumps, which are better for the environment and cheaper to run over the long term. In the last two years, my family has installed a heat pump to replace both our gas furnace/air conditioner and our water heater. We are proud that we no longer use any fossil gas in our home. This has cost us thousands of dollars to accomplish because we have had to do a retrofit including upgrading our electrical system. Clearly, it makes more sense to make the transition to green heating solutions when building new houses to avoid having to do retrofits down the road as we decarbonize, and to save heating and cooling costs for homeowners and businesses.

By requiring Enbridge Gas to charge developers the costs of gas connections in full and upfront instead of spreading the costs over 40 years, the OEB has increased transparency and customer choice. Perhaps homeowners would prefer to install a heat pump and use electrical appliances instead of filling their homes and worsening climate change with methane-laced natural gas emissions.

The OEB took over a year to make their decision. This process involved tens of thousands of pages of documents analyzed in public hearings, dozens of interviews with experts across the energy industry, and included stakeholders such as the Federation of Rental-housing Providers of Ontario, the Building Owners and Managers Association, and the Independent Electricity System Operator (The Narwhal). They produced a thorough report detailing that fee hikes are not in the public interest (Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment).

Minister Smith’s plans to increase his authority and to override this decision not only sets a dangerous precedent by undermining an independent regulatory body, but this proposal will result in increased energy costs for ratepayers and will lock the province into additional emissions for decades.