Skip to content

Archive for November 2nd, 2012

Nov 2

blandings_turtle

Has Ostrander Point been spared from the blades of wind turbines?

Tip of the hat to Sherry Lange — (NAPAW)

Rick Conroy — The Wellington Times — November 2, 2012

Speculation grows that Gilead Power is retreating from Ostrander Point.

Is it over for the wind energy factory at Ostrander Point? Has this nineturbine project on Crown land on the south shore of the County become the first casualty of the departure of Dalton McGuinty?

Several sources speculated this week that Gilead Power Corporation had appealed to Hydro One seeking a return of its $5 million deposit. The company paid this money last fall in anticipation of approval by spring or summer. The project’s outlook then looked much brighter than it does today.

At the time the pathway for the developer seemed clear—all that was left to do was clear the 60-day review period in which the public could voice their objections or support for the project. MPP Todd Smith pushed for and received an extension to the deadline to account for the Christmas break.

Despite the fact that the project’s proponents acknowledged it would likely have an impact on two endangered species, the Blandings turtle and whippoorwill, the public review was widely seen as a formality. When the review period closed the comments and opinions were brought into the Ministry of Environment for a final decision.

Many expected the Ministry would simply acknowledge the opposition that had arrayed against the project—which included conservancy groups such as Nature Canada, the Audubon Society and Ontario Nature—but would nevertheless give the developer the green light.

Gilead Power likely had the same view—as it put up a $5 million deposit to Hydro One for work to extend transmission lines from a substation in Milford to Ostrander Point.

But as the weeks and months went by, doubt about the project began to sprout. By June it was clear the project had stalled—but the nature of the delay was unclear. On the Ministry of Environment’s website, the project remains listed as under technical review.

(To continue reading, click here)

Nov 2

Ontario’s Power Trip: Dalton McGuinty, power puppeteer

Parker Gallant — Financial Post — November 1, 2012

Premier’s Office overwhelmed bureaucrats on gas-plant scandal

The 56,000 pages of documents associated with the Ontario government’s decision to kill two gas plants originally planned for Mississauga and Oakville show clearly the top-down role of politicians, both in the decisions made and in the attempts to hide the costs. They show, in numerous instances, how Premier Dalton McGuinty was in absolute control through his cabinet ministers to the officials he had appointed to the agencies involved.

As I read the documents so far, including board briefings and emails among the many players, it’s the Liberal strategists attached to the Premier’s Office and Ministry offices who are invested in hiding the mess the gas plants created. As energy consultant Tom Adams suggests in his review of the documents, the evidence suggests the total cost of plant cancellations is likely greater than $1.3-billion, the burden to be borne by electricity consumers. The documents show that McGuinty strategists managed the gas files to benefit the Liberal party rather than taxpayers and ratepayers. Once the plants were cancelled, in October 2010 and September 2011, the top-down political influence is very noticeable. Post-cancellation negotiations to cover the costs of breaking contracts fell to Liberal party officials who tried to cover up the mess, not to energy experts.

One early sign of the Premier’s Office control came early, in November 2010, a month after the government announced it would cancel the $1.2-billion contract to TransCanada Energy (TCE) to build the 900-megawatt Oakville plant. One of the 56,000 documents is a presentation made to the board of directors of the Ontario Power Authority (OPA), the agency that runs the provincial power system under government oversight. One slide in the presentation captures the essence of the issues:

Premier’s Office staff advised TCE that Ontario has other needs for gas-fired generation

z OPA staff [is] advised that Province would be pleased if the following or a combination of the following criteria were achieved:

z Negotiated solution does not exceed $1.2 B

z No cheque issued to TCE

z Good location for replacement facility (i.e. rural and meets

setback requirements of Bill 8)

z Per unit cost close to that of similar generation technology…”

(To continue reading, click here)

Nov 2

cpre3636-quantocks-somerset

UK — In the wind turbine debate, who dares mention the B-word (Beauty)?

Unless we find the words to discuss the beauty of our landscape, it will be desecrated by lines of great waving semaphores

Simon Jenkins — The Guardian — November 1, 2012

You can smash a building, bomb a city, impoverish a nation and the world grants you a hearing. But break the twig of a British tree and hobgoblins will descend and destroy you. Thank goodness for that.

Britain this autumn is ablaze. The year’s eccentric climate has given us dying leaves of unprecedented splendour. Researching a book on English landscape, I travelled last week through the Midlands to the Peak District and the Yorkshire Dales. The golden beechwoods of the Chilterns gave way to the yellows and oranges of Cannock Chase, the purples of the Peak District and the ambers of the Calder, the Aire and the southern dales. England was never so beautiful. If the coalition is now presiding over the last rites of the open English countryside, it has at least granted it the loveliest of funerals.

The climax of my journey was a question posed by a Guardian reader. Which is the finer view, he asked: from Stanage Edge in the High Peak west towards Mam Tor, or from Mam Tor east to Stanage Edge? From each vantage point, black snow clouds dodged bright sun. Swirling light and shadow turned Hope Valley into a set for a Tolkien novel. The scene was of nature untrammelled, a palette of brilliant colours with hardly a sight of human habitation. The view from Mam Tor won.

How soon before these colours are gone and the horizon is lined with turbines, as now is the Peak’s northern rim, promoted unbelievably by the same Nick Clegg whose Sheffield constituency borders this paradise? During the last war artists such as John Piper and Sir William Russell Flint were commissioned by Whitehall to depict buildings at risk from bombing, creating the Recording Britain archive. A similar record is now urgently needed of the landscape.

In the news this week were two new threats to add to the government’s renewed eagerness to build in the country rather than towns. The first is the fungal disease threatening ash, and possibly others affecting larch and chestnut. The second is confusion over the coalition’s plan for onshore turbines to rise from some 3,000 today to 7,000-plus by the end of the decade. This constitutes nothing less than the mass industrialisation of the landscape.

The threat of ash dieback is mitigated by the vigour with which new trees regenerate in the British climate. The losses of the great storm of 1987, heart-breaking at the time, have been more than made good. Anyone must regret the loss of the ash, a serenely delicate adornment of woods and hedges, especially in favour of such bruisers as sycamore and poplar. But I am told ash does revive, unlike elm.

Trees also benefit from public affection. The wider countryside enjoys no such iconic status. In the recent debate over planning reforms developers were able to persuade ministers to favour rural against urban building, entirely because rural building was more profitable. Countryside was considered to have no intrinsic planning virtue outside the 15% of land designated as national park or natural beauty reserve. The concept did not arise.

Against wind farms there is not even that defence. They can go anywhere an inspector or a minister decides. Nowhere in Whitehall guidance on turbines is there any reference to natural or visual beauty. This is no surprise to a sector now drunk on public subsidy, but even its opponents feel they must avoid any reference to aesthetics. They talk of wind power’s cost and intermittency, its abuse of peat and extravagance of imported minerals, its forcing poor energy users to cross-subsidise rich landowners.

(To continue reading, click here)

Nov 2

Americanflag

Michigan — Renewable Energy: At Any Cost?

Doug Snitgen — Countrylines.com — November 1, 2012

FINANCIAL COSTS
Michigan is already on track, by state law, to get 10 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2015. This law will be reviewed in 2015 to ensure Michigan continues on an affordable, reliable path to clean energy, and it can be changed if needed to adjust to new technologies or spare consumers from unreasonably high costs.

Proposal 3 language limits rate increases to 1 percent annually, but this is misleading. A 1 percent increase every year, over a 13-year period, represents a cumulative 13 percent increase in the final year, and every year after. This cap does not include related costs—such as building necessary transmission systems and back-up generation for when the wind doesn’t blow—or normal rate increases not associated with this measure. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports that Proposal 3 would cost the average residential ratepayer an additional $170 to $190 per year by 2025.

JOBS & OTHER ECONOMIC COSTS
Proposal 3 backers claim it will create tens of thousands of jobs in green industries, but there’s no credible way to predict such job creation. Similar claims were made when the current Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) was enacted in 2008, but actual job creation has fallen well short of the hoped-for projections.

Ironically, current wind projects under construction in Gratiot County are manufactured overseas and out-of-state. The Muskegon Chronicle reported that Muskegon’s shipping port has received multiple loads of turbine tower sections from South Korea, and is expecting more turbine blade shipments from Germany this fall. The “value-added” portion of the turbines for this project—hubs, gear box and generator—are produced in Arkansas.

While transporting and assembling of blades and tower sections may provide some short-term jobs, they are not sustainable jobs. More likely, Proposal 3 will kill full-time utility jobs and place another handicap on Michigan’s economic growth. The added impact on electric rates will force businesses to spend money on higher energy costs instead of hiring new employees. Worse yet, if energy rates become uncompetitive, Michigan employers will look to relocate across state borders.

None of the states that Michigan competes with for economic development projects has a 25 percent RPS, and no state in the nation has an RPS locked into its constitution. A model simulation coordinated by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy estimates the proposal would result in a loss of over 10,500 jobs.

Many of the state’s trade unions, including the Utility Workers Union of America, Iron Workers Local 25, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, oppose the measure. They are concerned about the job loss it would create.

“I’ve looked hard, but I can’t find anything in this proposal that would guarantee real jobs for the people who need them,” says Pat Dillon, national president of the Utility Workers Union of America. “Things are finally looking up in Michigan and people are starting to get back to work. We need to protect those jobs, not gamble with them, and that’s what this proposal would do.”

ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS
While the proposal is intended to improve the environment, it would change our state’s beautiful landscape and lakeshores forever. The 25 percent mandate would require 3,100 more wind turbines in the state, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, which lined up side-by-side would require space four times the area of Detroit, Grand Rapids, Flint, Lansing, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Saginaw and Traverse City—combined!

(To continue reading full article, click here)