Personally my main takeaway from the article is less that renewable energy sources are a good alternative to the grid but more that the monopoly Hydro One connection fees are outrageously high. $25 - $80k connection fees seem like extortion in rural Ontario where the average annual income is probably around $80k.
I wonder if they'll do a follow-up article next year to report how the solar systems performed over the long Northern Ontario winter...
In Northern California, Sacramento & other counties subsidized utility hookups for wealthy residents (lots of local tech and flight from SanFran) who wanted to live further out in the rural El Dorado Hills area. This had long term consequences of the city always being in debt and having to sprawl to stay ahead.
I see this as catering to the rich, who could have afforded it, simply because they wanted to live in palatial McMansions in the countryside and felt entitled to be accommodated.
I don't think it should be the obligation of the county to provide utilities if people want to live outside city limits.
If you want to live rural, you need to come up with the cash to get your utilities, otherwise too bad, live in the city limits.
There are very good reasons why there is a thing called "city limits", this is one of them.
A brand new septic system (bed & tank) could run you up that high, too, these days. And a well is pricey as well.
Living rural is a constant money drain. Though in theory you are building systems that can sustain your independence later. In theory. In reality, rarely the case.
Living urban is also a money drain. To get a decent sized place, you need to pay HoA fees, high rents, security deposits often get stolen, not to mention pet fees, parking fees, expensive QoL, exposure to pollution and noise, lack of quiet and solitude. I'm semi-rural now and while we do have to pay for well upgrades and power backup systems, we get a huge beautiful quiet piece of land for our money.
Thats why you go suburban. Low COL but high quality of services and infrastructure. It's amazing what you can accomplish if you don't care about the solvency of your community :D
And I like that you understand that choice and cost. I don't like the concept that tax dollars should be used to pay for the extremely high cost of electricity and other utilities for a small number of people to keep rural living costs low.
Earlier this month the water line from my well pump to my pressure tank just... exploded. Water gushed all over my basement until I remembered where the off switch for the pump was. I'm lucky I was home, because it would have just kept running until it got to a place where it could drain out (i.e. upstairs) or the power shut off because everything shorted out.
It's real bliss out here in the country, let me tell you :-) My son was home and got to hear me swear with words and tones that he'd never encountered before.
Yeah it would need to sit between the pump and the pressure tank. My existing shutoff valve is -- like most -- after the pressure tank. What I really need is something to cut the AC power to the well the moment water starts to touch the floor under the tank.
HOA's are in theory a choice. In practice, in many regions anywhere built out in the last 30 years (more?) years is covered by them and there is no real choice. I absolutely loath them for this reason. There is no "choice" about them when it comes to newer housing.
My parents live 15 minutes out of town in North Western Ontario and they end up paying $1000-$2000/month in winter to Hydro One for heating, even though they have a well insulated house. You are pretty much screwed. They know people who got solar and the government promised them a certain rate, and then went back on their word and those people got boned as they could no longer afford their 40k installations over 25 years. I've never heard anything good about Hydro One.
Oil tanks are dangerous and unpleasant things to store and maintain, and very dependent on road viability for the once or twice yearly top up. I've known plenty of people in the North East that used oil for heating and they all hated it, and I bet it's easier to get an oil truck to top up your tank in Massachusetts or Maine than it is in Ontario. Oh, and the oil tank is an explosion hazard if you need to do any work on it.
Wood heating is a lot of labor. It's sustainable if you have forest land, but still a ton of labor. Even pre-seasoned and delivered wood takes a lot of work. The general rule of thumb is that you need to envision literally filling your living space with wood in order to have enough to heat your home with wood burning stoves. Wood just doesn't put out the BTUs per pound that oil, coal, or other petroleum products do. Propane seems to be the go-to, but I know very little about storing and running your house off of it.
I think in the future the answer is going to be geothermal, or "ground source heat pumps". They work like reversible AC units that use ground temp water to extract heat from. They're more efficient than regular ACs, allowing you to heat your home with ~1/3 the electricity of regular resistance heating, but the installation costs in suburban areas are extreme due to the deep wells needed. If you live in rural areas though you can use shallower trenches to lay the tubing down below the frost line, making this a much more viable choice.
My parents installed Geothermal a few years ago, which was expensive, like 30k I think, and it's helped, but not a ton as the line is still going under a frozen river in the winter, so the prices I quoted above are after geothermal. I think I saw a comment thread a few months back about how a lot of people got taken by the promises of geothermal and how they don't really do much for people in cold areas. It's great in the summer mind you. My buddy who works for Hydro One said a lot of folks end up paying the same or more after the install of geothermal because of how cold it is, which is really unfortunate. I looked at a big, nicer house in Nova Scotia that had dual geothermal and I was just drooling until I got my hands on the heating bills and was so confused why it was still so expensive.
They don't have wood burning and they are too old to be able to handle it anyway, you'd die from all the wood you'd have to cut and move and deal with. They said oil wasn't viable, and I don't think their house is setup for it anyway. They are worried about snow removal where they live as it's just too much for them now and it's so easy to get stranded for days, even though the city does eventually plow that road.
