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Ottawa Wind Concerns

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Ottawa Wind Concerns

Tag Archives: climate change

Why wind power is not the right choice for Ottawa

19 Tuesday Oct 2021

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

climate change, Ottawa, renewables, wind energy, wind turbines

Wind turbines: not efficient, not effective against climate change or to help the environment [Photo: D. Larsen for Wind Concerns Ontario]

Intermittent, unreliable, weather-dependent wind power is not the best idea for a city that says it is serious about acting to help the environment

Below is an excerpt from our submission to the City of Ottawa for its new Official Plan on why industrial-scale or grid-scale wind power is not a good choice. Our chief concerns are: reliability of the power source; cost; safety; and, impact on the environment.

Reliability of power source

We are unaware of any review of the Ontario experience with wind power as part of the electricity supply since 2006 and, significantly, since the Green Energy Act in 2009. This is an important omission as the experience has been problematic, and resulted in multiple recommendations from Auditors General as to the sort of analysis that ought to have been done, but was not.

As part of the necessary review of the Ontario experience with wind power since 2006, it is essential to do a cost-benefit analysis for wind power, and to prepare a full and honest estimate of what the costs would be for the people of Ottawa, and the taxpayers of Canada who are apparently going to be asked to help pay for these plans.

The fact is, wind is not a reliable source of power. In a Commentary prepared for the Council for Clean & Reliable Energy, author Marc Brouillette said this:

“Wind generation output is inherently intermittent as it depends on Mother Nature. For example, in 2015 Ontario’s wind farms operated at less than one-third capacity more than half (58%) the time. That means 70 per cent of wind energy was produced in the remaining 42 per cent of the time…Indeed, wind output over any three-day period can vary between zero and 90 per cent of capacity.”

He went on:

“Seasonally, Ontarians’ energy use is highest in winter and summer and lowest in spring and late fall. This is almost a mirror image of wind [power] production patterns”.

In short, wind might be somewhat useful as part of a mix of power supply, but it cannot be relied upon. Although there is a popular statement that wind replaced coal as a power source in Ontario, that is completely false: coal was replaced by the refurbishment of nuclear plants with natural gas being used to meet short-term, peak power needs.

Wind turbines are intermittent sources of power that are not aligned with grid requirements.

Again, a cost-benefit analysis that justifies this in terms of actual effectiveness in climate action will be mandatory.

We ask, has the City carried out any investigation that would allow it to plan for power outages and power shortages? This situation is occurring now in jurisdictions in Europe and the UK, where a move to mostly wind and solar has resulted in a severe shortage of power, such that the outlook for the coming winter is nothing short of grim. Can Ottawa not learn from these situations and conduct proper planning so as not to endanger its citizens?

Ontario’s power grid is designed for a stable supply of power, not intermittent surges and shortages.

A recent court decision in the State of Minnesota was the result of a cost-benefit analysis. In ruling that the proposed wind power project should not proceed. In her decision, Judge Louise Dovre Borkman relied on information from the state’s public utilities analyst coordinator, who said that “wind and solar capacity does not always translate into available energy because those resources are unpredictable and uncontrollable—the wind is not always blowing and the sun is not always shining.”

A critical factor in the decision was a statement in Minnesota Statute §216B.2422, subsection 4(3)  saying that due to the “intermittent nature of renewable energy facilities” there could be an impact on the cost of energy.

“In fact,” the Judge wrote, “as Minnesota Power illustrated in its EnergyForward , the output from those resources can ebb significantly even over the course of a single day. When that happens, or customer demand increases, Minnesota Power must increase output from more reliable resources, like coal or natural gas generators, or purchase power on the regional market.”

The Judge noted testimony from a consulting expert on energy who said that adding more wind power would leave the power company “doubly vulnerable to market pricing, both to sell surplus energy into the market when prices are low and to buy energy when prices are high.”

The final conclusion was that a “wind or solar alternative is not in the public interest” because the costs are higher.

In short, Ottawa’s choice of large-scale, or grid-scale wind power will be a high impact on the environment and electricity consumers for little benefit.

Cost

In a recent article in the Financial Post, economist Dr. Jack M. Mintz emphasized the need for honest accounting of the costs of climate policy, and he used the Ontario example:

“Despite implementing various cost-reduction measures the Wynne government was saddled with expensive sole-sourced contracts for wind and solar electricity awarded by the McGuinty government. Those subsidies were put on the backs of Ontario ratepayers who saw their electricity bills jump.”

