All that despoliation of Ontario communities, agricultural land and the natural environment for … what? Expensive power produced out of phase with demand, says Marc Brouillette
In a stunning commentarypublished yesterday by theCouncil for Clean and Reliable Energy, energy policy consultantMarc Brouilettesays that Ontario’s wind power program is an expensive adventure that does not achieve any of its goals for the environment or economic prosperity, and is in fact, making things worse.
At a cost of $1.5 billion in 2015, Brouillette says, the fact that wind power generation is completely out of sync with demand in Ontario results in added costs for constrained generation form other sources. Constrained nuclear and hydro cost $300 million that year, and a further $200 million in costs was incurred due to “avoided” natural gas generation.
And, the power isn’t even getting to the people who need it. “[O]nly one-half of total provincial wind output makes it to the Central Region and the GTA where most of Ontario’s electricity demand exists,” Brouillette states.
All things considered, wind costs more than $410 per megawatt hour, which isfour times the average cost of electricityin Ontario. This is being charged to Ontario’s electricity customers, at an increasing rate.
Ontario should reconsider its commitment to more wind, Brouillette concludes: “these challenges will increase if Ontario proceeds to double wind capacity to the projected ~6,500 MW.”
Reposted from Wind Concerns Ontario windconcernsontario.ca
Turbines surround a home in Huron County, Ontario. Complaints get no response. [Photo by Gary Moon]
The Global News investigative team took on the task of finding out what happens when people in rural Ontario report excessive noise and other effects from industrial-scale wind turbines in nearby wind power projects?
The answer, said Global National reporter Shirlee Engel is, “Not much.”
Here are Parts 1 and 2 of the Global News investigative report. The investigation took four months, and was based on documents and analysis provided to Global by Wind Concerns Ontario. It took two years for Wind Concerns to get the documents from the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change (MOECC) under Freedom of Information legislation.
In over half the cases in the documents, the MOECC made no response; in others there was limited response. The Ministry relied upon wind power companies “predicted modeling” to determine whether noise exceedance was possible. When actual measurements of noise were done, they were limited to a narrow range of audible noise and did not include low frequency or tonal noise.
Minister Glen Murray told the Legislature yesterday after a barrage of questions from Opposition MPPs that the Ministry will now be including “tonal” noise in its measurement; the Minister still insists there is no problem, and told Global News that he has no complaints on his desk at present — Wind Concerns Ontario documents show almost 3,200 complaints filed between 2006 and 2014.
Global News has a report today on information related to wind turbine noise complaints.
Carla Stachura and her husband Mike thought they’d found the perfect spot to retire.
A house in rural Ontario where they run a wildlife sanctuary with lamas and a variety of birds, and planned to spend their retirement years enjoying the peace and quiet of country life.
But that dream was shattered when wind turbines began popping up near their Goderich, Ontario home. Since then, their dream has become a nightmare. The couple says they’ve been unable to sleep and exposed to prolonged periods of annoying noise. Adding to their frustration, they say the provincial government won’t lift a finger to help them, other than order more tests.
“We’ve been having issues since they turned the turbines on,” said Carla.
The couple purchased the property in 2003. They say it was paradise until the K2 Wind Farm, operated by Pattern Energy, started operations in the spring of 2015.
Over the past two years, officials from the ministry have measured violations of the province’s noise limits at the couple’s home on two occasions, first in August 2015 and again in March 2017. Despite these violations, the couple says the government has done nothing other than order more tests.
Ministry of Environment does not respond to majority of wind turbine complaints
The Stachura’s complaints of government inaction are not unique. In fact, Global News has learned that Ontario’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change does not respond to the majority of complaints made by residents concerned about wind turbines.
Documents released through Ontario’s Freedom of Information Act and obtained by Global News reveal officials from the Ministry of Environment chose not to investigate or deferred responding to – meaning they did not make immediate plans to investigate – roughly 68 per cent of all noise and health complaints lodged against wind turbine operators in the province between 2006 and 2014. This represents nearly 2,200 individual complaints.
