Ontario and Samsung seal $6.7 billion renewable energy deal
By Vlad Savov 
posted January 22nd 2010 2:21AM
posted January 22nd 2010 2:21AM
[Thanks, Dan]
posted January 22nd 2010 2:21AM
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One day that wind turbine next to the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto will be thought of as the the grandpappy of it all...
http://www.windshare.ca/images/243/87VQxp87eF.jpg
@To Hell
As I remember, Hydro Ontario is buying the power from that windmill at a lost. And half the time it's not spinning.
oh seal. i thought it read....
what a breathe of fresh air
WTF? 6.7 billion for 4% seems like quite a bit of spending when Nuclear is a superior bang for the buck alternative. As a resident of Ontario I feel another 407 scandal, or eHealth debacle coming on ... if you folks in the states thought you pay up the wazoo for taxes please trade places for a week. We Canadians pay taxes that at times it feels like the government is double dipping in the municipal, provincial, and federal levels all the time from gas, garbage, gst, pst, now hst? What next the breathing tax?
@Slowmoe
haha, you ever been to the UK?
@nabberuk Tell em bro they just don't understand how we Brits pay through the nose for everything!'
@m2h
A lot easier and safer than it used to be.
@m2h
shoot it to the moon, we dont need nuclear waste on our planet.
Is this the best way to jump start the production of energy from renewable sources: giving 6.7 billion of the taxpayers money to a foreign private corporation? Wouldn't be better and smarter to gradually increase the federal tax on the sale of fossil fuels so that energy produced from renewal sources naturally becomes more cost effective causing all kinds of Canadian companies to form to build and produce renewable energy? That would automatically decrease the burning of fossil fuels and the tax windfall could be used to pay for tax credits for being more energy efficient or other worthwhile projects.
@Watts right.. if it were that easy... also, take a look at. "Samsung will create 16,000 jobs in the area, 4,000 of them permanent."
@Watts Unfortunately people tend to just budget in the spending increases on fossil fuels rather than looking for alternative energy sources. If this method works then it may put down a marker which could be followed by the policies that you mention.
That big cash pays to power 500,000 people with clean energy. I'm not sure over the short that its worth it, but maybe 20-30 year as the price of coal and oil go up.:/
@dds1043 You're right, but this is a long term investment so the short term loss is expected. Doing the intentionally oversimplified math, this would mean that the U.S. would need to spend $4 trillion to provide renewable power to the entire population creating 2.4 million permanent jobs.
@GTMac Doesn't look too bad IMO. We've done worse with trillions.
Plus we could get the hell out of the Middle East now that they have the octane we would no longer need.
Not that it would ever happen, but still...
$3/watt is par for the hole. They are buying an awful lot, shoulda been able to get a better deal. Not sure why they are buying so much at once.
@Neros Fiddle 2,500 Megawatts (or 2.5 Billion watts) x $3 = $7.5 Billion they paid $6.7 Billion which is about an 11% discount based on your arithmetic. As for the size of the order, I guess the jobs were the incentive.
I think it's great, that Canadas makes this big effort to move towards renewable energy and become more independent of oil and coal. Over here in Germany 7% of the renewable energy was produced by wind in 2008, while renewable energy had a percentage of 14,8% in total energy production.
@Philipp Yep, you're right - We Germans sure are idiots, considering that even though we pay an arm and a leg for those 15.1%, we still get 82.3% of our power from fossil fuels because we rather destroy the environment as a whole than using nuclear power, which we use even less than renewable energies (11%).
GOSH, ARE WE STUPID. Especially considering how we subsidized those green energy companies here with billions just to have them all go down the crapper because of the cheaper Chinese competitors.
And just for the record: Canada already produces 25% of its energy hydroelectrically, and they only create 67% of their energy from fossil fuels. Stop acting as if people were catching up. They're ahead of us.
@cain I don't think he even implied that Canada is trying to play catch up. Your comments seemed a little overreactive! :D
"Over here in Germany 7% of the renewable energy was produced by wind in 2008, while renewable energy had a percentage of 14,8% in total energy production."