As for the choice of wind power, Dr. Mintz noted:

“Governments generally do not understand and certainly cannot predict the evolution of technology so should not try to pick the ‘winning’ technologies themselves. They should instead put a price on environmental damage”.

In the Pathway Study on Wind Power in Ottawa, the author stated that because the Ottawa-area is a low wind power resource, financial encouragement would be needed to attract wind power developers. That means subsidies; that means higher electricity bills.

In a Commentary for the Council for Clean & Reliable Energy on energy costs, author Marc Brouillette stated that “Renewables-based DER systems in Ontario could cost 60-percent to 230-percent more than an alternative nuclear-based DES option. These higher costs have the potential to increase ratepayer bills by 10 percent to 20 percent.”

In its 2016 annual report, the Ontario Association of Food Banks wrote about energy poverty and connected poverty to Ontario’s electricity bills:

“Since 2006, hydro rates have increased at a rate of 3.5 times inflation for peak hours, and at a rate of 8 times inflation for off-peak hours. Households across Ontario are finding it hard to keep up with these expenses, as exemplified by the $172.5 million in outstanding hydro bills, or the 60,000  homes that were disconnected last year for failing to pay. In rural Ontario, the effects of the rising cost of hydro can be felt even more acutely. According to a recent report, rural Ontarians can expect current hydro bills to increase by 11.5 per cent by 2017, on top of their current hydro costs, which are already higher than those in cities or larger urban areas.”

 

…

In short, wind power generation cannot withstand any cost-benefit or impact analysis (which is why the developer proponents never want them done). If Ottawa wants to take action against climate change and to benefit all aspects of the environment, fostering wind turbines throughout our countryside is not the right choice.

OTTAWA WIND CONCERNS

ottawawindconcerns@gmail.com

 

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Wynne government ad would have been banned last year: Auditor General

25 Monday Jul 2016

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Renewable energy, Wind power

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

climate change, David Suzuki, Greenpeace, Ontario Auditor General, Wynne government

…but the Ontario Liberal government changed the rules so ad promoting its “green” agenda is now allowed.

Farmers Forum, August 2016

By Tom Collins

TORONTO– The Ontario government is once again calling on television scientist David Suzuki to help get its message out, but the province’s auditor general says the latest ad would have been banned under old rules that were changed last year by the Liberal government.

Suzuki spoke to an auditorium of school kids about climate change where Suzuki warned that the earth is in trouble, not enough adults are doing anything, and the results could be irreversible if nothing is done immediately. Suzuki then told the kids they would have to live with the consequences. The talk was for an ad to support the Liberal climate change action plan.

Ontario Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk slammed the ad saying in early June that the commercial doesn’t provide any useful information.

“Instead, it appears to be designed to create apprehension about the effect of climate change so viewers will be more likely to support Ontario’s climate change action plan,” she said in a statement. She said the ad reflects support for the Liberal government.

Taxpayers paid for it.

The much-loved and much-hated Suzuki doesn’t get the same respect from the scientific community. Greenpeace co-founder and scientist Patrick Moore told Brian Lilley of theRebel.media that Suzuki “is not the geneticist who’s using genetics because he’s against all the genetic sciences that we have developed to improve our food and medicine.” Moore, who left Greenpeace when that group abandoned science for ideology, added, “That to me is indicative of someone who has gone astray in their mind somewhere.”

“He id a really good job of popularizing science in his early years but he became political and ideological,” said Moore. “He just does not engage with anybody on a meaningful level who wants to debate with him or discuss with him… they’re feeding him all this propaganda, and that’s what he talks about.”

Suzuki also did a commercial for the Liberals in 2011, supporting then premier Dalton McGuinty for re-election.

The article is on page A21 of the August edition of Farmers Forum, see farmersforum.com

 

Group files court documents for Judicial Review of wind farm approval

01 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Ottawa, Renewable energy, Wind power

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

CCSAGE, climate change, endangered species Ontario, environment, Environmental Review Tribunal, Garth Manning, green energy, Green Energy Act, prince Edward County, wind energy, wind farm, wind farm approvals, wind power

South Shore Prince Edward County: how did a power plant get approved for this? [Photo Point 2 Point Foundation]

South Shore Prince Edward County: how did a power plant get approved for this? [Photo Point 2 Point Foundation]

Canada Newswire

Community Group Files Request for Judicial Review of Wind Farm Approval Process

<!– newsBody:PICTON, ON, Nov. 30, 2015 /CNW/ – CCSAGE Naturally Green (CCSAGE-NG) filed notice in Divisional Court at Ottawa today for a Judicial Review of the Renewable Energy Approval process for the White Pines wind power project in Prince Edward County.

