Category Archives: Renewable energy

Lisa MacLeod roars on the Green Energy Act!

06 Thursday Mar 2014

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Yesterday was the occasion for debate on the Green Energy Act, as the government is now scrambling to correct its domestic input policy—illegal as determined by the World economic regulatory body.

Nepean-Carleton MPP and PC Energy Critic Lisa MacLeod covered the gamut of problems with the Green Energy Act in her speech. You may read the full account here (recommended). An excerpt follows:

…But if they want to talk about children’s health, I’ll talk about a child’s health. I’ll talk about Madi Vanstone, who every day we’ve brought up in the assembly here. I can’t help but think that the Ontario that I live in, the Ontario that I’m raising my daughter in, is spending $22 billion for 1% of energy to make Liberal friends rich when little girls in this province who need life-saving drugs can’t get them. And why can’t she get them? Because this Premier said it costs too much. She said that it costs too much; we couldn’t afford it. We could afford to make Mike Crawley a rich man, we can afford to make NextEra a rich company and we can ensure that Samsung basically has a seat at the cabinet table here, but apparently our government cannot and will not choose to support a child who needs help. That’s the reality that we’re in in Ontario today. People can’t understand it. It was well documented, I thought, by Christina Blizzard. I thought she laid out the case on that quite clearly, and I thought that she pointed out what most people in Ontario are saying.
You look at the cost of power now—and I had the opportunity to speak to the supply motion, I guess it was a week ago. I talked about the opportunity I had to visit many of my colleagues’ ridings and talk to many people who are in their communities, and we talked about the high cost of energy and how that is hurting the people of this province and hurting manufacturers, and we talked about what our plan would be.
We’ve written a number of white papers. Some of them were just, effectively, ideas that we put forward that we’ll run on; others were ideas for discussion that we’ve talked about. But, very clearly, people are looking for a rational solution to the mismanagement by the government.
We’ve put forward a number of, I think, very thoughtful ideas and very sensible ideas to review not only the existing Green Energy Act—I think we’ve been very clear that we would repeal it—but we also talked about looking at some of the entities that we have in Ontario, like the OPG and Hydro One, monetizing them to bring more accountability. We know that there are some very serious and straightforward concerns there. We know, for example, that we’re exporting about $1 billion worth of power. …
You think about this: He has just acknowledged in this House that to create 1.1% of power is $22 billion. They had to acknowledge, albeit it was the Auditor General who forced them, that it was $1.1 billion for them to save five seats. With that amount of waste and that amount of mismanagement, we could not only eradicate our deficit, but we could make significant investments into our communities in health care and education, and we would still have power that we wouldn’t have to export. A novel idea, Speaker, but that is the reality; it is the truth, and it is something that we have said consistently—and the only party to do so since 2009.
That’s why we stand here day in and day out. We stand for the people in Strathroy and Stratford. We talk to the people in Cobourg, the people in Oxford and the people in Barry’s Bay. We talk about the people who are opposing these high subsidies and who are opposing these invasions on their land. We talk to them. We ask them to stay in Ontario and make sure that they continue to support us so that we can change this.
…
Let me be abundantly clear, Speaker: This is a government who is too concerned with its own ideology, and too concerned with its buddies that they could make a little bit more rich, that they had no concern whatsoever about the people paying the bill; that they have no concern whatsoever of the broader implications in an international trade war that they have now thrust us into. They don’t care, Speaker. They didn’t do their job at the beginning.
They’re not doing their job now, they didn’t do their job then, and everybody in Ontario is paying for it.

Amherst Island wind project “not financially viable”

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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Wind power on Amherst Island: not financially viable

Posted on March 5, 2014

Members of the community on Amherst Island (who, it must be said, are doing anything and everything to protect their community from a proposed wind power plant) have undertaken a financial analysis of the power project.

Note that this is something the government of Ontario has never done, despite the Auditor General’s chiding of them to do this in 2011. The result of this analysis? Wind power doesn’t make any sense.

Read the report at http://freewco.wordpress.com/2014/03/05/wind-power-on-amherst-island-not-financially-viable/

Lyman: Ontario’s electricity prices continue to rise

03 Monday Mar 2014

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Here from energy economist Robert Lyman, an analysis of what’s going on with the price of electricity in Ontario… and what’s to come.

The Ontario Electricity Tragedy – The Numbers for 2013

The average resident of Ontario has a difficult time even understanding his or her electricity bill, let alone comprehending all the costs borne by the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO), the Crown Corporation that manages provincial electricity supply and demand.

