By Leslie Misson
Shortly coming to power in 2018, Ontario’s Conservative government headed by Doug Ford came cancelled more than 750 contracts for renewable energy projects, including many wind farms. In 2019, the premier characterized wind turbines as “…terrible, terrible…”
But in August 2024, in a major policy reversal, the Ford government “…laid out plans to procure an additional 5000 Megawatts of renewable energy by 2034.” Most of the projected renewable energy projects will be based on wind energy. According to CBC reporter Mike Crawley, the current capacity of wind projects in Ontario is about 4900 Megawatts.
The government will now have to overcome the anti-wind power sentiment that the Conservatives have assiduously cultivated among Ontario voters over many years. In 2012, for example, when Pierre Poilievre was Conservative MP for Nepean-Carlton, he strongly opposed a wind energy project in his riding. Opponents of wind power often focus on purported negative health effects of turbines on people, domestic animals and wildlife living near wind farms (“wind turbine syndrome”).
One of Ford’s first actions just days after taking office in June 2018 was cancelling 759 renewable energy projects, including the half-finished White Pines wind farm in Prince Edward County [photo] that had been under construction for nearly a decade.
The government spent an estimated $231million to cancel the green energy contracts, which were to produce a total of 462.5 MW.
Opposition to wind power is particularly strong on the Bruce Peninsula where the onshore wind regime is excellent, and where the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station (BNGS) is located. The station, which is currently being refurbished, produced more than 45 billion kWh of electricity in 2023, about 7 percent of the Canada’s total electricity consumption.
Most workers at BNGS are members of the Power Workers Union (PWU) which owns a 4 percent share in Bruce Power, the private business partnership that has a long-term lease to operate the generation station.
PWU clearly sees wind energy as a major threat to nuclear power, which currently produces about half of Ontario’s electricity. For several years, the union ran full-page ads in the mainstream newspapers promoting nuclear energy and attacking wind energy. In an ad in the Globe and Mail in May 2019, PWU President Mel Hyatt characterized wind energy as “uncosted.” This is richly ironic considering chronic cost overruns for construction and refurbishment of nuclear power plants, and uncertainty regarding costs of disposal and storage of radioactive waste.
One of the main organizations opposed to wind power is Wind Concerns Ontario (WCO), which is largely based in regions that support the provincial and federal Conservatives. During the 2011 provincial election campaign, WCO carried out a speaking tour of 24 electoral districts. Billboards in some rural areas carried message, “Hudak in; Turbines Out,” referring to then Ontario Conservative leader Tim Hudak. WCO denied that it had funded the billboards.
In a 2017 CBC article about problems with the wind turbine at the Canadian National Exhibition grounds in Toronto, author Mike Crawley extensively quoted Parker Gallant, then Vice-President of Wind Concerns Ontario: “Wind turbines are not really effective. They basically produce unreliable, intermittent power, out of synch with demand.”
Proponents of wind power speculated that WCO and related groups, such as Mothers Against Wind Turbines, were covertly funded by the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, the PWU and privately-owned fossil fuel corporations. WCO, however, claimed that it was a grassroots organization of unpaid volunteers, and that its funding came solely from member donations.
The minutes of a 2015 Environmental Review Tribunal appeal against provincial approval of the Gunn’s Hill Wind Farm near Woodstock, Ontario sheds light on the question of whether WCO is a grassroots organization.
The Gunn’s Hill Wind Farm’s ten turbines are jointly owned by a private developer, the Six Nations of the Grand River Development Corporation and the Oxford Community Energy Co-op, most of whose members are from Oxford County where the wind farm is located. The farm began generating clean power in spring 2016.
The appeal against the Gunn’s Hill Wind Farm was rejected by the provincial Environmental Review Tribunal in late October 2015. The appeal was lodged by the East Oxford Community Alliance, a group which clearly shared the aims and concerns of WCO. One of the appellant’s witnesses was “qualified by the Tribunal as a professional engineer with expertise in public safety risks due to [wind] turbine failure and some expertise in the acoustics of wind turbines.” According to the US Energy and Policy Institute, this witness was a former employee of Bruce Power who “took early retirement to oppose wind energy development.”
A retired pharmacist who has often addressed public meetings of WCO suggested, among other things, that noise from wind farms may harm fetuses and children. These concerns are shared by Mothers Against Wind Turbines. The retired pharmacist often cited evidence for her claims from a World Health Organization training package and from peer-reviewed scientific journals. But these sources referred to excessive noise levels in general, not specifically to noise levels from wind farms – by this logic, children should neither be raised in close proximity to noisy railways, highways or busy streets.
Recent research indicates that a very small number of people living near wind turbines may be negatively affected by low-frequency infrasound. Other research indicates that widespread belief in negative health effects of wind turbines is a product of the “nocebo effect where negative expectations can translate into symptoms of tension and anxiety.”
This latter conclusion is strengthened by the absence of “wind turbine syndrome” in Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany, where wind farms have been operating for many years. Well-known American wind energy proponent Paul Gipe asks, “Why then are Germans, Danes and Spaniards [who live near wind farms] not falling down by the thousands to dementia and disease? Are they made of sterner stuff? Or is it that they don’t speak English and can’t read all the propaganda fostered by the anti-renewables lobby?”
Unsurprisingly, opponents of wind energy are very unhappy with the Ford government’s attempt to resurrect wind energy in Ontario. Mothers Against Wind Turbines, for example, published an article entitled “Ontario Policy Shift Blowing the Wrong Way.” Meanwhile, WCO posts, “CBC predicts new Ontario wind power rush, News story today claims Ontario wants mostly (unreliable, intermittent) wind power in new procurement.”
While Ford has pledged not to impose wind projects without the consent of municipal governments, it is unclear how he now intends to reverse the decisions of 155 municipal governments which, with Tory encouragement, declared themselves to be “unwilling hosts” to wind energy projects.
An effective method for building local support for wind energy centres on organizing renewable energy co-operatives. This is the case of Windshare, a Toronto-based co-op which owns and operates the wind turbine at the CNE grounds; the Oxford Community Energy Co-op which owns 49 percent of the Gunn’s Hill Wind Farm; and SolarShare, the largest renewable energy co-op in Canada, which has over 2000 members and owns and operates 51 solar projects in different parts of Ontario.
But it is unlikely that the Ford government will promote organization of renewable energy co-ops – let alone re-establish a publicly owned and operated monopoly – because of its commitment to private, especially corporate ownership of productive enterprises. Consequently, as Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn recently wrote, “Doug Ford’s flip-flop on wind turbines won’t undo all the damage he caused.”
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