That just sounds like a statement. Not saying, wow Germany is doing so great or anything. Just that they produce such and such an amount. Great, people are using more renewable energy. Cheers all around. Can't we all just be happy about that? :)
@Nick Spacek Word up! I am just super happy that Canada is taking this direction. Thumps up!!!
@ cain I don't think it's stupid to invest into renewable energy. First of all it's good for nature and second it's mandatory to stay economically and technologically competitve. By the way: don't you know that uranium ressources are limited on earth?
@Philipp Thorium is the way to go. Enough of it for plenty of thousands of years, plus no long-term waste. That's plenty of time to get fusion reactors up and running. After that, who knows.
There are already a number of wind farms in Ontario. I don't think any of them belong to Hydro Ontario. And I think there is already a company in Canada the builds those windmills.
I think that the government should provide the money to the towns and cities so that they can manage their own wind farms and keep the profits locally.
There are already a number of wind farms in Ontario. I don't think any of them belong to Hydro Ontario. And I think there is already a company in Canada the builds those windmills.
I think that the government should provide the money to the towns and cities so that they can manage their own wind farms and keep the profits locally.
There are already a number of wind farms in Ontario. I don't think any of them belong to Hydro Ontario. And I think there is already a company in Canada the builds those windmills.
I think that the government should provide the money to the towns and cities so that they can manage their own wind farms and keep the profits locally.
@donv69 Whoops, how did that happen?
@donv69
"Whoops, how did that happen?"
may be your evil twin.
Anyways, while they are expensive, windmill are kinda cute, looks good, they are green and, the best of all, the more global warming = more wind = moar energy.
@magallanes
"Anyways, while they are expensive, windmill are kinda cute, looks good, they are green and, the best of all, the more global warming = more wind = moar energy."
I do like windmills but the Kennedy's and many environmental groups don't. Also, it's actually during colder periods (when equator to pole temperature gradients are higher) that we see higher winds.
@derekisthematrix
PS $7 billion/4,000 jobs = ~$175 million per job.
@derekisthematrix
OK I haven't had my coffee yet...that's $1.75 million/job :-)
How about bringing some tech industry jobs over here to Windsor. We need it. :/
Awkward handshake.
Good for Samsung. Bad for everyone else.
Having to use a foreign company for such things is typical in Canada where we put very little money into our education system to develop companies and industries. We are happy to pour billions into higher education for theortical science but very littel for practical science. Why couldn't Canada develop this stuff themselves? Same reason why Canada doesn't lead the world in mining technology, pulp and paper techology or other nautural resource areas where we have the resources, just not the technology.
Back to this deal: This is a deal *just* for the province of Ontario...the federal government is a right wing neo-con group of fools who only put money into the oil sector in Alberta. Just be aware that it's not Canada as a whole doing this, just Ontario.
Alberta sucks...couldn't resist but it really does suck...
@lip Agreed. Canada has the potential to do a lot of things yet it's always the case we look more towards our neighbours to the south to do things or look elsewhere. There needs to be more incentive to promote local businesses and local innovation to do things.
@lip Quebec's power is virtually entirely green/renewable (Hydro), and as far as I know it's in-house technology. Ontario could have just called up HydroQuebec and asked for some help; Ontario already buys a metric fuck-ton of power from Quebec anyhow.
@Guspaz while you are correct that quebec uses mostly hydro thats simply because of all of the water resources in the area. and quebec IMPORTS MORE power than ontario does. look it up. ontario is over 50% nuclear, and over 20% hydro power btw.
@Guspaz btw if you want stats, here they are: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Canada
ontario imports 3.7% of their power while quebec imports 14.4%
go to quebec for help? please.
Having worked for 2 of the major energy suppliers, all I know is that in the end, the consumer is fudged because the days of low utility prices will be gone. Even before this, there were options to get 'green' electricity and it was always more than the regular electricity.