Fortunately for the rest of us, one man spends a lot of time monitoring IESO’s purchases and costs. His name is Scott Luft, and he reports his analysis on a blog entitled “Cold Air.” He takes publicly available data from IESO and translates it into something meaningful. Two tables recently published by Scott Luft tell us a great deal about what has happened to the “commodity cost” of electricity in Ontario since 2006, and especially about the breakdown of costs in 2013. The commodity cost is the charges that IESO pays for the actual power that it purchases from generators plus additional costs that are added on by order of the provincial government. It excludes the cost of electricity transmission and distribution and other special charges like HST.

Read the full article here.Ontario’s Electricity Tragedy by the Numbers (revised)

The unreliable renewables (or, the taxpayer gets it again)

28 Friday Feb 2014

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Here from today’s Financial Post, Peter Foster on the International Energy Agency, and its report on renewable power sources.

Peter Foster: The International Energy Agency backs unreliable renewables

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Peter Foster | February 28, 2014 8:35 AM ET
More from Peter Foster

The self-serving misrepresentation of capitalism that was at the heart of both nationalism/fascism and Communism is still with us, only now it’s gone global, is called sustainable development, and is focused on climate change.

Sean Gallup/Getty ImagesThe self-serving misrepresentation of capitalism that was at the heart of both nationalism/fascism and Communism is still with us, only now it’s gone global, is called sustainable development, and is focused on climate change.

At the International Energy Agency,  ”Variable Renewable Energy”  is Orwellian Newspeak for “Unreliable Renewable Energy” 

It was depressing to read this week of Caisse de depot head Michael Sabia regurgitating the foundational myths of economic nationalism: that markets are too short-term, and that takeovers by foreign “tourist” corporations should be resisted.

That was the precisely the kind of thinking that, a generation ago, got us PetroCanada and the National Energy Program. Petrocan relentlessly spouted that its perspective was broader and longer than that of its market rivals. The result was a carnival of waste and a gusher of red ink. The NEP got every far-sighted projection dead wrong. Government-promoted takeovers sunk the acquirers, not the targets.

How soon we forget, if, that is, we ever knew. The self-serving misrepresentation of capitalism that was at the heart of both nationalism/fascism and Communism is still with us, only now it’s gone global, is called sustainable development, and is focused on climate change. This allegedly demands a carefully-coordinated decarbonization of the global economy, balanced with wise guidance of poor country development.

How’s that going?

A report this week from the International Energy Agency – The Power of Transformation – Wind, Sun and the Economics of Flexible Power Systems  – is a classic example of the immutability of bureaucratic pretension and its infinite ability to explain away failure, even as it promotes more of the same.

Here’s the opening of the report’s Executive Summary:

Wind power and solar photovoltaic (PV) are expected to make a substantial contribution to a more secure and sustainable energy system. However, electricity generation from both technologies is constrained by the varying availability of wind and sunshine. This can make it challenging to maintain the necessary balance of electricity supply and consumption at all times. Consequently, the cost effective integration of variable renewable energy (VRE) has become a pressing challenge for the energy sector.

Translation: renewable energy is a practical disaster.

Everywhere, policies based on subsidization of “technologies of the future” are in crisis.  “Variable Renewable Energy,” VRE, is Orwellian Newspeak for “Unreliable Renewable Energy,” URE.

Unintended results have been piling up like a mountain of biomass, hoisting prices, undermining manufacturing, and creating fuel poverty among consumers, including now even those in Germany, which is still Europe’s richest country despite some of the continent’s most perverse energy policies.

As the summary says, wind and solar are obviously unreliable because the wind does not always blow, nor the sun shine. They are also very expensive. Solving the latter problem is always just over the horizon, not least because those short-sighted agents of the market keep coming up with new and cheaper sources of fossil fuel, such as shale gas, a development which far-sighted bureaucrats somehow failed to spot.

So what’s the IEA’s answer to the unreliability problem? Bigger and better-coordinated plans, bolstered by positive verbiage. According to the report, any country can reach high shares of wind and solar power “cost-effectively.” All that’s required is to forget history, economics and, while we’re about it, developments in climate science. The science is settled.

According to IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven “Integrating high shares of variable renewables is really about transforming our power systems.” What is required is a “change of perspective,” which is to say the same old perspective dressed up in new imperial costume. Which is to say, the same old new imperial costume.

You see, the problem was never really unreliability per se, it was that wind and solar were introduced piecemeal on top of all those awful “business as usual” systems. So what is needed is transformation of energy systems “as a whole.” You know, like the Soviets’ Gosplan.

