October 7, 2026
We have plenty of organizations of different types in Ottawa who continually refer to “renewable” energy or “clean” energy as a goal for the city. Though deeply conflicted—most of them devoutly claim they love trees and birds and turtles and then in the next breath support land-gobbling, bird and bat killing industrial wind turbines—they maintain that “clean” energy will bring prosperity, jobs, and self-reliance.
Incredibly, one such group (CAFES) recently claimed that having local wind and solar would mean less reliance on “imported” power. As if electricity were avocadoes from California. The ignorance of Ontario’s electricity system is stunning.
Wind Concerns Ontario (we are a corporate community group member) recently published a summary of Ontario’s now 20-year experience with industrial wind power. What’s clear is, wind is not the solution. To anything, except more money in the pockets of developers.
Ontario’s rural municipalities are about to face the possibility of more industrial wind power proposals, when the Independent Electricity System Operator or IESO finally launches its long overdue “window 2” of its Long-Term 2 Request For Proposals (LT2-RFP),
The next RFP was meant to be released much earlier this year (after a not entirely successful 2025 which saw only two or three wind power contracts awarded out of more than 20 proposals), but Ontario’s rural opposition to being industrialized by noisy giant wind towers is such that the IESO (and probably the wind power lobbyists) declared the October municipal election a “challenge” for new proposals, and put the whole thing off.
That should tell you something right there: with 159 municipalities (out of 444 total) having declared themselves to be “Unwilling Hosts” to new industrial wind power projects, community opposition is a real force to be reckoned with.
In Ontario, wind power operators speak less about climate change and more about economic realities. That means promising cash-strapped and challenge-worn small rural municipalities cash in the form of community benefit funds (or “vibrancy” funds in the wind power lobby’s continuing adeptness at cutesy names for completely serious matters), and the prospect of multiple jobs. The community benefit funds of course are a pittance against what the wind power developers cart off to the bank and reward investors, and the local jobs always turn out to be short-lived, related to construction. Even then, actual construction of wind power sites is done by specialized teams travelling to the site, usually by highly trained teams from the United States.
As Dr. Chris Keefer of Canadians for Nuclear Energy quipped, “There are no employee parking lots at wind farms.”
It is time then to see through the magician’s smoke and look behind the mirrors at what wind power in Ontario really is.
First, it is not a reliable source of power. Ontario is a low “wind resource” area—we will never be able to produce significant power consistently from wind power, and that is that. Wind power is “part-time power”. Who said that? Only Ontario’s current Minister of Energy Stephen Lecce. Last January, while a certain Toronto-based faux environmental group was pushing to triple Ontario’s wind power capacity and abandon its nuclear ambitions, Mr. Lecce said that Ontario cannot “power a full-time economy with part-time power.”
Economist Edgardo Sepulveda undertook the first independent cost-benefit analysis of wind power in Ontario (though past Auditors General in the province have asked for one) in 2024. In his paper Chasing The Wind: the value of wind generation in a low-emission nuclear and hydro dominant grid, Mr. Sepulveda acknowledges that to keep costs artificially low, the Ontario government subsidizes 70 percent of the cost of wind. In fact, he alleges, “the costs of wind far exceed its societal and climate benefits for the 2020–23 period… Due to its nuclear and hydro dominant generation and elimination of coal, Ontario is one of the lowest-emission large grids in the world. The climate benefit from any new zero-emission generation will be limited to the extent it can displace gas generation. Relative to other areas, Ontario’s wind capacity factors are modest and out of sync with gas generation, all resulting in a relatively low wind emissions offset.”
The high cost to Ontario taxpayers was revealed recently with the release of the public accounts figure of $6.9 billion annually to subsidize electricity generation costs in Ontario. That represents more than half of Ontario’s $13-billion deficit.
So, wind power’s scorecard so far: high cost, low benefit.
But does it help with power generation to keep the province running? Again, Mr. Sepulveda: he refers to “modest” capacity factors for wind in Ontario. It’s actually much worse. This past summer, 2026, saw lengthy periods of low wind power generation simultaneously with high demand. Mr. Sepulveda: “wind generation is uncorrelated with Ontario demand … correlation data with gas shows that wind is negatively correlated with gas generation. This indicates that wind did not efficiently displace gas in Ontario.”
Energy analyst and director with Canadians for Nuclear Energy Christopher Adlam took a snapshot of wind power in January this year and provided this analysis.
“On this frigid Saturday evening Ontario is generating 21,545MW. Of that capacity:
– 194MW is from 4,943MW of wind (0.9%)
– 0MW is from 478MW of solar (0.0%)
– 60MW is from 851MW of batteries (0.2%)
– 184MW is from 287MW of bio (0.9%)
– 4,639MW is from 8,866MW of hydro (21.5%)
– 7,682MW is from 10,551MW of gas (35.7%)
– 8,786MW is from 9,546MW of nuclear (40.8%)
We are also currently exporting 757MW to Quebec and 873MW to New York. To replace gas and nuclear with wind for this hour would require 422,256MW of wind capacity, or 122,749 of the 3.44MW wind turbines installed at Nation Rise, which, at $2.33M/MW would cost $984 billion dollars.”
In short, wind doesn’t work.
It truly is “part-time power,” and is further incapable of replacing fossil fuel power generation in periods of high demand.
Another critical factor in wind power is “energy density”, in short, how much energy can be delivered by a generation system relative to its physical size.
Here again, wind power disappoints, especially when compared to high density nuclear.
Wind turbines use up a significant amount of land, a grave concern here is Ontario where target communities for industrial wind power are also the location of successful agriculture. The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) and others have expressed grave concern about the future of farming and farmland in the province.
“Farmland is vital to our survival,” the OFA said in a statement before the last federal election in 2025. “We cannot rely on importing our food. We must remain a food sovereign nation. We cannot achieve this if we continue to develop on agricultural land that is home to reliable and arable soils.”
The wind power industry not only maintains it uses very little land (we have seen preposterous claims of perhaps a quarter of an acre—suburban housing lots are bigger than that) but the lobby also claims that farming can co-exist with the power generation facility. That conflicts with again the OFA advice to landowners to be careful about signing contracts to lease land for industrial wind turbines, as land use may be restricted by the wind power enterprise, which comes first.
Well, OK, wind is expensive and maybe doesn’t work all that well in Ontario but isn’t it good for the “environment” and climate, cry the “environmental” agencies.
No.
Wind power generation is an industrial land use and its side effects are pretty much what you’d expect from industry: noise, altered landscapes, impacts on wildlife (that means they are killed dead despite assertions of care and mitigation by the industry), and danger to aquifers as evidenced by the travesty in North Kent where wind turbine construction an operation interfered with groundwater over a fragile geology (nothing has been done to help the dozens of families now without potable well water, despite a provincial science committee recommendation).
Ontario has now had industrial wind turbine complexes since 2006. It hasn’t gone well, spurring the Unwilling Host movement which began in 2014 when a rural municipality mayor protested against the contracting process which gave local governments virtually no say in approving the industrial sites.
She wasn’t the first: on April 5, 2011, Amaranth Mayor Don McIvor wrote to then Environment Minister John Wilkinson about the effects of the large Melancthon wind power project in his municipality. The mayor was not too proud to plead with the minister to halt all wind power development in the municipality: “There is no question that the impact of wind turbines and the transformer that connects this power to the grid have negatively affected the health and wealth of neighbouring residents. The Council of Amaranth is opposed to any further wind turbine projects.”
A team of university researchers took aim at the approval process for industrial wind power projects in 2016 and found that health and environmental concerns had been “dismissed” unnecessarily. Stewart Fast (then with the University of Ottawa) and others said in their paper, “Lessons learned in Ontario wind energy disputes,” (Nature Energy, January 2016) the insistence on rigid criteria of direct causation had resulted in an approach that ignored real concerns. “Depending on the evidence cited, there is epidemiologic evidence to sustain various interpretations of wind-turbine impacts on well-being,” Fast et. al said.
The process through which developers applied for approval did not properly engage communities and left citizens feeling like “victims”. “Setting minimum engagement requirements, such as the requirement for two local public meetings, tends to be treated as the maximum requirements — a ‘tick box’ to be completed by developers.”
Ten years later, nothing has changed. In 2019 the Ontario government repealed the Green Energy Act and allowed municipalities some “say” in the siting of industrial wind power projects so that now, the IESO has municipal approval as a mandatory requirement for submissions. However, as seen in 2025, developers were acutely aware of opposition throughout the province and did not want to spend much money on impact studies and other information. As a result, they approached municipal councils with the scarcest of information, and sometimes with vague maps of a “study area” rather than precise turbine locations. In more than one location, developers said to a municipal council, if they got the council’s approval, then they would go ahead and do the complex impact studies. (That means that approval was given though and could not be taken back—councils were not fooled).
Chatham-Kent, where there are more than 500 wind turbines currently operating, had to deal with two proposals in 2025. At a crucial meeting of Council in October 2025, formerly turbine-friendly councillors voted No, citing the lack of information, and the poor process.
Councillor Alysson Storey said, “I am not comfortable” making a decision when there are so many questions and no answers. Staff confirmed upon her questioning that this meeting was the only time the issue could be brought before Council. Storey added that she was sick of the provincial government forcing “do or die” votes on Ontario municipalities.
That was 2025. Despite the IESO’s effort to avoid wind power proposals becoming an issue in the 2026 municipal election, it is one, as it should be.
In Chatham-Kent again, the topic came up at a mayoral candidate debate where most of the candidates spoke out against further wind power development. That included former mayor Randy Hope who was in the chair for much of the wind power project approvals, and who said in his view, the municipality was now “at capacity” for wind power. He added there was a need for greater community engagement.
As to the process, criticized by academics and by municipal councils, to say nothing of citizens who would be forced to live inside industrial wind power sites, nothing has changed. The IESO still only requires a minimum of one public “meeting” which isn’t a meeting at all in most cases, but rather a storyboard show with public relations hirelings representing the developer.
As professor Fast and others noted ten years ago, “Although such storyboard-style meetings can be a useful way of alleviating contentious issues, they often leave residents feeling like victims of a ‘divide-and-conquer’ strategy, in which answers and promises are given only to individuals and are not made publicly.”
So, time to come “clean” about wind power in Ontario.
Reliable affordable power? No.
Jobs and local prosperity? No.
Action on climate change and fossil-fuel use? No. Wind can’t replace anything.
As Ontarians go to the polls again this October, we must ask all candidates for their stance on the prospect of industrial wind power invading their community. And then, vote accordingly.
(C) Wind Concerns Ontario 2026
contact@windconcernsontario.ca
