I had a chance to absorb some of the elements of Ontario’s Green Energy Act and despite the ma [...]…

You say you can’t understand the outrage it is creating and I can’t understand why YOU would say this.

I suppose we landowners are supposed to be “understanding” when our homes and communities are going to be exposed to huge Industrial Wind Turbines that not only threaten our Health, Well Being, our Tourist Industry, our Landscapes, not to mention the 3 fold increase to our already outrageous Electricity Bills.

Along with that the GEA is apparently going to strip our Municipal Councils of all checks and balances when it come to zoning and Planning whenever the word “Renewables” is mentioned.

Along with rewriting our Environmental Assessment Act which basically will allow these machines to destroy every square inch of wild land they touch, we basically will be stripped of all our Democratic Rights which we have held dear for over 15o plus years.

This GEA is nothing more than a power grab by Smitherman and McGuinty and is not only disgusting but I would say tantamount to nothing more than the formation of a “sublime Dictatorship.”

One last point. No matter what CANWEA or the Politicians say about Wind Turbines and how wonderful they are; they don’t work! Not one ounce of CO2 has been taken out of the energy mix by installing Wind. Wind needs fossil fuel backup when the Wind doesn’t blow. And don’t start quoting Germany and Denmark figures as they are really poor examples for us to allude to. Denmark has the highest electricity prices in Europe with Germany second.

A man of words like yourself who has a certain amount of exposure in the news world should look at both sides of every story and report honestly. Obviously you don’t have to.

1. Physical and chemical laws

1a. Conservation of energy and other physical laws guarantee that any conversion, transmission or storage of energy comes at a loss.

1b. Reservoirs of heat or motive potential (e.g. water held at a height) or pressure (e.g. compressed air) are inherently more efficient than any known battery, and will almost certainly remain that way.

1c. Anything with moving parts is inherently less reliable than anything without.

1d. Things break down. Toxic materials leak into the environment whatever precautions are taken to prevent it.

1e. Dams, buildings, transmission towers and stations, reprocessing waste facilities, all cost money and require human effort to monitor & maintain.

1f. Things far away are harder to control and more dangerous to rely on than things nearby, especially in an emergency.

It should be obvious to any observer that Ontario “energy policy” has not been cognizant of these realities in decades. New power generation has in general taken precedence over power demand management and conservation – at a ratio of 60 to 1 – and over improvements to distribution networks and resilience of communities. Power pricing has totally failed to reflect the diurnal cycle of demand and few incentives provided to consume the bulk of one’s power “off peak”. Emissions harms including asthma from coal have not been accounted for as part of the cost of electricity, instead subsidized by health care (quite different from the way that automobile accident harms are handled).

Any energy strategy or policy that does not clearly state and establish that physical and chemical laws will be respected in the drafting and the interpretation of policies is doomed and should be rejected by the public. Ontario will necessarily fall behind economically and generate unnecessary environmental damage if it permits misunderstandings or false economic arguments that do not take full costs into account to influence its policies. The US Great Lakes states in particular have been reviving economically. They compete directly with Ontario in many industries and the President of the United States is from this region for the first time in nearly a century. There is no more room for error and delays will kill not only citizens directly harmed by emissions but those who rely on help from government that is wasting precious resources on inefficient programs.

2. Ceasing to use, or never using, a watt of electricity or joule of heat, is always and necessarily a better strategy than generating and moving it.

3. Heat is best captured and used as heat, rather than converted to some other form of energy.

4. Lighting represents possibly the second lowest hanging fruit.

5. District systems are closer to their users and easier to control in the modern era when electronic monitoring and remote assistance are available.

6. Ontario should elaborate and account for all the benefits of a smart grid, in priority order:

6a. Demand side management, the primary goal of a smarter grid, creates a dynamic market in this power and ensures that far less is lost.

6b. Detecting usage patterns and turning off devices that are not in use is a major feature of “smart” power networks both in the home and on the grid.

6c. Universal overprovisioned non-monopolistic broadband services are very likely to radically increase telework and information-intensive industries moving to Ontario. This radically reduces commuting and increases revenue to government per unit of energy expended.

6d. Power grid monitoring and maintenance are radically improved by each and every device (transformers, stations, etc.) being monitored in real time by the same SNMP-based mechanisms.

6e. Finally and least important, a smart grid is capable of dealing with intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar that generate surges of power at unpredictable times.

7. Electric vehicles are (according to Britta Gross, GM head of electrical infrastructure) more carbon-efficient to charge even from the dirtiest coal power than they are to fuel with even the freest-running oil source. Accordingly oil should be eliminated from transport use even before coal.

8. Ontario should not restore feed-in tariffs as they encourage extra generation rather than conservation or better distribution systems. It also causes malinvestment. Carbon taxes are better.

9. Wind is cheaper than nuclear and clean solar technology without nasty toxics is cheaper than coal when all the health care costs are considered.

10. Very small nuclear fission plants such as those being planned by Hyperion have made the CANDU line of technology obsolete.

Ontario has a long way to go. At best in this Act one detects vague awareness of 1b, 1f, 5 and 6e. They clearly do not comprehend 8 or they (as The Economist advises) would tax carbon rather than restore feed-in tariffs. They do not comprehend 9 or 10 and evidently someone who does not talk to GM or Ford advises them on 7. There are flailing faltering steps to understanding on points 2, 3, 4 and some positive moves but without 1a, 1c, 1d, 1e, 6a, 6b, 6c, 6d clearly understood and stated as the intent of the Act, as you say a change of government or minister simply causes progress to stop. This is very far from even keeping Ontario competitive with some of the smarter Great Lakes states’ or US federal government initiatives. I give this thing a total grade of D+ with most of it D- and a few C+ spots of hope (mandatory home energy audits, easier capital access for upgrades but unfortunately through a separate government system, district heat/power and CHP enabled but only on a small scale) that could have been well into the B range if only conservation had been uniformly enabled more than peak levelling, emissions uniformly punished by a carbon tax, peak levelling and storage uniformly more enabled than generation (including nuclear), and all sources compared on a fuller cost accounting. The UK Tories’ policy is in that range. For an A, well, look at poor countries that don’t have the money to waste in imported oil nor nuclear reactors. Like Mexico for instance, as Barack Obama repeatedly points out. This Act didn’t even include a Tar Sand ban however symbolic.