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Very well, I am your source on that.

I have worked for what was Waterworks, (now called "Water Resources" since we merged with the Sewer dept.) for the City of Calgary, for 20 years.

We are a fully self-supporting utility. Utilities in Calgary pay "franchise fees" for the use of the public right-of-way to bury their pipes or cables in. The City-owned utilities in lieu of that, paid a "return on equity", I think being changed to a "return on capital", an accounting distinction that escapes me. But whatever the payments are called, they are a significant portion of our total income from sending out water/sewer bills. It's not a "profit", as such, indeed we are forbidden to make one; but it's the same return-on-investment of the huge capital invested that the City would otherwise get if it put it in good bank funds, something like that.

Control of the overall watershed of the Bow and Elbow Rivers from which we abstract our water is indeed a provincial responsibility, but it doesn't benefit the City of Calgary any more than anybody else who lives in the watershed, protected from floods, their consumption for irrigation uses recorded, any substance releases checked, and so on.

The Glenmore Dam that provides us with a 30-day retention of water for clarification, etc, was built by the City of Calgary using a special loan bylaw in 1930. But the debt was paid off entirely by the utility from utility bills, no money crossed the other way from the tax-supported side of the corporation.

All of the accounting for this is traceable through public documents; our budget is published in our annual report, showing all income from utility bills, and how we balance that with expenses, debt service, etc. You can get all the detail documents with a Freedom of Information request, but we wouldn't put you to the trouble of filing one, if you came into the office and just asked to see them, like as not.

You can get a good start just by going to calgary.ca , then "city hall", "business units" and "water services", browse around and look at the Rates section.

I've worked with those budget documents for many years, and there are no kinds of subsidies from our own, or other, levels of government in them.

From American Waterworks Association conferences, I've met a lot of my opposite numbers and this is all the same across at least the prairie provinces of Canada, and several more in the US that I've swapped notes with. Basically, we're all "uni-cities", as opposed to amalgamations of smaller separate municipalities, the most extreme of which has got to be Phoenix. Conurbations can have complex arrangements of sharing costs for plants, or buying/selling water at city limits, and so on. I wouldn't be surprised if tax money crept into some of the arrangements. I'd be much less surprised to hear that the tax-supported side of some municipal corporations "made money" on the deals; that's the more common case, at least with large cities, as utility rate increases usually have less backlash than tax increases.

The situation is even clearer with the Calgary-owned Electrical utility, now called "Enmax" and run like a private corporation, not using the City IT, Fleet, HR or Finance departments, buildings, etc. There's one share and the City owns it, but otherwise it runs as a private corporation, supported entirely by utility bills; that's carefully regulated as competition to private electrical suppliers is open and the competition must be fair. Any competitor suspecting any kind of subsidy could have it investigated.

Enmax' financials are on the web, here's a link to the page about their profits, with links to quarterly and annual reports:

http://www.enmax.com/Corporation/About+Enmax/Financials/ENMAX+Earnings+and+You.htm

Where it comes to gas utilities, most of southern Alberta is supplied by "ATCO", a company private but regulated, supposedly to an agreed, fixed pr

In Canada, I believe that Alberta (our version of Texas, if you will) also has similar legislation.

It's not legislation (in fact, I'm not aware of any legislation passed to this effect). It's reality. There are a number of wind farms in southern Alberta, including Cowley Ridge, which has been running since the early 90s, The McBride Lake Wind Farm, which has been running since 2003, The Summerview Wind Farm , which opened in 2005, and many others I'm sure I've missed, with more being planned.

This is just a pilot plant, really, in the larger scheme of things. 40MW? 400MW is a "medium-size" plant these days.

Solar has to compete not just with coal that sequesters the carbon (more expensive than allowing CO2 into the atmosphere, but may prove still cheaper than anything else clean), with Nuclear (which is probably still cheaper than clean-coal, even budgeting realistic sums for its own waste disposal issues and plant decommissioning), and with Wind, which is just as green.