The documents also show limited resources sometimes prevented the ministry from responding to complaints.
Originally obtained by Wind Concerns Ontario, the documents include a list of 3,180 complaints. They also include a 458-page collection of “master incident reports,” which the ministry has verified as authentic, detailing the ministry’s response – or lack thereof – in cases where residents complained multiple times.
The documents show that in 54 per cent of all cases – more than 1,700 individual complaints – the ministry did not investigate residents’ concerns. In another 450 cases, roughly 14 per cent of total incidents, the ministry deferred responding to complaints.
In most cases, the documents do not reveal why the ministry chose not to respond. Instead, they tend to focus on whether the wind farm was compliant with ministry standards or past efforts to resolve residents’ concerns.
“The lack of response from the ministry shows just how unprepared they were for the potential effects of putting these giant machines so close to people and their communities,” said Jane Wilson, president of Wind Concerns Ontario.
Read more here, and watch the story today on Global News.
Two wind power projects have contracts but not Renewable Energy Approvals yet in the Ottawa area: the Nation Rise project in North Stormont (Finch, Berwick) and Eastern Fields in The Nation (St Bernardin, Casselman).
Wind Concerns Ontario is recommending that approvals not be granted for these projects, and that new tougher noise standards be developed for turbines, and enforced.
Wind Concerns Ontario has released a report based on documents received via Freedom of Information request that shows the Ontario government’s process to deal with citizen complaints about wind farm noise is flawed.
From the news release on the website today:
[Documents] show that almost 3,200 reports of noise complaints were made in 2006-2014. In more than half, the government took no action.
“When Premier Dalton McGuinty brought in the Green Energy Act in 2009, he promised the people of rural Ontario to address concerns about health and safety from the turbines,” Wind Concerns Ontario president Jane Wilson said. “But they already had multiple complaints about wind turbine noise from 2006 onward, and they were unable and even unwilling to deal with them. This is failure of a government to protect people.
“Their goal appears to be protecting the interests of power development corporations instead.”
Ontario families called the MOECC hotline to report sleep disturbance, headaches, and dizziness from the wind turbine noise emissions. Some were desperate and reported not having slept for days, even weeks at a time.
The reports show, however, that ministry staff had no protocols or guidelines to deal with noise complaints and that high-level directives blocked staff from responding. Staff were told to rely on computer noise models provided by power developers instead of actual noise measurement.
“The noise models said that the turbine noise levels were safe, and within regulations,” Wilson explains, “but complaints continued — the Ministry did nothing. The MOECC chose power developers, their ‘clients,’ over Ontario families.”
Many reports referred to vibration or “pulsing” sensations from the huge turbines, but the MOECC restricted responses to audible noise alone.
“People just gave up and stopped calling,” Wilson, a Registered Nurse, says. “Then, in many cases, the Ministry simply closed their files. There was no help for these people from their government.”
A revised Compliance Protocol was released by the government on April 21, but contains no substantive change to the complaint process.
Wind Concerns Ontario recommends that no more approvals or Notices To Proceed be granted for wind power projects, and that the government develop and enforce new, tougher noise standards.
“The phrase ‘clean energy’ is a sick joke,” says Matt Ridley of the U.K. Here’s why.
The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.
You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.
Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.
Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.
Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.
Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.
If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.
At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.
Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.
As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.
As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.
It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.
A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.
Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.
The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.
The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.
And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer.
Spectator.co.uk/podcast
Matt Ridley discusses wind power
Noise measurement protocol needlessly complex, failing to identify critical issues with wind turbine noise, Ontario engineer says.
He used MOECC data to confirm “tonal” quality to wind turbine noise emissions. One project has been operating for eight years — residents continue to complain, no action by Ontario government
Conference venue in Rotterdam: Wind Turbine Noise 2017
Ontario engineer William Palmer has proposed a rigorous, but simple and transparent technique to assess wind turbine noise, that could replace the problematic complex computer models and “black box” algorithms currently used in the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change newest protocol to assess wind turbine noise compliance.
The method had to consider that an effective monitoring system must take into account more than just averaging sound power levels over a long term. The method recognizes that humans are bothered by the changes and annoying characteristics that occur, as well as long term averages. Others describe this as the need to determine how the special characteristics of sound quality may impact quality of life.
To verify this approach, assessments were conducted using the method at two wind power developments in Ontario. In the K2 Wind project, he used MOECC data from testing in early March 2017 at a home within the K2 project. He was able to demonstrate that the MOECC data confirmed that the noise from the turbines surrounding the home had a tonal quality; that means it should require a 5 dB(A) penalty be applied to the other test results.
He reported:
Although the Ministry did not provide calibration files for their sound recordings they did provide in their report their assessment of the sound pressure level for each sample. Using the Electroacoustics Toolbox, and working backwards to set the given sound pressure level for a number of the recordings provided as the calibration level, permitted a “Quasi Calibration” of the Ministry data, and from that a calibrated FFT analysis was made. … Again, it was seen that when the residents described adverse effects in their comments filed with their initiation of recordings, FFT analysis of the sound recordings taken at those times clearly show a tonal condition occurring at about 450 Hz.
In the Enbridge project, where Mr. Palmer also conducted testing, he found similar tonal quality to the noise emissions in that project, and confirmed that the noise coming from the turbines is above the approved levels at several locations.
For this facility as an example, where the turbines first went into operation in November 2008, and citizen complaints occurred soon after, it has not yet been possible to complete a report to demonstrate compliance. The monitoring is still in progress, over 8 years later, with the turbines continuing in operation, and residents continuing to complain. The hypothesis is that individual samples are not representative due to variation.
Process is complex
He offered comment on the current protocol being used to assess compliance by the MOECC:
A premise of the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change wind turbine monitoring protocol is that monitoring to show compliance must be conducted over a long period. The protocol requires the initial acoustic monitoring by residents to produce at least a 10-minute sample for each complaint period, and the final compliance protocol requires a minimum of 120 one-minute measurement intervals for each integer of wind speed. During each of those one-minute intervals there must be no changes in wind speed or direction. A further 60 samples are required for each integer wind speed with the turbines not operational. So far data collection has taken years to obtain a sufficient number of samples, and in at least one array, initial reports showed that over 90% of samples taken were discarded as non-compliant. All samples are logarithmically combined to determine the Leq produced by the facility, which eliminates any short-term change effects. This appears to be precisely the sort of monitoring that was cautioned against by Genuit and Fiebig described in Section 1 when they noted, “By relying on sound pressure levels averaged over long time periods and suppressing all aspects of quality, the specific properties of environmental noise situations cannot be identified, because annoyance caused by environmental noise has a broader linkage with various acoustical properties such as frequency spectrum, duration, impulsive, tonal and low-frequency components, etc. than only with SPL [Sound Pressure Level]. In many cases these acoustical properties affect the quality of life.”
The annoyance aspects that impact the quality of life of impacted residents are not being assessed.
People walking away from loved homes
The current protocol cannot possibly identify critical issues in wind turbine noise emissions, Palmer asserts. In conclusion, he said:
This paper has demonstrated a method for rigorous monitoring of wind turbine sound. The goal of the method was to establish evidence for the condition noted by Karl D. Kryter: “The most direct, and perhaps most valid, insight into the possible presence and magnitude of stress reactions in general living environments is probably that which has been obtained from attitude surveys and real-life behaviour of people.” Behaviours such as walking away from an unsold loved home to live at the home of a family member, or when normal people become activists in trying to communicate their concerns provide such valid insights. The rigorous method had to consider the present acceptance criterion for wind turbines, in light of the insight given by those who study the quality of noise and its relation to annoyance. Those who study the subject identify that, “Current acceptance criterion relying on sound pressure levels averaged over long time periods and suppressing all aspects of quality cannot identify the specific properties of environmental noise situations.”
The results reported by Bill Palmer are typical of the community testing being undertaken in many communities near wind turbine projects across Ontario.
These findings indicate that the complex processes used by the MOECC and required of wind companies for compliance testing fail to identify key issues that can be quickly identified using much simpler techniques.
Meanwhile, the turbines, shown by other methods to be out of compliance, continue to operate.
While the Canadian Wind Energy Association, the trade association for the wind power industry and vested interests, continues to maintain that wind power cannot be contributing to Ontario’s rising and unsustainable electricity bills, the facts indicate otherwise. The figures for April 2017 show wind power produced out-of-phase with demand, causing power from other, clean sources to be wasted, and wind power producers paid not to add power to the Ontario grid.
Here is Parker Gallant’s analysis.
The Independent Electricity System Operator or IESO’s 18 month outlook report uses their “Methodology to Perform Long Term Assessments” to forecast what industrial wind turbines (IWT) are likely to generate as a percentage of their rated capacity.
The Methodology description follows.
“Monthly Wind Capacity Contribution (WCC) values are used to forecast the contribution from wind generators. WCC values in percentage of installed capacity are determined from actual historic median wind generator contribution over the last 10 years at the top 5 contiguous demand hours of the day for each winter and summer season, or shoulder period month. The top 5 contiguous demand hours are determined by the frequency of demand peak occurrences over the last 12 months.”
The most recent 18-month outlook forecast wind production at an average (capacity 4,000 MW growing to 4,500 MW) over 12 months at 22.2%, which is well under the assumed 29-30 % capacity claimed by wind developers. For the month of April, IESO forecast wind generation at 33.2% of capacity.
April 2017 has now passed; my friend Scott Luft has posted the actual generation and estimated the curtailed generation produced by Ontario’s contracted IWT. For April, IESO reported grid- and distribution-connected IWT generated almost 703,000 megawatt hours (MWh), or approximately 24% of their generation capacity. Scott also estimated they curtailed 521,000 MWh or 18 % of generation capacity.
So, actual generation could have been 42% of rated capacity as a result of Ontario’s very windy month of April 2017, but Ontario’s demand for power wasn’t sufficient to absorb it! April is typically a “shoulder” month with low demand, but at the same time it is a high generation month for wind turbines.
How badly did Ontario’s ratepayers get hit? In April, they paid the costs to pay wind developers – that doesn’t include the cost of back-up from gas plants or spilled or steamed off emissions-free hydro and nuclear or losses on exported surpluses.
Wind cost=22.9 cents per kWh
For the 703,000 MWh, the cost* of grid accepted generation at $140/MWh was $98.4 million and the cost of the “curtailed” generation at $120/MWh was $62.5 million making the total cost of wind for the month of April $160.9 million. That translates to a cost per MWh of grid accepted wind of $229.50 or 22.9 cents per kWh.
Despite clear evidence that wind turbines fail to provide competitively priced electricity when it is actually needed, the Premier Wynne-led government continues to allow more capacity to be added instead of killing the Green Energy Act and cancelling contracts that have not commenced installation.
…
* Most wind contracts are priced at 13.5 cents/kilowatt (kWh) and the contracts include a cost of living (COL) annual increase to a maximum of 20% so the current cost is expected to be in the range of $140/MWh or 14cents/kWh.
“Assertions are complete nonsense … only wilful blindness would suggest that wind and solar are low cost”
UWaterloo Prof Natin Jathwani, Executive Director Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy: Big Wind guilty of wilful blindness on energy costs?
Recently, energy analyst and occasional columnist for The Financial PostParker Gallant wrote that the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA) was hitting back at allegations that wind power was contributing to Ontario’s rising electricity bills.
Ontario representative Brandy Gianetta said wind power was a low-cost energy source, and she referred to University of Waterloo professor Jatin Nathwani for support.
Trouble is, she was wrong.
Professor Nathwani took the time to correct CanWEA’s statements in an email to Parker Gallant, published on his Energy Perspectives blog today.
