In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant’s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario… until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud…. when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.

If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.

Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.

Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:

“The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!”

You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.

As he also says:

“We Ontario ratepayers should be both shocked and disappointed at how IESO under the directions of Stephen Lecce, Ontario Minister of Energy and Mines are FAILING to manage the provision of reliable and cheap electricity instead of continually handing out our ratepayer dollars to those providing us with unreliable and intermittent energy! When the Doug Ford led Ontario Progressive Conservatives were running against the Wynne led Ontario Liberals they promised to ‘fix the mess’ but they have failed to do anything to fix the mess!”

But it’s hard to be shocked, let alone disappointed, when it’s so intentionally opaque. And now off to New England, where the Manhattan Contrarian leads off indignantly that:

“A fair criticism of politicians is that they all lie, at least to the extent of engaging in extreme levels of spin and/or exaggeration to put the best face on their proposals and programs. But some political lies are worse than others, in that they go far beyond mere spin or exaggeration and get into the blatantly counter-factual. In that category are the claims of many of the governors of the Northeastern states that they are promoting energy ‘affordability.’ These lies are particularly consequential in that they involve very large economic effects and vast waste of resources.”

Oh. That. And how? Well, see, a lot of it is the “Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative” or RGGI which, he rightly surmises, will not be familiar to many people. So he links to and quotes their website:

“The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a cooperative effort among the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont to cap and reduce power sector CO2 emissions.... RGGI is the first market-based, cap-and-invest regional initiative in the United States. Within the RGGI states, fossil-fuel-fired electric power generators with a capacity of 25 megawatts or greater (‘regulated sources’) are required to hold allowances equal to their CO2 emissions over a three-year control period.”

Hold what? Who? Hang on.

It seems that the website’s a bit behind. Virginia had withdrawn from it under a Republican governor but rejoined under a Democrat. (And Pennsylvania withdrew under a Democratic governor because of a deal with a Republican-controlled legislature.) But basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability. So no wonder it’s opaque:

“RGGI sets the amount of the allowances, and then they are auctioned off to the utilities (and others). Over time, the amount of allowances available intentionally decreases. The price that the utilities pay for the allowances then gets added into the consumer electricity bills…though the whole idea is to drive the price up in order to force a decrease in consumption, the mechanism by which the additional cost gets included in your electric bill is structured to be as opaque as possible. You will not find a line item on your bill to tell you how much of what you must pay is attributable to the artificial added cost from RGGI.”

He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:

“Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.”

Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:

“remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid [sic] when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability.’”

Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.