‘It’s just so wrong’: Pictou County councillors vent on wind turbine setbacks 

Province limits setbacks to about half of what municipality settled on.

Years of work and lots of taxpayer dollars were blown out the window with one quick amendment to provincial legislation, say Pictou County councillors.

It took a lot of effort over several years to come up with setback standards for wind turbines in Pictou County, said Warden Robert Parker at their May 5 meeting. The council settled on a one-kilometre setback with noise regulations.

“And then along comes the minister with just an edict … saying that the new rules for turbines are now four times the height, which I think came in about half a kilometre,” Parker said.

“You can imagine the upset of people who fought hard to get it from 600 metres … to a kilometre and Colchester County went to two kilometres.”

According to the province’s March 7 news release, the setbacks can’t be more than four times the height of the turbines “unless a greater distance is required to ensure that sound levels do not exceed 40 decibels at the exterior of a dwelling and that shadow flicker on nearby residential dwellings does not exceed limits identified in the amendments.”

The setbacks, which align with Nova Scotia’s climate action goals, “also remove the ability for a municipality to influence wind turbine placement based on visual impact on the landscape.”

Asked about the changes on April 30, Premier and Pictou East MLA Tim Houston said the new regulations came about from “looking at the science, looking at what’s necessary, what’s possible.”

Houston said there were varying regulations across the province and “we just wanted to bring some standard to it.”

‘IT’S JUST SO WRONG’

Colchester County Mayor Christine Blair sent the Pictou County council a copy of the letter she sent to Municipal Affairs Minister John Lohr protesting the new setbacks. Parker said she is right on the money.

“It’s just so wrong that the provincial government will say on the one hand that municipal governments are closer to the people and they should decide on coastal erosion and what the rules should be … but yet they come out on this and say it should be the same across the province,” he said.

“We’re just being dictated to as to what to do on these issues and we have no real control.”

He added that he understands the province wants more wind turbines to produce green energy but “you have to be fair to both sides.”

‘WOOSH-WOOSH ALL THE FRICKEN TIME’

District 10 Coun. Randy Palmer said it’s disheartening to go back to square one.

“I just don’t know why they’d come up with such a minimum standard for turbines because some of these turbines now are a lot larger and produce a lot more energy.”

District 3 Coun. Darla MacKeil said they took their time with this to get this right, “and in one swift swipe of a pen, it’s gone.”

“We spent a lot of taxpayer money, we spent a lot of time as councils … dealing with this. This has been a large concern in this county, especially last summer in District 11, specifically with windmills coming into very rural parts of our province,” she said.

“Which will not, if I say, affect the day-to-day lives of any of these ministers or government, right? It’s the people.”

She requested they write their own letter to Lohr, and council approved her motion.

District 7 Coun. Donald Parker said he agrees with sending a letter “not that it will make a difference but it will get their attention anyhow.”

“If you’re ever talking to anybody who’s living near a windmill, they’ll tell you in Fitzpatrick Mountain there, not very far away, they hear woosh-woosh all the fricken time sitting in their backyard,” he said.