Where they live it's regularly -30 to -40c in the winter. They were snowbirds until Covid hit.
Something does not compute. $1000 should be getting them ballpark 10'000 kWh of power. That is 14 kW of constant power use. Typical largest residential GSHP over here is 15-18 kW of heating at 4 kW compressor power. (usually COP in range 4-5 is specified at 0C input, 35C output) So unless the GSHP is woefully undersized, the house is terribly insulated and the resistive booster heater is running at full tilt, something is wrong with those numbers.
For saving money on heating the first step should be to waste less heat rather than making the wasted heat cheaper.
I’m not an expert, but it doesn’t sound like they installed the lines deep enough. I thought the point was that all groundwater is pretty warm compared to the air you’re trying to heat, at least if you go deep enough.
I think you're overstating the danger of oil tanks. You mention explosion risks, that's a very rare occurrence and could happen with gas or propane too. The real downsides of oil are the high prices and the carbon footprint.
Wood is at least much cheaper and has charming appeal, gas is cheaper too but not available in many districts. Propane is extremely cost ineffective for heating, it'd be much better to use any other type of heating if possible.
Sounds like they’re quite happy with the value provided by $1500-$2000/month from heating electrically.
Alas, if your home is well insulated, a newer wood stove should do the trick, but if moving it from a stack outside and cleaning ash is too much, I get it, stay electric.
Propane is delivered just like oil, but can be stored outside. Usually you get them refilled more often, so if road access is an issue, it’s not a great primary.
Propane freezes at 86 K; the lowest recorded temperature on Earth was 184 K.
There are a variety of things that can go wrong at low temperatures, like what happened with natural gas in Texas, but the propane itself isn't going to freeze.
As long as your tank is big enough, yes. The issue is propane is stored as a liquid, and when you draw it, it boils (and it must boil) but the evaporation makes the tank colder than ambient.
Boiling point of propane is -42C.
When it’s -30 and you’re drawing a lot of propane… yeah, your evaporation rate may suffer. Interestingly, a stiff wind is helpful here to warm the tank up to -30 (if it isn’t buried in wind-blocking and insulating snow…)
Propane tank heaters are a thing for this reason.
The issue in Texas was that you have regulators and pressure reducing valves, but going from high pressure to low pressure is cooling, leading to frozen valves/regulators because it wasn’t designed for liquid infiltration and the cold temps generated.
A wood catalytic converter stove will easily heat your main living areas and all you need is an area to store a few cords of wood, which does not need to be in your living area. It is more work to keep running but would save a ton of money as 1-2k of wood should get you all winter, not just a single month.
Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
If the government is going to insist on making money, then it should operate nationalised utilities, which provide a baseline service and cost, and if private enterprise can compete with that by offering a better product and/or cheaper service, then all the more power to them.
Having a situation where a single commercial entity has a monopoly position seems to be the second-worst option, just above "no service at all".
The system should either break even (which it doesn't do), or cost money (which means taxpayers subsidise it), or make money (which means users subsidise other taxpayers)
The question is to what extent should grid connections to new rural homes be subsidised by taxpayers, which is of course a political decision - just like to what extent roads, military, healthcare, education, oil production, etc should be subsidised.
A better solution may be to allow the subsidiy money to be used to provide grants for off-grid. It may be better for the taxpyer to give someone $30k to sort their power out, than to spend $40k on an electric line to their house.
> The question is to what extent should grid connections to new rural homes be subsidised by taxpayers, which is of course a political decision
100% agree. Not only that, but rural development is inherently connected to these other subsidies. Rural populations tend to have worse education, worse health outcomes, and more expensive roads/mile/capita. Not to mention the negative political externalities rural populations produce (maybe a modern US-only phenomenon).
> the negative political externalities rural populations produce
I'd argue that the causality goes the other way - people move to rural areas to escape the demands of the high-interdependency core. And I'd say much of our political divide is from that highly connected core extending its influence into the previously left-alone areas, first through broadcast media consolidation and now through social media and its consolidation.
I agree that many people move away from cities to "escape", but it's important to recognize that for many decades now, rural residents have received significantly more benefits from the government than they pay in taxes, while urban dwellers pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Essentially, those who live in cities are living within their means and subsidizing those who live in rural areas.
From an economic perspective, rural areas are still highly connected and interdependent - think roads, infrastructure, food, water, electricity, internet, transport networks. Those who move from cities to rural areas to "escape the demands of the high-interdependency core" simply shift from majority "producing" to majority "receiving" benefits from our interdependent society.
I'm a huge fan of rural living, but it is expensive. We as a society have decided to subsidize it to various degrees. I'm OK with this, but also think cheap, individual solutions should be used when feasible. For example, sewer lines are very expensive in rural areas, so most houses maintain their own septic tank. Rural houses often use a Propane tank they refill rather than a gas line hookup. They often have their own well for water. Thus, the high grid-connection fees in the article make sense, as rural residents can just build their own off-grid electricity production.
I agree with most of your comment, but it's a bit too judgemental.
