By Kaitlynn Anderson
Staff Writer
Farms.com
Some rural Ontarians can look forward to future savings on their heating and farm energy bills.
The provincial government plans to invest nearly $100-million to provide 11 communities with natural gas service, according to Tuesday’s release. (The projects await regulatory approval from the Ontario Energy Board.)
The investment will allow 11,300 families and businesses to lower the costs of heating their homes and buildings. In fact, families could shave up to $1,100 off their energy bills, the release stated.
By having access to natural gas, farms that currently rely on electricity, propane or oil can become more efficient in their operations as well.
The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) has advocated for this change on behalf of rural Ontario.
“We’ve crunched the numbers and we’ve shown them to the government,” Keith Currie, president of the OFA, said in a release today. “An annual investment by the government of $75 million over 20 years would see more than $1 billion dollars in annual savings for Ontarians. That’s money that could be reinvested in local rural communities.”
Rural residents in Chatham-Kent, for example, could benefit from two developments.
The government plans to invest up to $311,000 to construct a natural gas distribution pipeline to serve the Moraviantown First Nation, according to Tuesday’s backgrounder. Ontario has also set aside $8 million to build transmission pipelines, distribution mains and individual customer stations for the Chatham-Kent Rural Pipeline Expansion project.
For more information on the 11 proposed projects, click here.
Farms.com has reached out to the OFA for further comment.