Huron-Kinloss and West Lincoln have joined 22 other Ontario municipalities supporting the Wainfleet Resolution; the total is now 24.

The resolution refers to the Auditor General’s 2015 report in which Bonnie Lysyk detailed the amount of money Ontario citizens have paid for renewable power in a program that never had  cost-benefit analysis. Ontarians paid twice as much for wind power as they should have, she said, with the result that Ontario consumers have seen their electricity bills skyrocket. Worse, she said, is the fact that Ontario is in a situation of surplus power generation, which means regular losses as power generators are paid to “constrain” production, and surplus power is sold off at bargain-basement process on the electricity market.

The Wainfleet Resolution asks that the province not give out any new wind power contracts; the IESO accepted bids for more than 2,000 megawatts of new wind power generation last year, and planned to let contracts for 300 megawatts of new projects, despite the surplus.

While Ontario has over 400 municipalities, only about 100 are rural/small-town communities vulnerable to wind power development. Wind power projects have also been proposed in Northern Ontario where there are no organized municipalities but “unorganized territories.”