The power project was approved by the Ontario Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change in 2015. Part of that approval included a permit issued by the Minister of Natural Resources and Forests to “kill, harm and harass” endangered or threatened wildlife species.

CCSAGE cited institutional bias, lack of evidence-based studies, disallowance of municipal input, and denial of natural justice in its court filing, which is supported by 1,500 pages of evidence showing that the government’s approval process violated the constitutional rights of citizens and communities as well as international treaties and agreements.

Ontario’s Green Energy Act permits appeals of wind power approvals only on grounds of serious harm to humans, or serious and irreversible harm to animal and/or plant life and to the natural environment, but not on other grounds such as a biased approval process, violation of constitutional rights, harm to local economies, harm to heritage features, diminution of property values, or violation of international treaties and agreements.

CCSAGE NG Chair Anne Dumbrille said that because the existing appeal process is biased in favour of the wind power developers, the group’s only choice was court: “The Environmental Review Tribunal is a government-appointed panel that follows government rules with the result that it allows destruction of environmentally sensitive areas.  Our only recourse is to Canada’s courts, where rules of justice prevail,” she said.

CCSAGE NG was aided by research done by five students from the Osgoode Hall Law School at York University.

CCSAGE NG is a federally incorporated not-for-profit corporation working to ensure that “Green Energy” initiatives of governments and industry are safe and appropriate for the citizens, wildlife and the natural and heritage environments of Prince Edward County.

SOURCE Wind Concerns Ontario

–>

Ontario needs to learn from Europe’s green energy debacle, says policy advisor

16 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Renewable energy, Wind power

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

climate change, electricity bills, EU climate policy, Europe, forms of energy, hydro bills, Ontario, Ontario economy, renewable energy, subsidies renewables, wind farms, wind power

Financial Post, April 14

Ontario will follow the EU at its peril — power rates will soar while industries depart

As the Ontario government announces new unilateral climate policies, Canadian policymakers would be well advised to heed the lessons of Europe’s self-defeating green energy debacle.

The European Union has long been committed to unilateral efforts to tackle climate change. For the last 20 years, Europe has felt a duty to set an example through radical climate policy-making at home. Political leaders were convinced that the development of a low-carbon economy based on renewables would give Europe a competitive advantage.

European governments have advanced the most expensive forms of energy generation at the expense of the least expensive kinds. No other major emitter has followed the EU’s aggressive climate policy and targets. As a result, electricity prices in Europe are now more than double those in North America and Europe’s remaining and struggling manufacturers are rapidly losing ground to international competition. European companies and investors are pouring money into the U.S., where energy prices have fallen to less than half those in the EU, thanks to the shale gas revolution.

Although EU policy has managed to reduce CO2 emissions domestically, this was only achieved by shifting energy-intensive industries to overseas locations without stringent emission limits, where energy and labour is cheap and which are now growing much faster than the EU.

Most products consumed in the EU today are imported from countries without binding CO2 targets. While the EU’s domestic CO2 emissions have fallen, if you factor in CO2 emissions embedded in goods imported into EU, the figure remains substantially higher.

Of all the unintended consequences of EU climate policy perhaps the most bizarre is the detrimental effect of wind and solar schemes on the price of electricity generated by natural gas. Many gas power plants can no longer operate enough hours. They incur big costs as they have to be switched on and off to back-up renewables.

Most products consumed in the EU today are imported from countries without binding CO2 targets

This week, Germany’s energy industry association warned that more than half of all power plants in planning are about to fold: Even the most efficient gas-fired power plants can no longer be operated profitably.

Every 10 new units worth of wind power installation has to be backed up with some eight units worth of fossil fuel generation. This is because fossil fuel plants have to power up suddenly to meet the deficiencies of intermittent renewables. In short, renewables do not provide an escape route from fossil fuel use without which they are unsustainable.

Read more here: http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/eus-green-energy-debacle-shows-the-futility-of-climate-change-policies

Global “warmists”: how far do they want us to go?