The IEA notes that wind and solar now account for just 3 percent of world electricity generation. However, a few bold leaders generate 10-30% of their electricity, albeit spottily and expensively, from wind and sun. These champions include Germany, Italy, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, and Denmark. All are struggling with policy perversity. Germany’s abandonment of nuclear has – due to aforementioned wind and solar unreliability – led to a boom in one of the “dirtiest” power sources, brown coal.

The IEA grudgingly admits that renewables have wreaked havoc among “incumbent generators.” Where the transformational challenge comes is in working out how to reduce the existing economic part of the system while boosting investment in the new non-economic (not to mention climatically pointless) part. What “flexibility” thus means is the flexibility to accommodate dumb ideas, and in particular to execute the policy pretzel positions necessary to kill those “inflexible” (economic) parts of the system. This will require a “collaborative effort by policy makers and the industry.” Translation: the taxpayer will get screwed. Again.

Still, the important thing is to keep green bureaucratic dreams alive, aided by those positive semantics. The IEA wants the world to deploy wind and solar “in a system-friendly way using state-of-the art technology, improving the day-to-day operation of power systems and markets, and finally investing in additional flexible resources.”

I wonder why they never thought of that before.

…

Read the full article here.

The simple genius of a noise nuisance bylaw

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by in Ottawa, Renewable energy, Wind power

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Here from last week’s Wellington Times in Prince Edward County, is Rick Conroy’s account of the presentation to Council by Warren Howard, member of the Wainfleet group of municipalities (who started the Not A Willing Host campaign). The goal is to take what powers municipalities have left after the democracy-destroying Green Energy Act, and still take steps to protect citizens from the environmental noise produced by wind turbines.*

Quiet nights

Wolfe-Island-Small

Industrial wind turbines on Wolfe Island.
PHOTO: HENRI GARAND

Coalition of municipalities seek to protect health and safety of residents near industrial wind turbines

It’s a simple plan. But it may be just the thing to slow down the epidemic of industrial wind turbines spreading across rural Ontario. Warren Howard is a councillor in the municipality of North Perth and lives in Listowel. He is a retired banker and understands bureaucratic processes better than most. He thinks he has come up with a way to thwart the provinces heavy handed Green Energy Act (GEA).

Howard’s plan is to create a bulletproof municipal bylaw that prohibits industrial noise in a rural area at night. That’s it. It sounds simple—and it is—but Howard has done his homework.

He has been working with municipal lawyer Kristi Ross. Together they have discovered that while the Green Energy Act took away virtually all the municipality’s tools to manage, control and oversee the construction of these massive structures in its community—it left intact provisions municipalities use to govern nuisance noise.

Howard believes any municipality may be able use these provisions to stop industrial wind development in its jurisdiction. He is looking to form a coalition of like-minded municipalities to jointly fund the crafting of a noise bylaw that will be enforceable and effective in discouraging industrial wind energy development, but won’t capture and impede other activities that may generate noise—such as agricultural operations.

It’s a fine line. Howard knows it. But he believes it can work.

Municipal bylaws can’t overtly defy or block provincial initiatives. So the Quiet Nights plan doesn’t seek to prevent turbines from making noise—it wouldn’t withstand a legal challenge. Instead the bylaw would only prohibit the machines from making noise at night. Further, the Municipal Act states that such a bylaw, if enacted in good faith by council, is not subject to a review by a court.

Warren-Howard

Warren Howard Municipal councillor in North Perth in Southwest Ontario

Howard points to a decision in Wainfleet in the Niagara region. There, the municipality was seeking two kilometre setbacks rather than the 500-metre setbacks prescribed in the GEA.

The wind energy developer had argued that the municipality’s efforts to protect the health and safety of residents should have no force because they frustrate the purpose of the province’s GEA. But while the Superior Court justice disallowed Wainfleet’s desired setbacks, it confirmed that municipalities retain the right to regulate noise nuisance in the Municipal Act.

It is through this narrow opening that Howard is hoping to lead municipalities seeking to control or limit the industrialization of their rural communities.

Read the full story here.

*NOTE: Back in 2010, journalist Mark Sutcliffe asked Prowind sales representative Bart Geleynse on his Ottawa Rogers TV talk show whether the wind turbines make noise. “Of course they do,” Geleynse replied. “They’re power plants.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong

27 Thursday Feb 2014

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The Times

Wrong to assume

Blanding-SmallThe Prince Edward County Field Naturalists are wrong. Ontario Nature. Nature Canada. Both wrong. Dr. Robert McMurtry is wrong. The South Shore Conservancy is wrong. So too is the Prince Edward Point Bird Observatory. Alvar, bird, butterfly, turtle and bat experts are all wrong. The municipality of Prince Edward is wrong. As are the majority of County residents who believed Crown Land at Ostrander Point should be preserved—rather than industrialized for the profit of one corporation.

