The province disagrees. “Green energy does cost more than coal does, but there’s an obvious benefit to it,” says Brad Duguid, Ontario’s minister of energy and infrastructure. He says the province’s decision to move away from coal was made for environmental and health reasons and that energy costs are going up regardless (thanks to the need to refurbish Ontario’s aging fleet of nuclear reactors). “We need a stable, sustainable and affordable supply of energy,” he says. But the question remains whether wind, solar and other new sources of green power are right for the job.
Michael Trebilcock’s introduction to Ontario’s green energy dreams came a couple of years ago. The professor of law and economics at the University of Toronto discovered that his 100-acre farm in a picturesque corner of Ontario was set to be bookended by a half-dozen wind turbines. “Obviously, from a selfish point of view, this intrusion was not one we welcomed,” he says, echoing the sentiments of a growing number of rural Ontarians who have found themselves in a similar predicament. “But I was inclined to think that there were substantial social benefits on the other side of the scale.” Except after doing some research, he discovered that wind power wasn’t a very reliable source of energy, nor particularly green.
Ontario experiences most of its windy days during the winter—not the summer, when demand for electricity typically peaks. “Seasonally, this thing is out of phase,” agrees Adams, adding that, in order to become a reliable part of the grid, there needs to be a backup, a job that has typically fallen to reliable, cost-effective coal-fired power plants. Even if Ontario makes good on its promise to shutter its coal-fired plants in four years (it had previously promised to close them by 2009), the job of backing up wind farms would fall to hydro and nuclear plants, which are already “green” when it comes to emissions.
Trebilcock also questions whether paying top dollar for green energy will yield the big job gains promised by the government. “We are paying three or four times as much for this power than we are for conventional power, and this is already translating into dramatic increases in electricity bills,” he says. “This is actually killing jobs because people have less money to spend while industrial producers are also facing higher costs.” A better approach, says Trebilcock, is to put a price on dirty forms of electricity that reflects environmental costs, and then let the market develop cleaner and cheaper alternatives, while the government invests in research. It’s not as flashy as windmills and solar farms, but it’s bound to result in solutions that are more workable and cost-effective, he says.
Perhaps. But green sells, and politicians know it. Adam White, the president of the Association of Major Power Consumers in Ontario, says his group made a tactical decision several years ago not to challenge the government’s green energy push because it would be like spitting into the wind. Besides, he says it’s not like Ontario’s current mix of power sources are a recipe for guaranteed success either. “We might get nuclear cheap, but if it craps out, then we pay more. And if it keeps crapping out then we keep paying more,” he says. “It’s a bit of a pig in a poke.”
Mann, too, is among the first to admit that Hay Solar’s renewable energy of choice isn’t perfect. Solar arrays are expensive to install, don’t perform well on cloudy days and require a large amount of land to be effective. But he’s still a believer that green technologies are the future. “Watch CNN and the oil spill going on in the Gulf of Mexico,” he says. “What future do we have on this planet if we don’t start doing things differently?” The catch is, like Hay Solar’s “free” barns, someone eventually has to pay for it.
Pages: 1 2