The main political wedge we're facing is the absolute destruction of the manufacturing-production economy (which requires open space and other distributed capital), in favor of the finance-metagame economy (which doesn't). In this wider context talking about subsidies is a bit disingenuous, because if we had a balanced economy then resources would be flowing to the rural areas from the urban areas as revenue of private companies. Instead, most of the resources for building out non-urban infrastructure are flowing abroad, while the little remaining bit trying to mitigate the hollowing out gets called a subsidy.
It's easy to get frustrated with the regressive hypocritical politics, especially with the last few years of objectively utter nonsense. But if that is ever going to get fixed it's going to require even more resources going to rural areas to alleviate the poverty driving the anger and spite. Ideally this would happen by fixing the market dynamics, but really it needs to happen any way possible.
I understand your point - farming, mining, and manufacturing are all essential economic activities that have largely shifted overseas post-WWII. This has hollowed the rural economy in US and other western nations while also making goods vastly cheaper and bringing billions out of poverty worldwide.
In my mind I am very willing to help and support many parts of a community and society. We need all sorts of work to build a society - finance, tech, manufacturing, non-remunerated work (raising children, etc).
I’m in favor of gov investment in infrastructure as I believe it helps all of us grow. Same with healthcare and education.
But it is _very_ important to make these benefits transparent and clear, otherwise we end up in the situation we now face, where the same voters that would be most helped by these investments argue against such programs and are strongly anti-government (see Trump, Brexit, Jan 6, etc).
Farming in the US did not shift overseas. American farming output in 2021 is higher than ever, approaching 3x WWII levels[1].
Farming in the US rather consolidated around massive economies of scale, where a few large industrial-scale players with large capital available can produce vast amounts of food at a very low unit cost.
This was partially the result of government subsidies and policy ("go big or get out" in the 70s) and partially the result of large technological advances yielding huge productivity gains. Far less labor is now required to produce a unit of food. Petroleum-based fertilizers developed in the 1940s improved crop yields in many cases by thousands of percent. At the same time, mass produced mechanized farm equipment (tractors, harvesters, etc.) became far cheaper and widely available.
The traditional family farms that dominated agriculture until the mid-20th century have become largely uncompetitive in the commodity market, leading to many social problems in rural areas and a widespread perception that American farming is no longer a thing. A few find a niche in organic farming or specialty crops. Many just sold their land to a large operation, lived off of the proceeds for a while, then became poor.
It's important to note too that this consolidation has had beneficial social effects: in inflation-adjusted terms, food is extremely cheap now as compared to any prior point in history. Put another way, the amount of minimum wage hours of labor required to procure 2,000 calories a day is lower than ever before in human history. _Obesity_ is now a significant health problem among lower income Americans, whereas historically starvation and malnutrition due to high food costs were the main food issues for the poor.
American farming is bigger than ever; it's just done on a vast industrial scale now.
Your assuming nutrient levels per unit weight have remained the same in the food from WW2 to present. There’s pretty convincing evidence that in face nutrients per unit weight have dropped dramatically. So there’s a qualitative difference in comparing food from different years.
Very good point about farming and productivity. I believe US manufacturing didn't decline in output either, just increased productivity and declined in workers. Although essentially all the growth in new manufacturing went overseas I believe.
> But it is _very_ important to make these benefits transparent and clear, otherwise we end up in the situation we now face
I strongly disagree on the causality here. The red state subsidies are a blue team talking point. To the extent the reality gets through to the red team, it's anticonvincing because the main thing they feel they're missing is self determination.
Telling them to be appreciative of federal welfare, and they can get even more of it (eg UBI), is the exact opposite of what they want. They want purpose, hence the attraction to regressive ideologies promising that there is purpose to their suffering. Purpose cannot be provided by overt direct subsidies - it can only come from the feeling of earning one's way, regardless of the truth of the matter (eg how the metagame industries suffice). By extension this means revitalization of rural economies, no matter how artificial. Then again after decades of ZIRP what does "artificial" even mean?
It sounds like you're suggesting the subsidies remain, but the red states get to pretend that it's not the anti-government individualism their personal ideologies demand?
If people want self-dependence and self-determination, they should strive for it - not play acting that they are independent. What they should not do is complain about the entire concept of government intervention ("socialism!") while benefitting from the exact same thing, paid for disproportionately by the groups they demonize.
I'm talking straight up pragmatic realpolitik. Fundamentalism is attractive to people in poverty, because it lends a purposeful narrative to their suffering. Fundamentalism then breeds more poverty. If we don't want that cycle to take down the country with ever more regressive fundamentalism, then we need to break it. If that involves pinching our nose and tiptoeing around the hypocrisy, then so be it.
From my libertarian perspective I'd rather not use a loaded term like "subsidy" due to the larger context where the government printed massive amounts of money over the past several decades, benefitting the centralizing/urban metagamers at the expense of the distributed/rural economy. Loaded terms make it too easy to condemn specific aspects while ignoring others that are quite similar.
Don't they often argue that government handouts are what prevent people from finding jobs, innovating, or moving to an area with jobs.
I don't think it's too hypocritical to accept government handouts because you need it while at the same time wishing you had a job so you didn't have to take handouts
However not everyone feels that way and they use a very broad stroke when it comes to Government assistance which was referred to by some as "socialism" and later "communism"
I grew up in a very rural, conservative small town and still talk to many people there.
They loved the $1500 checks in their accounts. They see rising cost of housing and several have suggested government subsidies for homes or a massive government program to build more houses.
I agree people want purpose, but I don't think rural conservatives are actually against government programs or subsidies, as long as it benefits them and is not presented from the perspective of modern culture war and media. They don't like "handouts" but they DO like roads, water, electricity, farm insurance, military bases, post offices, etc.
Your experience would seem to support the first part of my comment. What is making "benefits transparent and clear" if not presenting "from the perspective of modern culture war and media" ? Pointing out that their communities are net subsidized directly undermines the feeling of self sufficiency. FWIW based on my personal experience, I would say that people accepting the handouts justify it as at least getting something "back" for themselves, while others get so much more - it's not like the cognitive dissonance just goes away.
But sure one doesn't need to be so indirect as I went on to say in the second half of my comment. I feel like that's playing awfully close to the cognitive dissonance though, in that any given program can very easily end up on the talking point shitlist and become permanently unwelcome. Ideologically I'm a fan of decentralization so I'm inclined to focus on fixing the distributed economy, even though it requires a similar amount of forcing.
I think we agree on most practical aspects of this situation.
We both agree that this situation of expensive grid hookups in rural areas is simple economics. We both agree to make it affordable would require a subsidy. Rural residents seem to want this cheaper/subsidized, but several in the article are also happy to build their own infrastructure instead. I think that's great!
It seems where we may have disagreement is around wider political issues regarding perspectives on government, media, and culture. Specifically, I think we have slightly different perspectives and theories about the mindset and views of conservative rural residents.
That's totally fine! However, it feels a bit like we're both talking in circles without a clear topic / thesis or enough personal experience to provide strong insights.
I agree on all counts. I think "strong insights" are pretty common these days though, and if we hope to ever figure anything out, less-purposeful discussion such as this might be more productive. Cheers!
I agree that many people move away from cities to "escape", but it's important to recognize that for many decades now, rural residents have received significantly more benefits from the government than they pay in taxes, while urban dwellers pay more in taxes than they receive in benefits. Essentially, those who live in cities are living within their means and subsidizing those who live in rural areas.
This is a commonly repeated factoid, but it's not really true. Or at least, it's very misleading. Let me explain.
Rural populations tend to be older. That means more spent on Social Security, more spent on Medicare, and so on. This is by far the largest reason why people say that cities "subsidize" rural areas. But if those old people moved to cities, they would still be receiving Social Security and Medicaid. So it would be more accurate to say that young people subsidize old people.
Farm subsidies exist and probably should be reduced (or eliminated) but in the grand scheme of things, we're not talking about much money. It was about 22 billion in 2019, according to NPR [https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...]. That's comparable to some of the increases in yearly budget that are being talked about for Amtrak, a program that mainly benefits cities.
So don't move to a rural area believing that the federal government will shower you with cash. In general, it won't, or at least not more than it does for city dwellers.
On the other hand, being old or poor may cause the Feds to shower you with cash, but not more than you would have gotten in a city (and many things will be more expensive in a rural area than a city).
I've seen other strong studies showing that government cost per-capita is _much_ high for suburban and rural areas. Intuitively this makes sense when considering infrastructure - more people use a road in a city than in a suburb, and vastly more than in a rural area. Yet those roads cost a similar amount to construct and maintain.
One of the best analyses I've seen is from Strong Towns - a blog devoted to building livable and financially solvent towns and cities. In their deep-dive analysis of Lafayette, LA, they find that the only part of the region generating enough revenue to sustain the maintenance costs was the dense old-town city center. [1] Most of the costs examined come from infrastructure (roads, power, gas, water), not social services.
I imagine the calculus is different when considering federal government expenditures (as you point out), as the majority of federal expenditures are towards social security, medicare, medicaid, and the military. However, there is significant federal subsidies to farmers as you point out, and huge sums of cash for highways, power, and other infrastructure.
From my experience taking Amtrak cross country a few times, the places benefiting the most are the rural areas that Amtrak runs through. A large contingent of people on the train were traveling to/from places that had train stations, and no airports. There were very few people doing city-city trips. That isn't taking into account the Northeast corridor though.
That's not what I'm getting at. When a sizeable portion of the rural population are subject to conspiracy theories and misinformation and worships an incompetent slob, these effects can undermine the power of the government.
This isn't mere "disagreement," unless the Overton window is that large now.
As another poster suggested, I could have the causality backwards. Either way, the rural population is where the problem lives.
"he system should either break even (which it doesn't do), or cost money (which means taxpayers subsidise it), or make money (which means users subsidise other taxpayers)"
That assumes a fixed amount of money and a fixed amount of stuff. Neither of which is the case in a country with its own floating exchange rate like Canada.
Government doesn't spend money, it spends people. What else were you proposing to do with the electrical engineer that is so much more important than maintaining electrical grid connections to citizens?