29 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Renewable energy, Wind power

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Canada climate, Canada GHGs, carbon budget, climate change, Economist Robert Lyman, federal government, global temperature, global warming, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPPC, Robert Lyman

In Canada we hear about global warming and climate change but the rhetoric seldom goes to the extremes seen in other areas. Economist Robert Lyman, who advised the federal government on issues pertaining to energy, transportation and the environment for 37 years, reviews the situation in this paper.

An excerpt:

In April 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body well known for its faulty projections of global temperatures rising, issued yet another report claiming that the science of climate change is “settled” and irrefutable. It also issued a report on the mitigation measures that countries should take. The IPCC’s goal, as approved by governments in 2010, is to avoid a rise in global temperature to no more than two degrees Celsius by the end of the century. To achieve this, they estimate that greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations in the atmosphere must be kept below 450 parts per million (ppm) and the world must stay within a carbon “budget” of about 1000 billion tons of CO2 to 2010.

The IPCC report followed, but was closely related to, the 2013 report of Carbon Tracker, a U.K.-based organization allied with a number of “ethical” investment funds. Carbon Tracker’s report, entitled Unburnable Carbon 2013, compared the carbon budget to the amount of carbon present in the world already proven reserves of coal, oil and natural gas. Its conclusion was that those current reserves totaled almost 3000 billion tons, three times the allegedly available budget.

The recommendations coming out of these two organizations today don’t even make it to the back pages of the financial sections of the newspapers, but they are making their insidious ways through the governments of western countries as they prepare for the next Climate Change “Meeting of the Parties” in 2015. We ignore this at our risk.

Read the full paper here: WHERE THE CLIMATE WARMISTS WANT TO TAKE US NEXT

Paying for greenhouse gas emissions: what’s right for Canada?

20 Friday Sep 2013

Posted by ottawawindconcerns in Renewable energy, Wind power

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

climate change, greenhouse emissions, IPCC, Robert Lyman, social cost of carbon, social premium GHGs

WHAT SHOULD WE PAY TO REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS?               Environmental organizations frequently call for Canadians to take expensive measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions that may accumulate in the atmosphere and eventually result in unwanted climate change. Economists have long studied the question of what premium citizens should be asked to pay in order to avoid the adverse environmental effects of climate change. This premium, often referred to as the “social cost of carbon” (SCC) has been variously estimated to fall somewhere between $20 and $85 per tonne, depending upon the inputs and assumptions used in the analysis. The primary tools upon which this analysis is based, however, are sophisticated computer models that attempt to integrate scientific assessments of the atmospheric effects of increasing GHG concentrations on temperature and other aspects of climate and economic assessments of the effects of these climactic changes on people’s incomes and wellbeing.

There are several problems with the analytical approaches that have been taken to date. Collectively, these problems suggest that the estimated values of the SCC are exaggerated. The modelers are free to use arbitrary inputs or ones that are largely unknown concerning climate sensitivity to GHG concentrations, social welfare and the economic effects of rising temperatures. The rate of time preference (i.e., discount rates) is a policy parameter, which reflects the choices of policy makers, not the objective assessment of analysts.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) considers that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, now 382 parts per million (ppm), should not be allowed to peak above 450 ppm and should stabilize in the long term at around 380 ppm. However, to achieve this, global emissions would have to decline by 60% by 2050 and emissions from industrialized countries like Canada would have to decline by over 80%. In fact, global emissions are rising, driven by economic development in developing countries and especially in Asia. According to the most recent authoritative forecasts, world energy consumption and related emissions will grow by 56% from 2010 to 2040.

There is no chance of a new climate change agreement before 2016 at the earliest, and that would not come into force before 2020. No progress seems likely on the core issues dividing developed and developing countries.

Canada represents only 1.9 % of global GHG emissions, and global emissions are growing at 1.2% per year. Even if Canada disappeared from the earth, global emissions growth would make up for the loss in 18 months.

Based on this, one should question whether any social premium should be paid for emissions reductions in Canada at all.  To make major costly emissions reductions in the absence of international agreement is to accept major economic harm with no compensating environmental benefits.

Robert Lyman, September, 2013

Robert Lyman is an economist specializing in energy issues; he lives in Ottawa.

Readers may also wish to read Ross McKitrick’s latest article on climate change statistics and forecasts here.

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