Hydro: The Decline and Fall of Ontario's Electric Empire

[Jamie Swift] and [Keith Stewart] have written a sweeping, often entertaining, hut not always evenhanded account of Ontario Hydro's "decline and fall" from its former glory days as one of North America's most technologically sophisticated and cost-effective electrical utilities. They portray a "swashbuckling" and "apparently omnipotent institution" (x) that played a formative role in shaping modern Ontario. It is the story of a reckless and monopolistic crown corporation which operated largely independent of its putative political masters. In the process it constructed an unsustainably expensive infrastructure of nuclear generators, and left the province's taxpayers holding the bag as the ultimate guarantors of the utility's soaring multibillion dollar debt. Yet Swift and Stewart also give Hydro its due, acknowledging that until its legislated dismemberment into five separate arms in 1998 it could always be trusted to keep the lights on and the factories humming. Not surprisingly, therefore, Ontarians developed a curiously dichotomous attitude towards their utility, being simultaneously irked by its arrogance and fiscal excesses, yet quietly proud of the scale and complexity of Hydro's technological achievements. Many will agree with Swift and Stewart's critical assessment that irresponsible dawdling by a succession of provincial governments over several decades is largely to blame for the fact that Ontario, long an exporter of its surplus electricity, now is regularly threatened with power blackouts on the hottest summer days. Far fewer will be persuaded by the authors' unbridled faith in the "soft energy path" (207) of conservation as the only solution for restoring Ontario's self-sufficiency in electrical energy. Few activities are more technologically complex than the large-scale generation and delivery of electricity. Yet much of the evidence Swift and Stewart present to demonstrate the potential of conservation as a viable alternative to building new generating capacity is weakly impressionistic. When Ontarians looked for an escape from their dependency on foreign fuel supplies in 1902, they demanded to know the hard economic facts before agreeing to switch to [Adam Beck]'s public utility model. Their descendents today, when deciding on how best to solve their own vulnerability in electricity supply, will be no less demanding. Swift and Stewart's Decline and Fall vividly presents the soft energy side of the debate, but it is far from being the full s