Here is Professor Nathwani’s email:
Dear Mr Gallant:
In your Blog, you have cited Ms. Giannetta’s post on CanWEA’s website on April 24, 2017 as quoted below:
Her article points to two articles that purportedly support the “myth” she is “busting,” but both require closer examination. She cites Waterloo professor Natin Nathwani’s, (PhD in chemical engineering and a 2016 “Sunshine list” salary of $184,550) article of March 6, 2017, posted on the TVO website, which supports Premier Wynne’s dubious claims of “a massive investment, on the order of $50 billion, for the renewal of Ontario’s aging electricity infrastructure.” Professor Nathwani offers no breakdown of the investment which suggests he simply took Premier Wynne’s assertion from her “Fair Hydro Plan” statement as a fact! It would be easy to tear apart Professor Nathwani’s math calculations — for example, “The total electricity bill for Ontario consumers has increased at 3.2 per cent per year on average” — but anyone reading that blatant claim knows his math is flawed!
First and foremost, the record needs to be corrected since Ms Giannetta’s assertions are simply incorrect and should not be allowed to stand.
If she has better information on the $50 billion investment provided in the Ministry of Energy’s Technical Briefing, she should make that available.
The breakdown of the investment pattern in generation for the period 2008-2014 is as follows:
Wind Energy $6 Billion (Installed Capacity 2600 MW)
Solar Energy $5.8 Billion (Installed Capacity 1400 MW)
Bio-energy $1.3 Billion (Installed 325MW)
Natural Gas $5.8 Billion
Water Power $5 Billion (installed Capacity 1980 MW)
Nuclear $5.2 Billion
Total Installed Capacity Added to the Ontario Grid from 2008-2014 was 12,731 MW of which Renewable Power Capacity was 6298MW at a cost of $18.2 Billion.
For the complete investment pattern from 2005 to 2015, please see data available at the IESO Website.
In sum, generation additions (plus removal of coal costs) are in the order of $35 billion and additional investments relate to transmission and distribution assets.
I take strong exception to her last statement suggesting that the 3.2 percent per year (on average) increase in total electricity cost from 2006 to 2015 in real 2016$. The source for this information is a matter of public record and is available at the IESO website.
Ms Giannetta’s assertion is complete nonsense because she does not understand the difference between electricity bill and generation cost. Let Ms Gianetta identify the “blatant flaw.”
As for the electricity bill that the consumer sees, there is a wide variation across Ontario and this is primarily related to Distribution.
The Ontario Energy Board report on Electricity Rates in different cities provides a view across Ontario:
For example, the average bill for a for a typical 750kWh home Ontario comes is $130 per month.
In Toronto it is $142, Waterloo at $130 and Cornwall at $106. On the high side is Hydro One networks is $182 and this is primarily related to cost of service for low density, rural areas.
Your Table 2 Total Electricity Supply Cost is helpful and correctly highlights the cost differences of different generation supply.
Only wilful blindness on Ms Giannetta’s part would suggest that wind and solar are coming in at a low cost.
Warmest regards
Jatin Nathwani, PhD, P.Eng
Professor and Ontario Research Chair in Public Policy for Sustainable Energy
Executive Director, Waterloo Institute for Sustainable Energy (WISE)
Faculty of Engineering and Faculty of Environment Fellow, Balsillie School of International Affairs (BSIA)
ENDANGERED TURTLES WIN PROTECTION FROM WIND FARM IN ONTARIO, CANADA
The Environmental Review Tribunal determined the Blandings Turtle was endangered by the wind farm
Landmark legal decision overturns government approval of large power project
WELLINGTON, ONTARIO, CANADA, April 27, 2017 /EINPresswire.com/ —
A years-long legal battle over a wind power project by Germany-based wpd in Ontario, Canada, resulted in a ruling by the provincial government’s Environmental Review Tribunal yesterday, in favour of protecting an endangered species of turtle.
