Fragile

How many times did you reach for the light switch on Friday, even though you knew there was no electricity flowing through the circuit? How often did you begin a task only to pull up short because it required electricity?

An extended blackout on Friday across large swathes of the County served as a vivid reminder of how intertwined electricity has become in our lives. Fifteen hours without power rendered Wellington a virtual ghost town for most of All Souls Day. No coffee. No food. No heat. No people. No economy. Some folks fled to unaffected regions—with long queues forming outside cafés and eateries in Picton. Others hunkered down, to await the flicker of light’s return. Some spent the day managing the water flowing into their basement from the previous evening’s rainstorm, without electricity to turn the pumps. Others still, scrambled to ensure their livestock were fed and watered.

There will be meaningful losses when the damage has been assessed, the lost opportunity tabulated. It was, for most, however, likely little more than an inconvenience. Much longer and the impact of the blackout would have been far greater.

The experience offers an opportunity to reflect on this invisible resource and what it means to nearly every aspect of our lives. We can ascribe some moral weakness to our dependency on electricity and other forms of energy in our modern age. We can lament our vulnerability to power interruptions. But we can’t pretend that there is a pathway backward, to an unelectrified past, that doesn’t lead to deep societal disruption. Nor can we continue to delude our selves that we can power our lives and economy with intermittent electricity generating methods (wind and solar) until we invent utility-scale storage, i.e. batteries.

It was a useful reminder that electricity is a resource that ought to be sheltered from political whim and the vicissitudes of popular impulses. For more than two decades ambitious, but predictably unworkable electricity generation and distribution policies have been seen as harmless tools to be wielded in order to win popular support and votes.

And what has this wrought?

There is a direct line that can be drawn between California’s fanciful electricity regulation scheme two decades ago, through Enron, to the fires ravaging that state currently. Elsewhere, in northern Germany, a brand-new coal-fired electricity generating plant comes online this week to power an economy that has spent the better part of a trillion dollars on wind and solar energy over the past three decades. Closer to home, we have erected more than 6,500 wind turbines in Ontario and committed to paying billions of dollars for electricity that is nearly all sold to neighbouring US states—at a whopping discount. So whopping, in fact, that there are periods when we pay them to take it from us.

New estimates produced by Scott Luft indicate that more than 90 per cent of the electricity generated by wind in Ontario over the past 14 years was either exported to our US neighbours or curtailed (a market contortion in which wind energy generators are ordered to disconnect from the grid, or risk damaging it, but who are paid as if they were contributing to Ontario’s electricity supply). That means that an almost negligible amount of wind and solar-powered electricity generated in Ontario is used to power Ontario toasters or industry. It also puts a lie to the claim that wind and solar energy enabled the dismantling of coal-fired generation in Ontario. It didn’t. Gas and nuclear energy did. The data are clear.

Luft has immersed himself in the data produced by the Independent Electricity System Operator, Hydro One and Ontario Power Generation for the better part of two decades. His Cold Airings blog, at coldairings.luftonline.net, should be essential reading for anyone interested in how ill-informed policies and poorly considered ambitions have so drastically warped and compromised an essential resource in this province. Even more so, for those folks who harbour lingering notions that the four turbines currently being dismantled near Milford are anything but a grotesque and expensive mistake.

It is clear from Luft’s work that there is no value in subsidizing any new wind energy production in Ontario when all we do and have done for 14 years is turn around and sell it to opportunistic States that understand the mess we have made of our electricity market in Ontario, and are eager to exploit our precious folly. Adding even a single wind turbine to this collection of steel and concrete detritus only piles up the waste.

One has only to look at the spectacle of Amherst Island, diminished by 26 monstrous industrial turbines made useless and irrelevant by the two gas plants— one brand new (for which Ontario electricity consumers spent $1.2 billion)—sitting idle across the narrow channel, to see the utter wreckage wrought by political interference in critical infrastructure. Millions of homes worth of electricity generating capacity sitting unused, while Amherst Islanders must live under a dystopian Blade Runner forest for at least a generation.

Electricity is an essential resource. Let us agree that it is too important and complex for it to remain a plaything for the political class. Instead, let us set parameters around affordability, reliability and environmental sustainability and then leave it to the longignored engineers to figure out how to do it. We must take the levers away from the politicians and return them to the professionals.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca