Green energy program flawed, costly
Niagara This Week | December 25, 2014 | www.niagarathisweek.com
What is wrong with renewable energy – everything, when you launch the initiative like Ontario.
The renewable energy initiative is politically motivated. The initiative was launched without a business plan so no cost benefit analysis has ever been done. The end result is a heavily subsidized industry that creates surplus energy. The Ontario energy consumer paid $ 1 BILLION in global adjustment fees last month and we are being sentenced to pay billions of dollars in our electricity bills for corporate welfare payments over the lifetime of these FIT (feed in tariff ) contracts.
Niagara Regional Wind Corporation (NRWC) will make $ 1.2 Billion in subsidies over the next 20 years if their 230 MW project is completed. Twenty-six West Lincoln farmers think they will become millionaires and the rest of us will get to pay the bill.
No independent health research was conducted, and the Ministry of the Environment (MOECC) will only consider the health effect of audible sound. That is like the tobacco industry having researchers study smoking but ignoring tar and nicotine. The MOECC does not include infrasound, low frequency sound, tone, manufacturer error, stereo and surround sound, clustering effect, less space between IWTs than recommended in the conservative guidelines – all left out of the computer generated sound power level modelled for people that live, work and play within 1.5 kilometres of an industrial wind turbine (IWT).
Denial of the impact of sound, shadow flicker, stray voltage, heat, electromagnetic energy will not protect people in these communities. The Health Canada Study on Wind Turbine Noise found that 16.5 per cent of the population within the IWT project area will be affected. So we have 10,000 people within two kilometres of the largest industrial wind turbines placed onshore in North America, the potential exists for 1,650 people to be affected. Not everyone who smokes gets cancer, but we do take a precautionary approach with tobacco products.
The process is flawed. The municipal council is responsible to protect my health, safety, and quality of life, yet 59 MPPs voted for the Green Energy Act and removed the planning rights of my democratically elected municipal council. These 59 MPPs removed my democratic rights with an act that many of them did not even read. When elected officials no longer serve and protect our democratic rights they threaten the very democracy we live in.
The headlong rush into renewable energy is driving industry out of this province. Ontario, once the industrial powerhouse of Canada, is now receiving equalization payments from the federal government. The renewable energy portfolio will be Ontario’s biggest failure of the 21st century.
Catherine Mitchell
Welland
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2014/12/25/green-energy-program-flawed-costly/