You can of course print money instead of raising taxes but the principle's the same.
Lets rephrase it then. How many hours of electrical engineer time should be spent hooking up a new home in rural Ontario? Why would an electrical engineer who lives in the Toronto suburbs want to do this? How much time and effort should a country devote to running and maintaining this connection? What does the engineer get in return?
Either he gets more in return (thus "makes money"), gets less in return (thus "requires subsidy") or it's even (thus "breaks even")
How much should the person who wants to live in rural ontario give for the engineer's time? It seems Canada decides they should give a little, but not the same amount of time the engineer gives (and instead the engineer should be compensated by time from the rest of the country)
As to what that electrical engineer could be doing that would be better? Well how about fixing the electrics in a childrens hospital? Or maybe they could spend the day working on their garden, or watching netflix.
"Well how about fixing the electrics in a childrens hospital?"
Do they not have their own engineers? In which case what are you doing about the shortage of engineers.
Again this is all fixed amount thinking. Are you sure you are supply limited in engineers? It's only then that you need to think about taxation. And then the taxation has to be targeted at those using engineers - to free them up for the public use.
Are you absolutely sure all engineers and equipment is engaged doing things that are required?
There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, and if there is any unemployment at all then there is capacity to expand.
"Or maybe they could spend the day working on their garden, or watching netflix."
Why should engineers work any less hours a week than anybody else? The person growing their food needs to work a full week, why not engineers?
Government deploys resources, not money. And whether those resources are used hooking up people to the grid, or fitting out another server room for Pornhub is a political choice, not a financial one.
Its not about being run for profit. Its why should anyone build a house in the middle of nowhere and expect the govt to spend whatever it takes to get connected.
> Its why should anyone build a house in the middle of nowhere and expect the govt to spend whatever it takes to get connected.
But the article says "he expected to pay a few thousand dollars, given that the nearest pole was across the street, about 45 metres away. He was shocked to find out it would cost $80,000".
So it's not the case of a house in the middle of nowhere...
Just playing devil's advocate here but maybe the whole line cost $400k and they could only charge the other 4 houses on the street $80k each. The fact that the line's already run doesn't mean it's already paid for.
Should we foot the bill for connecting every rural home because people wanted to move out of the city - increasing the urban sprawl? Maybe if there 5-10 people at a time in batches they could do it at cost. . but custom jobs for every individual homeowner, come on be realistic instead of entitled.
> if private enterprise can compete with that by offering a better product and/or cheaper service, then all the more power to them.
In this case, going off-grid is exactly that: private enterprise offering a more suitable alternative for this use case. In fact, it's the correct solution, because the public should not be required to subsidize the choice of an individual to live in an area not well served by power distribution infrastructure shared across many homes.
It's just like how the government won't pay for paving a long driveway (AKA road) that connects a rural house to the main highway.
Government should only get involved in subsidizing these things when the goal is to scale access to millions, i.e:
- High impact nascent and early stage technology (i.e. EVs, renewables)
- Generational scale investments in human capital and infrastructure that private industry is too risk averse to undertake.
Subsidizing rural home builders to the tune of 80K does nothing for anyone except that home builder. It would be undoubtedly nice for them, but that's not a justification for allowing it.
> Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
Look, there's 'shouldn't be run for profit' and then there's 'Simply infeasible to do some things regardless of profit motive simply due reality.'
Pull up a map of Ontario and pick some locations at random and then figure out the distance from those locations to the nearest town that likely has a utility tie in. Tell me the distance and what you think the cost per km would be in that kind of situation. Now tell me if the government should cover that kind of service for whoever wants it, whenever they want it, for free.
You vastly underestimate the size of a Canadian province like Ontario and the costs of installing and maintaining infrastructure in a place with that kind of climate.
>Government shouldn't be run for profit, frankly it should pay for the entire connection.
Except when the service is being provided to people you don't like. (not sure if I should /s this since based on my observation this is what most people unironically want).
When the govt spends money on something, it is asking/telling people to spend their effort on that task/product, instead of something else that they would/could have been doing instead.
So if the govt spends $80k of people's effort on the rural line, what doesn't get done as a result?
That should be the cost of doing business when you're a government-sponsored monopoly that provides an essential service to your tax-paying citizens (not customers).
As an urban ratepayer in Ontario, I would very much not like my electrical fees to subsidize the recreationally remote, thanks. Rural/wilderness homes in Ontario already have heavily subsidized road infrastructure and get a larger cut of the carbon tax rebate per person. It's one thing to subsidize agricultural communities, but this is different. If you have some deep burning need to be a woodsman, more power to you, but that's your decision and your money.
And looking at the article, if off-grid is more economic for the resident for that kind of life, then it's also more economical for the government. Everybody wins. Subsidizing that would eliminate that win/win.
That said, as carbon pricing rises, the calculus on propane power may shift over time... which, I assume, will result in such residents loudly opposing carbon pricing.
Why do you expect the rural taxpayers to pay for urban/city only improvements like transit/subways or money to fight guns/gangs but balk at the thought of paying for electrical hookups in rural areas.