And now we have learned that Ontario’s own Environmental Review Tribunal is wrong. A Toronto court has said so. This ought to keep Premier Kathleen Wynne up at night.

The Tribunal’s Robert Wright and Heather Gibbs spent more than 40 days hearing evidence, challenging testimony and witnesses and weighing competing claims. They began their task in a snowstorm in February; and delivered their decision on a hot July day last summer. Wright and Gibbs visited Ostrander Point. They walked around. They saw, with their own eyes, what was at stake.

They dug deep into the evidence. They weren’t satisfied that the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) had sufficiently scrutinized the developer’s plans before issuing it a permit to “harm, harass and kill” endangered species, including the Blanding’s turtle.

They discovered that mitigation measures proposed by the developer to ensure overall benefit to the species were untested and worse, according to evidence presented before them—unlikely to work, particularly for the population at Ostrander Point.

However, the Toronto court ruled that Wright and Gibbs should have given the MNR the benefit of doubt.

“In my view, the Tribunal ought to have assumed that the MNR would properly and adequately monitor compliance with the ESA (Endangered Species Act) permit,” wrote Justice Ian Nordheimer in the decision.

But Wright and Gibbs, after listening to 40 days of testimony and examining nearly 200 documents entered into evidence, concluded they could not make that assumption.

The Tribunal’s error was that it didn’t believe the MNR would adequately look out for the Blanding’s turtle.

Wright and Gibbs had gone backward and forward through the proposals prepared and submitted by the developer and accepted by the MNR. They concluded the “Blanding’s turtle at Ostrander Point Crown Land Block will not be effectively mitigated by the conditions of the REA [Renewable Energy Approval].”

The court didn’t say Wright and Gibbs were wrong about their conclusions, but that they should have “accepted the ESA permit at face value” or explained better why their conclusions were different than the MNR.

“The Tribunal was obliged to explain how the fact that the MNR had concluded under the ESA that the project would lead to an overall benefit to Blanding’s turtle (notwithstanding the harm that would arise from the project) could mesh with its conclusion that the project would cause irreversible harm to the same species,” wrote Justice Nordheimer.

This is the bit that ought to send a cold shiver through Premier Wynne and anyone else who is worries about the welfare of endangered species in this province.

Read the full article here.

Ontario citizens expect environment to be protected

25 Tuesday Feb 2014

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Ontario citizens want wildlife protected from wind power plants

Monday, Feb 24, 2014

TORONTO, Feb. 20, 2014 /CNW/ – Ontario citizens expect government to protect wildlife, according to a recent poll. Results of an online public poll hosted by Wind Concerns Ontario showed that 97.38 percent of the more than 1,300 people responding said they did not support the killing of birds and animals for wind power development.

“We think Ontario citizens are unaware of the government’s policy on wildlife, even endangered species, and wind power,” said Jane Wilson, president, Wind Concerns Ontario. “They don’t know that wind power developers are allowed to show that the ‘overall benefit’ of their projects trumps the need to protect birds and animals.”

At the Ostrander Point wind power project to be built on Crown land, the developer proposed to build a “compensation area” for endangered Blanding’s turtles, Wilson said. “We’re not sure how the turtles were going to get the message about that,” Wilson said. “The real message is, this government supports wind power developers, no matter what the cost.”

SOURCE Wind Concerns Ontario

windconcerns@gmail.com

NOTE: the South Branch wind power plant, which is about to begin operations soon just south of Ottawa, received a permit to kill, harm or harass the protected Bobolink.

“Quiet nights” by-law could protect communities

19 Wednesday Feb 2014

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Quiet nights bylaw could protect communities from noise

Noise bylaw could stifle windmills 14

By Bruce Bell, The Intelligencer

Friday, February 14, 2014 3:24:46 EST PM

PRINCE EDWARD COUNTY – Strength in numbers could provide municipalities with protection against unwanted developments including wind farms.

