Companies proposing wind turbine projects in Prince Edward County will now face opposition from a much larger provincial group.
Members of the Alliance to Protect Prince Edward County (APPEC), a group formed to oppose six proposed wind farms, joined a new lobby group called Wind Concerns Ontario this week.
The group is a collection of 22 citizen-based groups across the province which oppose the McGuinty government mandate to replace coal generating power plants with windmill projects.
“Wind Concerns Ontario provides a strong, unified voice of opposition to the unchecked rush to locate over 640 massive industrial wind turbines across the province in the last five years without the benefit of full environmental assessment,” the organization said in a press release.
“Along with their transformers, transmission lines, overhead distribution wires and substations, these industrial wind turbines threaten people and the environment in serene, historic, rural communities or prime agricultural land, migratory bird paths, close to sensitive wetlands, designated wildlife areas and pristine shorelines.”
Gord Gibbins, a co-chairman of APPEC, said the new provincial group is a coup for his organization, which now boats about 75 members.
He said Wind Concerns Ontario consists of thousands of members, who will share resources in trying to spread its message — that wind turbines, though hailed as environmentally friendly, leave a carbon footprint.
“More and more people are seeing the negative effects (of wind turbines,” he said. “I think the Ontario group will bring more attention and muscle to the global issues, the waste of taxpayers’ money and the effects from a green perspective.” Gibbins said the new group doesn’t have any major events or projects on the go yet.
But he hopes it will put more pressure on municipalities to consider the downside of wind turbine projects.
He said his group is lobbying for Prince Edward County to have a standard environmental policy that all companies will have to adhere to before attempting a project in the municipality.
Six different companies have wind turbine projects either proposed or on the go in Prince Edward County. They are Canadian Hydro Developers Inc., Gaia Power Inc., Gilead Power Corp., IPC Energy, Sky- Power Corp. and Trillium Power Wind.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Help! Quick! We need the support of your organization to help our “Save The Bluffs” group in Toronto, former Scarborough which is threatened with a huge windfarm only 2 kilometers beyond the bluffs in Lake Ontario. Hydro has pulled out all the big guns. The provincial government has declared “wind” as the new religion and we the people are left to fight their propaganda and the indifference of the rest of toronto who could care less about the last bit of natural shoreline, the wildlife, the birds, the noise or appparantly even their electricity bills. If the authorities say its good it must be. Even though we have cited all kinds of evidence to the contrary backed up by research it is “see no evil, hear no evil” until it will be too late. We need public speakers who know the true costs to health and the environmen. We need lawyers to examine whether or not they can get away with using crown land this way. We need to meet with others who have beaten the system. Can anyone in your organization contact me. I have given you my web-site. I hope this plea does not fall on dead ears.
November 23rd, 2008 at 10:30 am
Carbon Is The Number One Enemy
I see articles on this website that oppose wind energy and nuclear. Go inland, and you’ll find people opposing electrical power transmission lines. That doesn’t leave a lot of options. Keep it up folks…you keep using electricity, but you think it grows on trees. It doesn’t. The hard fact is you have to choose: either some carefully selected electric generation and transmission, or an economy that can’t support education, heath care and the elderly.
Personally, I am far from persuaded that windmills are a complete solution, but they are a partial solution if you have enough wind farms scattered georaphically, so that some of them are operating most of the time at reasonable output (the long term average output of any individual windmillis in the 14-25% range). Placing some 2 km offshore near Toronto means that you do not need ugly (yes, “ugly” is trotted out every time by NIMBYs) transmission lines cross-country to reach the electrical loads in downtown Toronto. Please tell me specifically the ways in which this would kill fish (what % of the population?), measureably heat the water (by how many hundredths of a degree?), cause shipping accidents (the water is too shallow for anything but a pleasure boat), interfere with airplanes (they soemhow deal with city buildings), or kill birds (that humans seem to imagine are too stupid to see or hear them). Every argument trotted out (except economic ones) that I have ever heard is emotional, not rational. For example, people have compained about EMI from windmills. Do the arithmetic: you can expect 200 times as much EM effect from a power tool in your hands as from a 2 MW windmill 2 km offshore.
November 24th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
Dear Mr. Fournier:
Thank you for your comments.
The economic arguments in favour of wind are very good and in most circumstances you are right in that economics make wind power one of the cleanest and cheapest alternatives for supplying energy. That said, there are alternatives that in some circumstances that may be even cleaner and cheaper. A good environmental assessment process should allow for this possibility.
For example – Toronto Hydro has poor wind sites for big wind projects when compared to other locations in Ontario. But, Toronto has a dense and centralized population that uses a lot of natural gas for water and home heating. Accordingly, distributed energy potential of home electricity generation and supply (see Calgary’s ENMAX “Whisper Gen”) may be a better alternative for customers than investing in a large wind plant.
Waterkeeper supports government processes that allow for discussions and comparisons of this sort because we assume there is always something to be learned.
Thanks again …mm