Pretty sure they don't pay anything since people living outside cities is net minus everywhere, maintaining all the infrastructure id expensive as fuck. I'm five with it but the reality is that they are being subsidised everywhere per capita. Economies of scale, capitalism 101.
Anecdotally, Philadelphia is the poorest county in our state, while Chester county is the richest. Seems like suburban areas bring in the most money and can afford excellent infrastructure, while infrastructure in the city is in constant disrepair.
"One could say the same if you choose to be a car-less urban dweller who relies on transit and high-density infrastructure.
You can stereotype and caricature people both ways, neither helps the discussion."
Car-less urban dweller pays ticket fees for transit, so the argument doesn't work.
They aren't car-less because they are saving money - if you give everyone who uses public transport a car, gridlock will get so bad there will be bodies in the street.
Sigh.. sure, you can find faults in anyone's examples if you're just interested in doing that instead of debating the broader point.
Neither side can be diluted down to an anecdote, but I guess here we are all trying to do it anyways.
My point was actually about the stereotyping and the painting of all rural dwellers as recreational, as if urban dwelling is the only valid choice and everyone else is intentionally choosing a lesser or more difficult lifestyle.
The _overall_ point here is that connecting to any public utilities should not be made prohibitively expensive just because you live in rural areas.
> The _overall_ point here is that connecting to any public utilities should not be made prohibitively expensive just because you live in rural areas.
In this case, the argument is not that it was "made" prohibitively expensive. It's that it is prohibitively expensive, and the debate is whether or not it should be made less expensive through subsidy by government actors.
This same debate will be occurring with providing other services to remote locations as carbon costs get incorporated into the prices of distribution of services. It's not going to get better.
Isn't that why the government has the power of taxation or the ability to levy fees? Not that I'm a fan of government reach, but if the single, monopoly, private corporation can't provide necessary services at a rate that their customers can afford, and there isn't any competition to "naturally" reduce rates, then this is a place where governments usually step in. They step in the form of subsidies and grants, the sources of income of which are usually taxation or fees levied to other constituents. And electricity, running water, and sewage are considered to be essential necessities, not luxuries. This is an area where monopolistic practices should have limits, even if such costs are "necessary". This is where governments have the positive ability to help.
My comment was based on the understanding was that the government was already involved with the company and proving subsidies already.
"Isn't that why the government has the power of taxation or the ability to levy fees?"
My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense. This would mean still charging the people connected. Otherwise, who would the government tax to subsidize these other citizens?
In this case, government grants to individual homeowners looking to connect to the public utility makes the most sense. It's also easy to quantify since you can see how many people are interested in connecting to the grid who aren't currently. Governments can find multiple ways to source funds for those grants. Homeowners would apply for those grants and get funds for the connection. If funds aren't provided directly they are often provided as credits against property tax. The gov pays the utility directly.
I've seen it done this way for many different projects.
"My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense"
Thats literally the opposite of how taxes work. What you are describing is called charging the customer.
Taxes are paid independant of usage, my taxes pay for schools wven if I dont have kids. Someone with 10 kids but less income pays less taxes for schools.
>And electricity, running water, and sewage are considered to be essential necessities, not luxuries.
In the US, the latter two are not broadly considered necessities in rural areas. The situation varies but wells, where possible, and septic systems are extremely common away from urban metros and towns of a certain size.
I have both a well and septic, so I totally get it. But if you are connected to public water or public sewer, which often a municipal monopoly for good reasons, and you have limited other choices, the local government places restrictions on the cost of getting hooked up to public water and sewer if there are no alternatives.
In any case, water and sewer are indeed considered necessities and you are unable to sell or convey a house in the state that I live without a functional water or sewage system, whether on public water/sewer or on well / septic. If you have a non-functioning well or non-functioning septic (outhouses are no longer allowed), then you can't sell your house, and also you are in risk of having your own house condemned. So these are indeed necessities.
They're not considered necessities in the sense that the government has to, in general, provide you with a hookup at a reasonable cost. But, as you say, running water and proper sewage may be a zoning requirement to build a house and live on a property just as a variety of other things may be requirements.
I think you can still call them neccessary, but they just aren't public utilities in rural areas. If you have a well, you still have running water. If you have a septic system, the sewage has somewhere to go.
Right. But the context was a comment to the effect of the government providing them at a reasonable price. Which, as you say, it commonly doesn't in many rural or semi-rural areas.
The government gets most of its money through taxes in Canada.
Then they plan and redistribute that money to the agencies, corporations and departments that provide essential services for the population, and it gets spent on offering and managing those services. (Yes this is a simplified explanation)
Not sure how it works where you live but I suspect it's probably similar.
My comment was based on the understanding was that the government was already involved with the company and proving subsidies already.
My point was that some taxation is based on usage, so charging those using the utility would make sense. This would mean still charging the people connected. Otherwise, who would the government tax to subsidize these other citizens?
So if Elon Musk decides to carve out a 1,000 acre compound 50km from the closest power source the government, no tax payers, should pay for the hundreds of thousands to connect him to the grid?
Look there's _always_ an edge case that makes the generalized common good approach sound unreasonable.
But in the end, you make the best rules you can that help the majority of people, and you accept that they will not be 100% ideal. If some people end up unfairly benefiting from it, so be it.
It’s unreasonable even if not extreme. Some dude who wants to retire 50km into the bush because land is cheap shouldnt get a $100k subsidy by tax payers.
Giving a huge subsidy to someone in the top 1% when they buy a luxury electric car with monstrous torque is also suboptimal. https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives
Welcome to the world of government subsidies - I don't see how you can stop any of this cost-effectively, as money is fungible and stuff can be resold.
Sure. There aren’t enough crazy-rich people to be significant, just like at the other end there aren’t enough people having 12 kids to cause significant expense to government child benefits schemes.
> There aren’t enough crazy-rich people to be significant
In part because of these costs. If it were on the taxpayer to foot the hook-up bill, a home in the middle of the Grand Tetons would suddenly look much more attractive.
The Google maps pictures if they place certainly look pretty, but you need to be pretty rich just to be able to live so far from where most of the work is.
The land in a town or city is more expensive because of all the positive things such places bring outweighing all the negatives, even in the relatively cheap suburbs. Electricity (etc.) supply is part of that, sure, but far from the only thing.
Thousands, even hundreds of thousands, is essentially insignificant for the government of a nation of a third of a billion (as you said Musk, I’m thinking of the USA rather than Canada).
This is why governments have passed incentive acts to help. In the United States, that came from the Rural Electrification Act[0]. It was a recognition that rural areas are critical to our urban areas because they provide food and resources, in addition to an occasional oddball university location or something to stare at on a transcon flight.
Although the law is nearly 90 years old, it continues to be foundational for supporting rural communities. In 2014 it was updated to provide support for rural electric and telephone cooperatives to supply gigabit internet. And that’s why the north woods of Minnesota often has better internet than large swaths of Minneapolis and St Paul.
It's interesting that 90 years ago, supplying your own electrical power was unthinkable. Also, there were communities that existed in advance of electrification, so there was at least some population density to justify wired power.
For people moving into a relatively unpopulated area, in a different country, it might make more sense today, to let people bring in their own power generation, maybe subsidize it a bit if needed.
I'm all for cost recovery and fiscal restraint, and the exception I'd propose in this case is that rural residential electrification is the cost of government. If you want to expand your habitable footprint as a state, it means some reciprocity for the people living there. The govt needs rural people settling remote areas more than those people need govt.
Satellite internet changes a lot, as if you can do off grid renewable power with satellite internet, economic viability and mobility of populations changes radically. We've seen it post-covid with rural real estate prices matching those of cities as the result of remote work (I think).
Hydro was used as a giant opaque debt slush fund by previous governments, where they levered up debt secured against revenues and then blew it on favoured groups to secure re-election. "Infrastructure," surely, but now you have a debt retirement fee on every hydro bill that is essentially a tax.
Economic growth in diversified regions. They are the roots for growth, where in cities, the marginal value they contribute is a fraction of what they can contribute outside of one. There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services, which values human life as managed livestock in service of an owner, and not as an engine of growth and development, but that is one I do not share.
> They are the roots for growth, where in cities, the marginal value they contribute is a fraction of what they can contribute outside of one.
It sounds like you are ascribing some special virtue to rural living that I just don't see. When I think about work that adds social value, very little of it requires rural living (farming, mostly) and most of it can be done anywhere (computer programming, skilled trades, manufacturing, etc.). Why is a person's contribution bigger if they are rural? What special value is there in doing these things in a place no one lives? Why do we need to increase growth in some arbitrary rural location.
> There is a prevailing political worldview predicated on warehousing people in cities and making them dependent on public services
And ironically, you are arguing that we should be providing these people a public service, presumably because they are dependent on it. I fail to see where the cut off should be.
Their marginal contribution is greater because they literally bring human civilization from where it is, to where it is not yet, and where there is more opportunity for growth by virtue of nobody else being there, and return what they produce there back to the urban economies.
A marginal chicken in a mass feeding factory is less valuable than a marginal chicken in a backyard. It's a question of numbers and impact. The life of a marginal person in a city is not as valuable or meaningful to their neighbours as a marginal person in the country, as there are more strong ties in rural areas, and more weak ones in urban ones. In this sense of marginal numbers, cities cheapen lives.
Maybe that's the point, where humans should switch our r/K selection strategy from high investment in K-selected lives to low investment r-selected lives, and try to exist and spread more like bugs than mammals, but that's not something I'd advocate.
If you want the necessary growth and evolution of a civilization for long term survival, you need to diversify it over geography.
The cut off for public services is the persons relationship to them. When you pull hydro lines into rural areas, you facilitate growth from each marginal person out there. When you supply power to a new suburb, you are facilitating marginal growth there at a lower rate. The public service dependency occurs when growth is a zero-sum competition for the attention of a provider (see Ivan Illich's radical monopoly and related ideas), instead of exogenously sourced growth in a rural setting, merely facilitated by public services.
