E-mail A Friend Tell a friend about the information found on this page by sending them an e-mail.   Your Name: Your E-mail:   Type an e-mail address, then click add: Add a Personal Message: (Optional)

June 2009 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Feature: Wind power Feature: Transparent oceans Feature: Bute Inlet The Inside Story Editor’s Notebook Reverberations À la carte Mosaic

Seventy-three turbines are arrayed close to hydroelectric transmission lines above the shoreline at Baie-des-Sables, Que. The blades turn at 10 to 20 revolutions per minute.

Feature story On with the wind •  Anatomy of a wind turbine •  Wind power for Everyman Map: Wind speeds in Canada Photo Gallery: Wind energy Wind energy facts Wind energy in Canada timeline How does noise compare? International Wind Energy Industry

Quebec wasn’t the first province with wind farms. That honour belongs to Alberta, where the earliest large-scale projects were built on the steppes south of Calgary. Until last fall, Alberta had the largest portfolio of wind power of any Canadian province, with 524 megawatts. In 2007, provincial energy officials announced they were looking to add more capacity by lifting a 900-megawatt ceiling on wind energy. There are also new projects afoot in all parts of Canada, including British Columbia, which has so much clean and inexpensive hydroelectric generating capacity that its energy planners haven’t paid much attention to other alternative renewables.

The emerging Ontario wind sector has been driven forward in recent years by energy firms such as Canadian Hydro Developers, EPCOR Utilities and Enbridge (the natural-gas giant). SkyPower, a Toronto green-power firm with Bay Street backers, has been erecting large installations in eastern Ontario and on the shores of Lake Ontario, and many more are in the works.

“Our plan contemplated a significant ramp-up of wind-energy resources in Ontario,” says Amir Shalaby, vicepresident of power system planning for the Ontario Power Authority, the agency responsible for mapping out future energy investment. By 2025, he adds, “15 percent of Ontario’s energy will come from wind.”

At the moment, however, wind accounts for just one percent of Ontario’s power mix. The mid-term target is about 5,000 megawatts — a figure Keith Stewart of WWF Canada describes as “quite modest.” Shalaby admits such numbers have proven to be highly subject to change as the political winds shift. Lefrançois also expects to see Quebec push its own goals much higher in coming years. After all, the government has already had to reject many viable wind-farm proposals because it reached its latest target level so quickly.

How much wind can realistically be developed? Stewart points to a recent U.S. Department of Energy study which concluded that with technological improvements to turbine design, it would be possible to source one-fifth of all electricity consumed in the United States from wind farms, a dramatic transformation that would add less than 0.6 cents per kilowatt hour to average electricity rates. “That’s not an outrageous cost,” he says.

Yet energy planners such as Shalaby say it is not just about the unit cost of wind energy. They must grapple with two other issues: whether a windy area is close to a transmission corridor and the vexing problem of intermittency. Quebec’s approach has been to locate wind farms near defunct industrial sites along the St. Lawrence that still have good connections to the grid. Shalaby says that over the next 20 years, Ontario needs to build 2,000 kilometres of new transmission corridors, at a cost of $2 billion, to carry new sources of wind and hydro energy from Northern Ontario to the cities of the south. The cost will be split between consumers and producers.

Another issue with wind turbines is that they don’t generate power when it is too windy or not windy enough or when they require maintenance. When society’s craving for power is high — for example, on a sultry summer day — but the wind isn’t blowing, there’s a problem. To deal with the mismatch between supply and demand, energy planners rely on backup generating plants that can meet demand at a moment’s notice; these tend to be fuelled by coal or natural gas. Another part of the solution is to situate wind farms in diverse areas of the province.

“If there’s no wind in one region, there will be in another,” says Shalaby. “You get a better chance of having some of the fleet running all the time.”

Some wind-energy watchers suspect that Ontario has been hedging its wind-energy targets because the province is pressing ahead with massive plans to build new nuclear reactors — a closely watched, intensively lobbied energy strategy that will cost $27 billion and is meant to refurbish or replace the aging Pickering reactors, east of Toronto, by 2027.

This contrasts with Quebec’s wind-energy game plan in one other important respect, which has to do with recognizing this fast-growing industry as a means of generating both power and jobs. Quebec has decreed that when 1,000 megawatts of capacity is reached, new wind farms must source at least 60 percent of their parts and labour within the province; half of that must come from the region where the farms are situated. Simultaneously, Cégep de la Gaspésie et des Îles à Gaspé, a community college, began training wind-turbine technicians. A wind-energy applied research facility was also established in Murdochville, a venture that was to be costshared with Ottawa, until the Conservative government abruptly cancelled its share of the funding in 2008.

Meanwhile, in the regional centres of Matane and Ville de Gaspé, multinational turbine manufacturers have established factories to supply Quebec’s wind operators. In Matane, General Electric has set up a facility to build nacelles. In Gaspé, the Danish wind giant LM Glasfiber built a 9,300-square-metre plant that turns out blades at the pace of three a day. The company approached Martin Couture, an accountant who was running a fibreglassboat manufacturing business, to oversee the operation. A Quebecer then living in Grand-Mère, Que., the energetic Couture leapt at the opportunity. “You could really set it up and give the company its soul,” he says.

Standing outside the sprawling plant next to a row of completed blades that look surprisingly like beached whales, Couture pats the enormous objects affectionately, pointing out little features such as a noise-reducing zigzag strip and small fins to lessen drag. He also explains how LM’s blades bend slightly, allowing them to flex backward in high winds and thus improve their efficiency. (Couture recently left the company.) These days, the plant is cranking them out as fast as it can. LM initially expected to hire, at most, 140 people to run the plant, but there are now 300 employees. Some of its made-in-Quebec blades have been exported to Brazil and the northeastern United States, and the orders are pouring in as Quebec keeps boosting its wind targets. The strategy is smart for a host of reasons, not least that it has allowed Quebec-based wind developers to move quickly to complete their projects.

With its new green-energy law, Ontario finally moved to emulate Quebec in using its wind policy to help stimulate economic activity, something that should come as welcome relief in the province’s decimated manufacturing sector. “We could source our turbines locally,” says Stewart, “as opposed to getting in a queue behind the Europeans.”

Indeed, there is some indication that international wind-industry suppliers are looking to set up in Ontario. German turbine manufacturer Multibrid has announced plans to set up a turbine plant in eastern Ontario, creating a wind-energy manufacturing base to serve Ontario and the northeastern United States. By no coincidence, however, the firm belongs to France’s nuclear-power giant Areva, which has been trying to endear itself to Ontario energy officials in an attempt to supply the reactors due to be constructed at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station, east of Toronto.