So, 16,000 jobs "saved or created" for $437,500 CAD each? Though 12,000 of those will be laid off as soon as the initial setup is done...
And remember that most of that $7B will be going to Japan, not Canada.
Maybe Sammy will invest it in cheaper OLED manufacturing technologies? :)
@Michael Pollard
Why will most of the $7B be going to Japan? Am I missing something here, or is this guy just plain stupid? I guess the latter is true.
@huhuhuhu
Please don't assume others are stupid unless you wish others to assume you are stupid. Especially when you ask a question and have not yet waited for any response, which would tend to indicate you are the one who is stupid.
You asked if you are missing something, and in fact you are. The situation is simple. Most of the $7B will be spent on equipment, not salaries or other wages. While I am not an expert on such things, I would expect that high-efficiency generators are probably rather pricey. As such, most of the money will be going to Japan to pay for the equipment, and the relatively high manufacturing costs and administrative salaries (and recovered research costs and such), not the relatively low construction costs.
If I buy five new $20,000 servers from Sun, and I pay another $10,000 for on-site setup by Sun, all that $110,000 goes to California even though I live in Virginia. Unless Sun decides to use local contractors, the only money that stays in Virginia is the salary paid to the network administrator. And possibly sales tax. Even if they use local contractors, they get a relatively small percentage of even the installation costs, and none of the hardware cost.
I would expect that the recurring wages and salaries for the created 4000 employees are not even included in the $7B, though construction and installation should be.
(Besides, somebody with a username of "huhuhuhu" should be slow to call anybody "stupid".)
@Michael Pollard
You still haven't explained why most of the $7-billion will be going to Japan. Hint: Samsung is a South Korean company.
You may not be stupid, but your xenophobia is certainly poorly aimed.
@khaeru
Sorry. Yea, maybe not stupid, not xenophobic, but blatantly ignorant sometimes...
I guess I'm still in the 80's mindset that the US usually creates the tech; Japan then improves the tech, improves manufacturing in quantity (thus reducing unit cost), and adds new, desirable features (thus making the tech more marketable); Taiwan does a good job of reproducing tech while maintaining quality, and China copies everybody else without regard to legality or quality (thus making the tech far cheaper), spurring the competition to innovate and continuing the cycle.
I forget that the above cycle is not always accurate, and that for the past 20-30 years other countries (like South Korea and, to a lesser degree, Thailand) are now also doing a very good job at tech.
I'm probably missing some other ones, not to mention that no country can accurately be generalized in such a way, despite our ways of thinking leading us to do so.
And the little detail that Samsung did in fact originate in Korea and happens to be one of the largest electronics manufacturers in the world. I'm familiar with Samsung products, but forgot their history. But Wikipedia is your friend!
And I still want Samsung to put some of the revenue into reducing OLED cost...
@Michael Pollard
Sorry, I am not the one who is stupid. Did you realise you are too stupid not to know the which country those flags shown in the picture origin from? Maybe you should go back to high school to take some more geography classes. Then you would learn what Japan flag looks like.
@Michael Pollard
Also, I want to hear about the explanation about Thailand doing a very good job at tech. Wonder if this guy has ever been to Asia.
I do not think this person "forgot their (Samsung) history" but rather he never knew. Ignorant simply means stupid.
Seems Canada is in the same boat as the US pay others to do what we could but our governments wont do that. Support everyone but our own and cant figure out why everything is going down the tube.
So this is "Samsung Group", not Samsung Electronics Inc. that received the contract. These two entities are different. The former is the conglomerate, the latter is its sister company( a HUGE sister company at that).
@ConceptVBS
No. Samsung Electronics is not a sister company of Samsung Group. You would use the term "sister company" to describe a company which is owned by the same parent company as another company. So you can say Samsung Electronics is a sister company of Samsung Heavy Industries, but not Samsung Group. The correct term is subsidiary; Samsung Electronics is a subsidiary of Samsung Group, and your could also say that Samsung Group is the parent company of Samsung Electronics.