Warren Howard, a councillor from North Perth (Listowel) in southwestern Ontario appeared in front of Prince Edward County’s committee of the whole to determine if there was any interest in joining a municipal coalition to establish a noise regulation bylaw.
Howard told the committee a generic bylaw used by a number of municipalities could quite likely help stop unwanted development in Ontario communities.
“A coalition would be a much better way of doing it, because you can be 99.9 per cent sure that if a municipality tried to stop a wind development using a noise bylaw, the developer would challenge it in court,” he said. “If we had 10 municipalities in the coalition, there’s no court that is going to hear the same thing 10 times and I would imagine the first decision would be binding.”
Howard said a bylaw would need to be developed in “good faith” and couldn’t be established to target one type of development – namely the erection of wind turbines or to simply frustrate provincial initiatives. He said legal opinion suggests a noise bylaw could be developed using the concept of “quiet nights” for rural areas, prohibiting clearly audible sounds. He said general exemptions could be provided for activities such as specified farming practices, festivals and emergency vehicles.
Howard said the Green Energy Act (GEA) overrides municipal matters in planning and zoning but not the enforcement of bylaws such as noise control.
While bylaws cannot be created to completely block out provincial initiatives everywhere in a municipality, Howard said a court ruling regarding a wind development in Wainfleet, Ontario, suggests municipalities have the right to enact bylaws which protect the health and safety of residents.
“The wind company submitted that the bylaw should be declared of no force or effect pursuant to Section 14 (2) of the Municipal Act 2001 because it frustrates the purpose of the GEA and that therefore a conflict exists,” Howard told the committee.
“I am not prepared to go that far. The Municipal Act clearly contains provisions to allow for nuisance and noise as well as health and safety matters.”
Coun. Brian Marisett told Howard “Prince Edward County has dealt with noise issues many times and it’s always controversial and I don’t know what level of noise you can monitor.”
Howard said the bylaw would deal only with clearly audible sounds “because it’s hard to determine what level of noise is harmful and scientists can’t even agree on that yet.”

Read the full story here.

European Parliament policy advisor: wind is a loser

16 Sunday Feb 2014

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Here is a very short video prepared by Ben Acheson, policy advisor on energy and the environment to Member of European Parliament Struan Stevenson. He reviews the European experience with wind power and says, it’s time to chalk this up as a loss.

And what a loss. Billions in the pockets of developers, and “fuel poverty” for the people.

Watch the video here.

79th Unwilling Host: response to loss of democracy in Ontario

16 Sunday Feb 2014

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Here from Sarnia, an opinion on last week’s vote at Lambton County to declare the municipality Not A Willing Host to wind power plants. Note that the report states wind turbines will soon be operating near Ottawa–the wind power plant at Brinston will begin operations this month, or in early March.

Unwilling host declaration born from frustration

By Peter Epp

Friday, February 14, 2014 7:09:16 EST PM

Wind turbines at the Erie Shores Wind Farm near Port Burwell generate power. Similar turbines may be popping up near Ottawa. (CRAIG GLOVER/QMI AGENCY)

Wind turbines at the Erie Shores Wind Farm near Port Burwell generate power. Similar turbines may be popping up near Ottawa. (CRAIG GLOVER/QMI AGENCY)

It’s been almost five years since the Green Energy Act received approval at Queen’s Park, and yet the public debate over the content of that legislation continues to be a sore point, especially in rural Ontario where most of the legislation’s impact has been felt.

Planning and decision-making for the location of wind turbines has been legally centralized in Toronto since 2009, and so local municipalities and their locally-elected councillors have had little to no influence in deciding whether a wind turbine or solar farm ought to be located within their political jurisdiction.

It is rare in Ontario, and in other democratic jurisdictions, when the wishes of the electorate, through their public representatives, are ignored so profoundly. Indeed, approximately 80 municipalities in this province have declared themselves to be “unwilling hosts” for wind turbine developments – a collective protest against legislation that smacks more of the Soviet than the Canadian style in getting things done.

Lambton County council joined that chorus on Wednesday. And in declaring that Lambton County was an unwilling host to wind turbines, it joined with several lower-tier local municipalities that have done the same.

Most protests are born from frustration and from the collective anger of an individual or group who have been placed in a position of futility. Removing all but a token comment on wind turbine developments has left local councils in Lambton County and elsewhere in a municipal no-man’s land. All they have left is the “unwilling host” designation.

None of this will change until there is a change in government at Queen’s Park. The Liberal government in power is loath to tinker with the legislation it crafted and supported five years ago. Even as recently as January 2013, during the heat of the Liberal leadership race, Kathleen Wynne declared that her role as premier would be to better convince the people of Southwestern Ontario that wind turbines are good for us, and that Toronto knows best.

And Wynne has been as good as her word. She’s tried to convince rural Ontario, but we’re not buying what she’s selling.

Read the full story here.