In the Tribunal ruling, government approval for 18 of 29 industrial-scale wind turbines in the “White Pines” project was reversed. With 60 percent of the project removed, it may be impossible for the power developer to meet its contractual obligation.
The citizens of Prince Edward County, about two hours east of Toronto, where the project was to be located, fought the wind turbines for almost 10 years, and spent almost $2 million CAD in legal fees.
“The County” as it is called, on the shores of Lake Ontario, is a stopping place for hundreds of thousands of birds migrating in eastern North America, and was identified as an Important Bird Area by conservation groups. The area is also a habitat for the endangered Blandings turtle, and home to the Little Brown Bat which is on the verge of extirpation.
“This [decision] is clearly a victory for the survival of the Blanding’s turtle and many other animal and plant species,” said Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County president Gordon Gibbins. “Although the Tribunal decision was specifically concerned with protecting the turtles and their habitat, we are very pleased that indirectly as a result of this decision there will be no turbines in the Prince Edward County Important Bird and Biodiversity Area.”
“The Tribunal decision has made it clear that this wind power project was never about protecting the environment,” said Jane Wilson, president of Wind Concerns Ontario, the coalition of community groups concerned about wind power projects.
“The wind power project was always about money. The citizens of Prince Edward County fought hard to protect the environment and wildlife against our own Ministry of the Environment.”
Citizen evidence was crucial in bringing forward evidence of harm to the environment in the various appeals of the power project, Wilson says. “The government did little or no oversight on how wildlife is to be protected, and it was the people of Prince Edward County who brought the information to the Tribunal. As a result, in Ontario now, wind power does not automatically override environmental concerns.”
Economic impacts were also a concern for the community. The County is a tourist destination with dozens of wineries and cheese establishments; winery owners were concerned about the negative impact of the huge power-generating turbines on the County with its quaint villages and pastoral views as a tourist attraction.
Prince Edward County Mayor Robert Quaiff said, “Our community has been fighting this project for quite some time. I’m glad to see that the Environmental Review Tribunal has recognized and given credence to our concerns.”
New Ontario wind turbine noise compliance protocol falls short
Way short.
As in, little or no understanding of the problems with wind turbine noise emissions.
New noise protocol misses all the problems
On Friday, April 21, the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change released a new protocol document intended for “assessing noise from wind turbines that have already been built. It is used by industry and ministry staff to monitor compliance.”
While in the absence of guidance for staff, and the complete lack of compliance audit information from wind power developers and operators, this is a step forward, the truth is, the protocol doesn’t change much.
Here’s why:
the protocol still relies on audible noise only, when many of the complaints registered with the MOECC concern effects that are clearly linked to other forms of noise
the protocol does not take into account lower wind speeds, which is where problems are being experienced, particularly with newer, more powerful turbines
there is no comment on any sort of transition between the protocol that existed before and this one
Improvements:
the Ministry’s action in producing this protocol is an indication that they know they have a problem
the description of Ministry response is a good step forward
requiring wind power companies to actually have, and to publish, compliance audit documents could be a sign of expectations of greater accountability among the power developers/wind power project operators.
This table outlines the critical gaps in the new protocol document.
Issue
Protocol Requirements
Actual Experiences
Wind Speeds
Assessment of noise at wind speeds between 4 m/s and 7 m/s
MOECC testing indicates problem noise starts below 3 m/s which is outside of wind speeds involved in the protocol.
Ambient Noise
Narrow time period assessed
Wide seasonal variations while wind turbine noise constant
Location
Only test outside of home
Very different inside noise conditions
Tonal Assessments
Uses criticized techniques
Narrow band analysis shows tonal noise present.
Resident Input
None
Resident concerns drive other MOECC procedures
Frequencies
Excludes Infrasound
Elevated levels of infrasound in homes
The Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change needs to acknowledge that there is a problem with wind turbine noise, and accept that it must play a role as a government agency charged with protecting the environment and people in it — preparing an industry-led document may look like a positive step, but this document does not meet the needs of the people of Ontario forced to live with wind turbines, and their noise emissions.
