The installed capacity of wind in Europe rose by 10,000 MW, an increase of over 15%. Wind now produces 4.8% of Europe’s electricity. The new installation of wind is similar to the United States, which also installed 10,000 MW of wind, which accounted for 40% of America’s newly installed generation capacity in 2009.

It is remarkable that this level of activity occured during a year of such financial turmoil, where obtaining financing for any project was extremely difficult, especially in the first half of the year.

The shift away from fossil and nuclear toward renewable energy is continuing to accelerate around the world. As capital stock turns over and is replaced, wind will contribute an even greater share of our electricity.

Perhaps it is time for the wind naysayers to concede that wind is emerging as a major contributor to our electricity supply, and work toward optimizing its use, instead of clinging to the old fossil and nuclear paradigm.

“It’s (variability) one of the things that people throw out as a potential obstacle to development of wind on a large scale, but operators are very flexible people and they’ll figure out how to optimize it and make it efficient. So I kind of want to put that (variability argument) to rest.” John Norden, Independant System Operator, New England.

“It means we that we’re going to have to mobilize the capabilities of the other assets that we have at our disposal.” Kim Warren.
“Loads can contibute to balancing quite easily.” (along with hydro, and fossil generating units).

The Midwest ISO combined 23 control areas in its region into one. “That helped the people in the western areas that had fairly small load areas and a lot wind that they couldn’t control. Now it’s spread over 106,000 MW, so we have a lot less variability.” Dale Osborn, Midwest Independant System Operator.

“If we can work together more broadly on a regional basis and in regional markets, I think we’ll be able to accommodate an awful lot more renewables by taking advantage of the differenct characteristics of the different systems to be able to work together and balance the variability.” Paul Murhphy, CEO, Ontario IESO.

So there you have it. Use of existing dispatchable generation resources, dispatchable loads, large catchment areas, and integration of markets allow substantial use of variable output renewable energy. This is exactly what the renewable industry has been saying, and it is exactly what they have done in other jurisdictions.

And it is also what the people who run our electricity systems are saying.

Installed wind capacity in Canada as a whole increased to 3249 MW, up from 2369 MW, according to the Canadian Wind Energy Association. That is growth of 37%. This capacity will supply about 1.5% of Canada’s electricity. That is remarkable growth considering the state of the economy. Try to find any other sector of the economy that grew by that much in 2009.

Car shows were full of future hybrid electric, and electric vehicles. The business press was full of stories about new battery or capacitor technologies that would drive the new car paradigm over the next two decades.

CO2 emissions in the electricity sector, and in the economy as a whole, have fallen for at least 2 years in a row. It isn’t all just the recession which tends to reduce demand for energy. New renewables like wind, as well as switching from coal to natural gas, and newly aggressive conservation efforts have made a big difference.

Worldwide, solar photovoltaic installations continue to grow rapidly. And Ontario is about to join the party.

The Green Energy Act in Ontario has been passed. There were 8000 MW of applications in the initial application period. Clearly there is lots of interest by Ontarions. The first 700 contracts for small installations (mainly solar), have been granted. And at least some of them have begun.

So it easy to despair. To blame the politicians, or big business. Or the lobbies for the status quo. But is it possible that the battle for sustainability is being won anyways?

To get a sense of what the world thinks of Canada right now, look at George Monbiot’s latest remarks.

” Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.

I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada.”

My home and native land. Perhaps those maple leafs will be coming off the backpacks of Canadians (and Americans) in Europe.

Spain, by contrast, is an electricity peninsula, with only weak links to neighbouring France, and an ability to import/export less than 1/10th as much as Denmark. So how does Spain manage to have so much power from wind? It is pretty simple, really. Spain has significant amounts of hydroelectric resources, including pumped storage. When winds are high, pumps lift water to a reservoir, and release it during times of light winds or high demand. The pumped storage and hydroelectric stations provide a buffer that not only compliments wind energy, but also accomodates swings in demand.

25% of Ontario supply already comes from water power. And we already use this to accomodate swings in demand. Right now, for example, water is supplying 4800 MW in Ontario, compared to about 3000 MW last night. So accomodating a lot more wind in Ontario is already easy, with no changes in the rest of the system. We also have significant connections to New York State, Quebec (with a lot of water power storage), and smaller links to Manitoba, Minnesota and Michigan. We are far more connected than Spain.

A recent article on this provides more information.

A quote from the article: “Those that oppose wind power… say that wind is so unreliable as to be useless. They parade a vision of gas-powered power stations generating spare electricity just in case the wind suddenly drops. The reduction in carbon emissions is negligible, they claim, and the cost of installing turbines is huge.

None of this is true. The Spanish case histories in this article show that good grid management can integrate very large amounts of wind energy with few problems, provided that pumped storage and hydraulic power can be used for storage and international connections enable easy export and import. Second, the carbon emissions from Spanish electricity production during the peak hours of 8/9 November are calculated by REE at about 145 grammes per kilowatt hour, about a quarter of typical UK electricity. Using wind power in large volumes substantially reduces the carbon dioxide produced in electricity generation.”

We should always draw on international experience. And that experience suggests that Ontario can go a long ways further to integrating wind into the grid.

So what did the good folks of Oakville, home of Ford Canada, and one of the most prosperous communities in Canada do, to express their outrage at new emissions from a gas plant coming to their town? They organized a drive through petition, and got 1000 signatures opposing the plant. It apparently didn’t occur to the organizers that idling cars are a major source of emissions.

In times of shortage, we will be able to import power to meet demand.

1200 MW is a lot. In fact, it is more than the installed capacity of wind in Ontario today. In other words, this line can carry the full output of Ontario’s wind farms on the windiest of days, and store that energy for later use. In practice, it won’t work quite like that, as most of the time when it is windy, the simplest storage is just to stop burning coal, or burn less natural gas in our generation fleet. That lets us store the energy in the fossil fuel.

The extra 1200 MW is added to Ontario’s already considerable water storage capability. Ontario routinely ramps up water power during the day, and back down at night, to match demand. This swing in production can be 2-3,000 MW over the course of a day. Quebec’s storage is more than just a few days – their reservoirs have multi year storage capability.

Smart move building that line. It will not only allow Ontario to manage day to day, hour to hour, and seasonal swings in demand, but it will allow the same flexibility to work with similar variability in generator output. And that includes wind, nuclear and fossil shut downs, or line outages elsewhere in the system. If we use the Quebec link well, we will be able to reduce fossil fuel use, and improve system reliability at the same time.

The government of the day thought that was ridiculous. Who would want to go see a wind farm? So funds were not approved for a visitor centre.

In the first year, they had 10’s of thousands of visitors. They got their visitor centre.

Recently, the Ravenswood wind farm was a stop on a motorcycle rally for over 30. Over 200 attended its grand opening. And it has become a regular stop for Communities in Bloom.

The tiny Ferndale wind farm on the Bruce Peninsula hosts lots of visitors too. There have been school groups, regular summer tours, women’s groups, outdoor festival participants, and university professors. There have been business people looking at developing wind farms, or making components for wind turbines. There have been renewable energy tours, college and university field trips, and kids from a nearby summer camp. There have been people from Kansas, Nebraska, Massachusetts, the Netherlands, the UK, and France, as well as Lion’s Head, Stokes Bay and Wiarton. There are well over 1000 people per year go through the tour. Some of the visitors come to the Peninsula specifically to see the turbines and learn about them. For others, it is simply something that enhances their visit.

A wind farm tour can’t compete with the Bruce Trail, the bluffs, the beaches, the National Park, the ferry, the pow-wow or the blue grass festival. Nor should it. But for many, it can enhance the experience of visiting the Peninsula.

The Bruce Peninsula is full of attractions and natural beauty that draws vistors. But there is one area that does not draw tourists. And that is the beef farming area in the mid peninsula. This is the area that has been proposed for a larger wind farm. But tourists do not come to watch hay dry. Or cows chew their cud. Those vistas, as compelling as they may be, are available to them far closer to home.

No, a wind farm in beef country will have no negative effect on tourism. It hasn’t so far. And if we do it right, it may well be a tourist draw.

You can think of the electricity system as a big bathtub. The water level in the tub must be kept constant at all times. There are a couple of thousand taps putting water into the tub. And there are several million drains taking water out. The taps are the generators – Niagara Falls, the nuclear plants, the coal plants, the wind turbines, and the grid connected solar panels. The drains are the customers – homes, businesses, schools, factories.

