Unbounded conceit

I must admit to being shocked upon learning the decision to approve the industrial wind factory at Ostrander Point. I expected Ontario bureaucrats would shuffle this thorny file to the bottom of the pile and eventually right off the table. Too many groups were arrayed against it—environmentalists, health advocates, property owners and the municipal government. Why would the outgoing Premier risk his entire green energy strategy over nine turbines? It seemed needlessly reckless and divisive. And so easily avoided.

I shouldn’t have been surprised. Nothing about Dalton McGuinty’s management of Ontario’s energy has been logical, sensible or predictable. Or reasonable. But reason was never part of the equation. It was always about ambition—the ambition to be seen as green.

I’m sure, at first, he believed he was doing the right thing. Like the rest of us he had heard for more than a decade about how carbon emissions were altering the climate— and that something had to be done. In a pre-election debate in 2003 Dalton McGuinty decided he would be the one to lead Ontario to a post-carbon future. He would save us from ourselves.

At that instant, the complexities of operating an electricity system of the scale of Ontario were washed away. And to be clear the complexities are immense. Electricity, unlike other forms of energy, can’t be stored—not at least on the scale required by a village let alone a province. So electricity must be generated at precisely the millisecond that you and your neighbours turn on a switch. And shut down when you turn it off. Otherwise the entire system teeters out of balance—causing disruptions, outages or worse.

Ontario’s electricity is also tightly wound with the neighbouring provinces and states— meaning policies that change how we manage our electricity grid here, inevitably have an effect there.

Managing this balance requires a highly coordinated interplay between dozens of generating sources and neighbouring grids.

But saviours don’t worry themselves about such complexity—they just act. So Dalton McGuinty chose not to listen to advice; he failed to heed the warnings; and even as industry and manufacturing fled the province, he refused to be swayed from his ambition.

When the province’s own safeguards and protections got in the way of these ambitions— he simply mowed them down. Soon all the province’s agencies and ministries answered to the almighty Ministry of Energy. Normal rules and process didn’t apply to green energy. Still, by choosing in his last days in office to push forward an industrial wind factory on pristine Crown land, overriding the advice of environmental watchdogs, the local council and thousands of others, Dalton McGuinty has revealed a breathtaking new standard for leadership conceit.

By now, even McGuinty surely knows he has badly mismanaged Ontario’s electricity system— failing to make much-needed upgrades, robbing funding for basic maintenance and foisting upon Ontarians massive increases in our electricity bills even as consumption falls. His ambition has led Ontario down a dead end. Most of the jurisdictions who chased the allure of renewable energy for the past 20 years are quietly backing way from intermittent energy generation. Despite the positive public relations these policies garnered, unpredictable electricity has proven too difficult and too expensive to integrate into existing systems. So without much fanfare, Germany is building dozens of brand new coal-fired electricity generating plants to keep its lights on. Spain has sheared the hefty premium prices it once paid for intermittent energy genera-tors such as wind and solar. Others are doing the same. They will cut even more. They just won’t issue a press release when they do.

Meanwhile, Gilead Power Corporation is likely ass hocked as anyone at the early Christmas present from the Ontario Liberal government. The Blanding’s Turtle, Whippoorwill and other species soon to be evicted from Ostrander Point, however, must now rely on the goodwill of the developer for their survival. All this so that Dalton McGuinty can say he was green .

The Ontario Liberals will pick a new leader later this month. Absent the blind ambition of its current leader, the party—or more likely its successor government—will begin backing away from McGuinty’s green energy schemes. Why? Because they don’t work and we can’t afford them.

Perhaps more compelling to the politicians, however, will be the unrelenting images of the industrialization of a pristine rural ecosystem at Ostrander Point and the destruction of the habitat of two endangered species—in the name of green energy.

We must kill, so that we may save.

This will be a harder slogan to sell after Ostrander Point is ruined.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca