A “boutique solution to a mega-mall problem”

This is from this week’s edition of Inside Ottawa Valley, in the Kemptville Advance,written by retired scientist David G. Stephenson. Part 2 appears next week.

An excerpt pertaining to wind power generation follows:

Across the province advancing wind turbines are changing the wind swept countryside into a scene from H.G Well’s “War of the Worlds”. Wind power is clean and cost competitive, but the turbines are very large, unsightly, noisy industrial installations. A wind turbine will immediately zone everywhere within eyeshot as industrial, and people prefer not to live or conduct their recreational pursuits in an industrial zone. Consequently large wind farms are now being built over water.

A wind farm filling all of this country’s portion of the great lakes might just, when the wind was blowing, generate enough power to replace our use of fossil fuels.

But the output of wind farms is unpredictable and only available a quarter of the time. Wind power, like geothermal and tidal power is a boutique solution to a Mega-mall sized problem. Their contributions can only be useful supplements to a robust anchoring source of non-polluting energy.