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Manure doesn’t polish
Credit: Orangeville Citizen | 2013-11-21 | www.citizen.on.ca ~~
Translate: FROM English | TO English
Translate: FROM English | TO English
You can reshape it or spread it, but you can’t polish it. Dufferin Windpower has employed Dillon Consulting to try. But, beware Dillon, you don’t put one over on people who make a living off the land and make a business of dealing with fertilizer, equipment and the vagaries of weather, crop yields and pricing.
Dillon Consulting is paid to make it seem that The Dufferin Windpower Project is good for the community. The ploy of forming a ‘Community Liaison Committee’ is to put a good face on it.
Dufferin Windpower is only interested in positive answers. The negatives of health and land value issues will be disregarded, as always.
Don’t tell us that the Dufferin wind project will generate 91.4 megawatts, to power up to 30,000 homes.
That might be the turbine’s outside capacity, but industrial wind turbines generate only 27% of the time, on average, and 85% of that time when not needed as, due to overcapacity, we are already selling electricity to the USA.
The problem is: The Ontario government guarantees all wind generation at 11.5¢ kwh while it’s sold for 2.8¢. They actually shut down hydro (4.5¢ kwh) and sometimes nuclear (6.5¢ kwh) to prioritize wind!… The wind companies make a profit at the taxpayer’s expense. The tab presently is over $3 billion.
Ontario doesn’t need wind. For the foreseeable future, it has an overcapacity of electricity generation.
Hydro and nuclear supply the base load requirement and gas capacity supplies more than enough for the variable load.
Wind generation is intermittent and only adds to the cost of Ontario’s household electric bills.
As for ‘decommissioning’, why would we believe anything you tell us, when the wind companies are technically off the hook. The MOE states: “The Ministry of the Environment has published a Technical Bulletin that provides guidance for preparing a Decommissioning Plan Report, but does not require the original wind turbine company applicant or its successor to post security to ensure that there will be money available to carry out the decommissioning plan if the wind company or its successor fail to do so. Absent the depositing of adequate financial security to complete the work, the cost for dismantling the turbines and the liability for the health, safety and environmental hazards created by abandoned wind turbines, will fall to the landowner”. When the twenty year subsidy contract expires, Dufferin Wind Power will have made its money, but have no incentive to refurbish or decommission their turbines. Consider industrial wind turbines last for 18 to 25 years, the turbine assembly weighs about 160 tons, and there‘s a 30 metre diameter concrete base to get rid of.
The bottom line is: If not hydro, nuclear and gas, what will we do for electricity when the twenty-year contracts run out and there is no longer wind generation?
Any farmer will tell you not to spread manure into the wind. You’ll get some on you.
John Wiggins via email
This article is the work of the source indicated. Any opinions expressed in it are not necessarily those of National Wind Watch.
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