Green haste in wind energy makes economic waste  

Credit:  The News | www.ngnews.ca 20 July 2012 ~~

On July 19, John Dalton, the Renewable Energy Administrator for Nova Scotia, was to award Power Purchase Agreements for 100 megawatts of additional, redundant, wind power to Nova Scotia’s energy capacity in order to meet the government’s arbitrary renewable energy mandates.

The government’s renewable energy mandates are not based on science, engineering, economics or even social and environmental considerations. They are based on ideology and a feel-good show of commitment to look “green.”

Recently, scientists gathered in Ottawa “to stage what (was) billed as a funeral possession to mourn the death of evidence. Dr. Scott Findlay, associate professor and former director of the University of Ottawa’s Institute of Environment, said in a press release that “there is (a) systematic campaign to reduce the flow of scientific evidence to Canadians. As a result, the public hears and sees only information that supports… government policy or ideology. That’s not evidence, that’s propaganda.”

Nova Scotia continues to forge ahead with renewable energy mandates without conducting any business-case evaluation of the impacts of their targets. Further, Nova Scotia has never required industrial wind power developers to prove any of the claims that they so casually make. This provincial blundering in renewable energy is one of the main reasons why electricity prices continue to rise and economically cast Nova Scotia as an unattractive place for business.

We need a fundamental shift in policy away from these grandiose feel good mandates that fail to recognize the futility of large scale deployment of industrial wind turbines in Nova Scotia and the economic burden this places on our society. It’s time for energy sources to demonstrate their value on the open market without government mandates.

Nova Scotia’s energy policy should be based on facts, sound science and the principles of economics, not a continued grasping at straws in the wind in an attempt to look “green.”

Alice Lees

Egerton