Pig in a poke

Jamie Forrester is becoming impatient waiting for massive wind turbines to begin sprouting on County horizons, powering his toaster and humming in the breeze. The councillor from Athol insists those who object to the transformation of this community, environment and economy must get out of the way. For Forrester and others, the industrialization of the County’s pristine shoreland and rural pastureland can’t come soon enough. For they are on a quest to save the planet.

Sadly their view of this brave new world affords little regard for the other species with whom we share this rock hurtling through space. Forrester figures those who object to 40-storey steel towers topped by a bus full of gears, oil and two tonnes of rare earth magnets are just grumblers worried about protecting their view and the value of their property.

Many are. Yet it is not clear that is such a bad thing—regard for rural and natural beauty is what attracts many and encourages people to preserve, protect and invest in conservancy groups and land trusts. Esteem for the place in which one lives, as opposed to say electricity generation, is likely an essential human motivation to keep the planet healthy.

But Forrester doesn’t leave it there. Last week he described a proposed decommissioning bylaw as “just another stalling tactic— just like bird sanctuaries and noise concerns.”

You must give Forrester credit—he says what others won’t.

But his comments beg further questions: Does the list of the insincere and disingenuous in Forrester’s view include Nature Canada? Ted Cheskey, manager of Nature Canada’s bird conservation program, says an internationally recognized “Important Bird Area” is being threatened by wind energy development on Prince Edward County south shore.

“For us at Nature Canada, the Gilead project is a good example of a wind energy project that is being proposed in the wrong place,” wrote Cheskey last fall. “In fact the worst possible place in terms of risk to birds. If approved, we believe the project is likely have significant impacts on a very rich breeding bird community and on migratory birds that depend on Ostrander Point’s natural habitats.”

Ontario Nature pleads that the provincial government not put wind turbines where endangered species live.

The National Audubon Society has described the Ostrander wind development as failing to meet the standard of being properly sited, imposing unnecessary risks to many species of birds and degrading one of the most Important Bird Areas in the world.

The Prince Edward County Field Naturalists worry that wind energy proponents have targeted every square kilometre of the eastern Lake Ontario flyway, on land and offshore, for development—threatening increased mortality from collisions in flight and also the destruction of much of the staging and feeding landscape for migrants.

Are each of these organizations speaking out to protect private property values in Prince Edward County? Is there a possibility there are other issues at stake here?

But folks like Jamie Forrester stopped listening a long time ago. He, like many others, bought the arguments that wind and solar energy was free, clean and could be harnessed to power our homes and industry. It was an easy sell. For two decades we’ve been warned we had to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels to curb the carbon these fuels emit into the atmosphere. Wind and solar-powered electricity offered an easy solution. Politicians, eager to be seen as green, overlooked the obvious shortcomings and plunged in head-first.

But it was a false dream. It takes very little investigation to reveal that intermittent electricity generation offers little more than a marginal and unweildy supply of electricity at an extraordinarily high cost. Meanwhile those on the vanguard of wind and solar energy, namely European nations, must build coal-fired electricity generating plants to power their economies. As a strategist to the American Wind Energy Association cautioned last year—the more people know about wind energy, the less they like it.

That is why communities such as Prince Edward County have risen up in opposition. Wind developers are in our midst. People have gone to their computer and to their library to learn more about the electricity grid, its role in our economy and the experience in other communities with wind and solar energy. The more they know, the less they like it.

Of course our motivation begins with a love of the natural beauty with which we are blessed in Prince Edward County—but resistance to wind energy is rooted and grows from the knowledge that it doesn’t work. Unless of course you are a politician looking for votes, or a developer looking to get wealthy.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca