Ontario’s Big Windy Gamble
Posted August 13, 2009 7:54 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
You are forgiven if you somehow missed the celebrations, but in late June, George Smitherman, Ontario’s minister of energy and infrastructure, was named the 2009 winner of the World Wind Energy Award. The handsome plaque, handed out at the eighth World Wind Energy conference on Jeju Island in South Korea, hasn’t yet been installed on his office wall, but the 45-year-old is busy making a bid to extend his reign as “Mr. Wind” (as he calls it) into 2010. Or perhaps, given the scale of pending government announcements, lock up the title for the rest of the century.
Ontario is already North America’s friendliest jurisdiction for wind and other renewable energy projects, thanks to its recently proclaimed Green Energy Act, meant to speed along approval, and the establishment of European-style 20-year fixed-price energy contracts. (Power companies are now required to integrate all new green energy projects into their grids and pay producers 13.5 cents per kilowatt hour for onshore wind farms, 19 cents/kWh for offshore wind, and up to 80.2 cents/kWh for solar power, versus about six cents/kWh for both hydro and nuclear energy.)
Read the rest of the article at Macleans.ca.
