I'm sure a lot of people are upset over McGuinty's breaking his promise to keep electricity prices capped, but I think that it's actually a good thing. Mind you, I don't support the fact that he's breaking a promise, I just support making consumers pay actual market price.
I know it means paying higher electricity bills, but I think that this is the only way people are going to wise up and start conserving energy. We probably all believe that wasting electricity is a bad thing in principal, but I'd say that very few people actually believe it in practice. So, the incentive to change our practice is, as usual, money. We might not change our lifestyles to match ideals, but we sure can and do when it saves money.
Personally, I know that I have a bad habit of leaving my computer on for hours to download stuff. Not just a couple of hours, but more like 5, 6, or more hours. Now I'm already pretty good about turning off lights and such, but as soon as I heard about the removal of the price cap, I started looking into energy efficient lightbulbs--which I wouldn't have bothered with otherwise.
There are some things I'd like to see big businesses doing too. I went to work on Saturday, and the BMO-tron and Scotia's stock update thing were all on, even though there wasn't really anyone around to look at them. I remember in the black out days how the banks and other companies downtown shut off all those things, and I think it'd be a good thing to maintain, on weekends at least. Not only that, but our building is WAY too warm! I mean, it's warm enough to be uncomfortable in anything more than a t-shirt, but who really wears t-shirts in the winter?
Guess the only thing I'm worried about in terms of the removal of the price cap is it's effect on low income families and small businesses. The removal of the price cap is good if it gets people to save energy, but if people have to freeze to death because of it... McGuinty says, I think, that he's going to work something out to deal with this, but I wonder if that's really going to happen? Anyway, I'll be initerested to see what the outcome of all this is.