When water is flowing into the tub from a tap, then less needs to flow from other taps. Remember, we need to keep the water level constant, not rising or falling. When the wind is blowing, less coal or natural gas is burned, as we throttle back on production from the fossil plants. If you want to reduce the flow from one source, you must increase it from another.

Lets consider the impact of each of the main sources of Ontario generation. Burning coal to make electricity is a major contibutor to smog. A study by the Ontario Medical Association estimates that Ontario has 5800 premature deaths from smog related illnesses, 17000 hospital admissions, and 59,000 emergency visits. The total cost of the health impact on productivity, direct health care costs, etc. was estimated at $7.8 billion annually. 688 of the deaths are attributed to smog from our coal plants. And we haven’t even talked about the cost of acid rain or climate change. No, we probably don’t want coal.

Natural gas is much cleaner than coal, but not perfect. The contibution to smog is dramatically lower, but the carbon emissions are still at about 50% of the level of coal. But there is another challenge with natural gas. Natural gas is a depleting resource. We know that we will run low some day. Some forecasts say that production will peak in North America within about 10 years, and then begin an inexorable decrease. For awhile we will be able import liquified natural gas, from politically stable places like the middle east, but this will cause carbon emissions to double due to the energy required to transport and liquify the gas, and of course the cost will be higher to pay for liquification terminals, and ships. Also, when you run low on a resource, the price can go up dramatically. The price of natural gas last year was 3.5 times what it is today in wholesale markets. Recessions work to reduce demand. We need to use our limited gas resource wisely.

Nuclear has its own problems. First, its cost is very high. The provincial government just cancelled plans to build new nuclear plants, due to sticker shock. One report estimated the capital cost of new nuclear quoted to Ontario at $10.7 billion for a 1000 MW plant. This is about 4.6 times the capital cost per MW than wind, and even with wind’s lower capacity factor, the capital cost alone would exceed the cost of wind. And wind doesn’t need fuel. Second is the issue of waste. Nuclear engineers like to propose deep geologic storage, or above ground storage for a few decades, followed by geologic storage. The problem I see it is not technical. We probably can store nuclear waste safely for a few decades. But for 10’s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of years? This I find extremely unlikely. Human societies don’t last that long. 1000 years from now, the people living here (if we make it) likely won’t speak English, we most certainly won’t have the Liberals running against the Conservatives, and it is even unlikely we will have a parliamentary democracy. But the waste will still be toxic. Nuclear waste disposal is not a technical problem. It is a cultural problem. And nobody can solve that.

Waterpower can be quite benign, like Niagara Falls, but if flooding is involved, there can be a big impact on recreation, fisheries and the ecosystem. Ontario has more opportunities than most people think for new development, but we cannot supply all our power from water.

Wind cannot be consider in isolation from other sources. Every tap has its impact.

We are property owners on an existing wind farm @ Ravenswood, and also seasonal property owners at Miller Lake.

The Ravenswood Wind project consists of 6 turbines, of which 4 turbines are on our property that started producing power in January 2008.

The home farm that we reside in is a 108 year old farm house which is sparsely insulated – nothing like houses of today. We have two children – a daughter Courtnee 22 years old and a son Owen 19 years old.

As landowners participating in a project, we don’t have set backs from housing required. The new rules require setbacks of 550 meters from a non participating landowner. For us though, the closest turbine is under 300 meters to our home. YES a lot closer than the people complaining about the turbines in some areas.

Tracy’s parents also live in a house on one of other farms, with a turbine also less than 300 meters away. Their house isn’t insulated up to code either. And Tracy’s father had a pace maker for at least 7 years. Neither parent has had any health effects or has complained about the noise.

We are very happy to report that in 20 months of operation there has been no annoyance of noise, no headaches or nosebleeds, we have not been waken up by them or had sleep deprivation. We don’t think that we have gone crazy either. Our cows are still producing calves; our laying hens are still laying eggs.

We were very pleased with the final results; we appreciated the working relationship between Sky Generation, Carlsun construction firm and ourselves. We were always informed and updated in the process, they included Doug whenever needed.

We have enjoyed the project from beginning to end.

Tracy and I are very happy that the turbines are part of our farm operation. We like the majestic look they provide and we’re glad that we are doing a least a little something green for our environment.

Doug and Tracy Rogers