The crux of the policy disagreement is in different axioms about the value of individual life (v. collective "good"), which I don't think we reconcile here, but we can see how our assessments of a policy are certainly artifacts of them.
The government of Canada paid/pays people to live in remote northern regions. Use it or lose it. It allows Canada to claim regions that could be up for dispute in the future. Canada and Greenland engage in events that visit remote places and leave symbols like flags to show usage and provide a historical record for the world court if it came to it.
Some scattered towns aren't going to significantly impact claims by indigenous peoples, and anybody else claiming big chunks of the top half of Canada is going to get laughed out of the room.
Those towns are filled with indigenous people and Canada pays many to be part of a para military force in case of invasion or just to provide ground level information
. Hans island is in dispute between Greenland and Canada and both countries visit every year to plant a flag. Having a settlement if possible year round would make the claim stronger.
The northwest passage is seeing Russian / US subs crossing without permission. Having a population creates a stronger claim for situations like this.
> Those towns are filled with indigenous people and Canada pays many to be part of a para military force in case of invasion or just to provide ground level information .
Okay but that's not about claiming the territory.
> Hans island is in dispute between Greenland and Canada and both countries visit every year to plant a flag. Having a settlement if possible year round would make the claim stronger.
Okay, that's a tiny island. Far over 99% of the land is not in dispute, and doesn't need towns to stop it from being in dispute. And even there, they don't bother to have anyone live on it! I feel like this island supports the idea that these populations are disconnected from land claims.
Also wow it super does not matter who owns this island when the strait is already split right down the middle.
> The northwest passage is seeing Russian / US subs crossing without permission. Having a population creates a stronger claim for situations like this.
How so? I could see how an active port could physically get in the way of sneaking through, but I don't see at all how a town gives canada a better claim for keeping those subs away.
>If you want to expand your habitable footprint as a state
Why is this desirable? You basically just expand every single cost without much benefit and reducing the quality of facilities provided to everyone. The general trend of populations globally is centralization which provides massive benefits.
> The govt needs rural people settling remote areas more than those people need govt.
I'm not sure I agree with this, but I'm curious to hear your logic. My understanding is that more urbanization is required for both environmental and infrastructural reasons.
Why would maintenance be covered in the connection fee? Not only is it backwards from the usual financial game of lowering up front costs by hiding them in recurring costs but there is no way to know up front if you'll need to maintain that line for 2 years or 200.
Governments provide services - in general - in no small part because services are almost all cost.
Do you want your citizens to have electricity, as is expected in a modern 21st century country - or would you rather folks go without because of cost? If yes, then getting electricity to houses should be a priority, even if they never profit.
It should also be very noted that electric companies tend to balance the rural costs out with charging urban customers a bit more to make up for the difference, much like healthcare (whether it be premiums or taxes)
The option is never going to be power or no power. It's going to be paying the connection fee, setting up your own power, or living somewhere already connected.
Any proposal for governments to spend more on something should also come with a description of what they should spend less on to compensate for it.
Why should urban citizens subsidize a lifestyle choice for others? If you want to live out in the middle of nowhere you shouldn't expect everyone else to pay you for it.
Why should urban citizens subsidize a lifestyle choice for others?
Because people that live in cities need to eat.
Because we are a society.
Because not everyone that lives in the country (or a small enough town) chose to live here - people get born there and turn into adults there.
I shouldn't have to mention this, but farmers need infrastructure to keep making your food. Gas and groceries and utilities and grain silos and schools and doctors and a bunch more - oh, and people that operate all of this.
Those people that make all that stuff run need a lot of that stuff too.
This sounds like something the market can deal with. If it costs a lot for farmers to set up, they can charge more for products until they are profitable again.
Is it high compared meaning they are making a huge profit or that people can't afford it? If it really does that cost much then subsidies are possible.
However it seems some people live in rural areas to save money, you hear about that often here where people would post something like "I moved to the woods in North Dakota and only pay $500 a month" is it fair to then use tax money to help keep that price low?
It's not entirely clear to me in the article. Does the utility exist at the property already? My understanding this that if you're on a rural road and build a house past the last one built, the electric company will try to make your connection fee cover them extending the lines on their side to your property. Then you still have to cover the lines on your property.
> Last summer, Timmermans's two radio stations: Great Lakes Country 103.1 and Hits 100.7 went live from their new home — in Little Current, Ont., about 90 kilometres southwest of Sudbury — the first off-grid stations in Canada.
the guy was running two radio stations; i expect they quoted the price like it was a business/commercial line
The main takeaway should be that being that far north is not a show stopper for going off grid with mostly solar, a bit of wind, and batteries in a very harsh climate with limited sun hours in the winter. Anything further south is probably a lot more effective and cheaper to run. But the point of the article is that people are doing this and are saving money doing it. Of course, that is indeed enabled by a monopolist really encouraging this by discouraging new customers with unreasonable fees. But that's the other point, being at the mercy of companies like that is not great financially and there's a point where it becomes simply not worth the money in.
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I wonder if they'll do a follow-up article next year to report how the solar systems performed over the long Northern Ontario winter...