Wind is getting quite realistic for commercial use, Alberta (home of the tar sands and a lot of gas & oil) also has a lot of windpower building up. My Calgary household verges on carbon-free because I do all my commuting either by bike or by our "C-Train" that is notionally powered by wind turbines, paying a surplus for its power to subsidize the wind farm. Our own electric bill is only about 15% higher for our whole household electric bill to be also "green". ($12.50/mo to join the "GreenMax" program, when average bill is still under $100/mo)

  http://www.enmax.com/Energy/Residential/Greenmax/A bout+Greenmax.htm

But wind shares a problem with solar: it's not reliable. The sun don't shine every day and the wind don't blow every day.
Coal & Nukes are beloved for producing "base load" ... the minimum point on the yearly usage graph that is what you always need in the grid, 365x24.

One spot Solar is perfectly matched to is the insanely-growing US Southwest, where new residents are pouring into sunny Arizona and Nevada at bewildering rates. And using air conditioners, MOSTLY WHEN THE SUN IS BEATING DOWN. Unlike, say, Toronto, or Georgia, or even most of Texas, which can be "muggy" and require air conditioning even at midnight, the temperature goes right down again quickly even before sunset in the desert. There, 9AM to 6PM are when you get a power-consumption spike above that base load, and the one time you can count on a solar plant to be at maximum output.

If these guys are not just doing some kind of stock-pumping scam, and really, truly do have a way to make solar cells cheaper, say under 20 cents/kWh on even optimal days, then they could go straight to building a GW plant on the very cheap desert land outside Las Vegas, and start up some kind of "GreenMax" plan that charges them 20 cents for every kWh during the hours of 9AM-6PM that is above their winter-evening consumption level, they could proudly put a "carbon free" sticker on their giant air conditioners and not have to choose between comfort and virtue.

Enmax (the major power supplier for Calgary) also has a fairly serious program to promote alternate energy. As one poster pointed out, they have a number of windmills, and claim the local light rail runs on power from it. (I find it hard to believe they actually have the power seperated out in a special grid, I suspect they just produce *enough* power from wind to run the trains, but the marketing imagery is clever anyway)

Users can also sign up to help pay for wind generation by paying a bit more for electricity.

Yep, when I lived there I was a GreenMax member.

That said, I do love the choice of Austin to Calgary for a solar race. Very appropriate...

i believe, however that demand is exceeding production, even though we pay a premium for 'green power'. but its a fee i'm willing to pay.

1. Buy a G3 or (eventually) crusoe. Significantly more efficient than those nasty pentiums (pentii?)
2. Sign up for your local utilities optional windpower program.
3. Your local utility doesn't offer wind or solar? Well, replace step two with "harass your local utility till they give you the choice to get pinwheel power".

There. You're set.

Correct, but misleading. Let's look at some facts:

Fact: All power other than nuclear that we use is solar power.

The sun grows plants which were kind enough to get crushed into oil for us. The sun evaporates water, allowing it to move up hill and provide us with hydro. sun = heat = atmospheric convection = windmill. biomass, see oil minus 1 billion years.

Fact: Transitions of state and transport invariably lead to losses in efficiency.

Godd ol' Isaac and his nifty laws. Keep 'em in yer wallet I say! Sun - > plant loses a lot of efficiency. Plant - > oil even more. So, we're not talking about "efficiency" when we talk about oil burning. We're talking about "convenience".

"Obvious" conclusion: We all burn the sun in our cars (unless you have a nuclear car. There's a thought "Car crash, millions die of cancer") We choose how we do that based on convenience not efficiency. Oil, ultimately, is the least efficient way, because even if we start burying leaves right now we'll never be able to generate more in time...

oh yeah, my electric company offers wind power. $15 more a month, which isn't bad. I've got that. Now all I have to do is pick up a voltsrabbit electric conversion kit and I'll be all set.

but.... I likemy teflon pan.... and although I think that plastic is used stupidly (why give me something that is permanent for a use that is obviously temporary???) HDPE can be wonderful stuff! Hey, did I mention that my local electric company just yesterday started offering solar power?

But don't trust me, I'm just some geek in an over-air-conditioned room.... read what the ieee thinks about the benefits we got, get and will continue to get from ye olde space programme