Renewable Wind Energy Project In Niagara, Ontario Community Of Wainfleet Receives Provincial Approval

A News Commentary by Doug Draper

Ontario’s Ministry of Environment has given its blessing to a plan going back at least five years and put forward between Rankin Construction and the Regional Municipality of Niagara to build five wind-generating turbines, rising about as high as the length of a football field, on private lands near the Lake Erie shores of Wainfleet.

These five turbines, which their private landowners said ‘yes’ to some five years ago and which would generate enough energy to keep all the electrical equipment working in fired up in 2,500 modern-day homes, have become another battleground in Ontario for those who wish to oppose anything that is described as a “green” or “renewable energy” project on the grounds that anything around wind or even solar is going to soak energy consumers across the province in the pocketbooks and may even be dangerous to our health.

Niagara At Large attempted to contact Wainfleet Mayor April Jeffs this October 8^th to report her reaction to the MOE decision to approve this project and NAL also attempted to get in touch with Tom Rankin, president of the Niagara-based Rankin Construction, but he was apparently in travel out of the region.

Nevertheless, let’s get down to one not so minor point here that given all of the arguing about how much introducing renewable energy facilities like wind and solar may cost in this province, we receive also receive the news this October 8^th from Bonnie Lysyk, the recently appointed Auditor General for Ontario, that the cost of the former Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty pulling the plug on two gas-powered plants in Oakville and Mississauga is now an estimated $675 million and possibly closer to a billion for Ontario taxpayers.

This is, after all, the rhetoric we have heard for month after month on end from the two other Ontario parties – the Conservatives and the NDP – about how much pulling the plug on these plants cost before a political election just to save, according to them, a couple of  Liberal seats in Oakville and Mississauga. We were treated to all of that noise when all of the time the Conservatives and NDP did their own share of pandering to not-in-my-backyard forces in those areas by opposing those same gas-fired plants being located in those areas.

In other words, if either the Conservatives or NDP was the  government at that time, only a few years ago, what reason do we have to believe that they might not have done the same thing and pulled the plug on these plant projects for the same narrow, self-serving political reasons?

Then to compound all of this, apparently it is okay for the Liberal government of the day to say they won’t move forward with any kind of gas-fired power plants in Oakville and Mississauga – to areas of the province that must be among the largest energy users – but let’s move the gas-powered plant proposal to a rural area of Napanee, Ontario, somewhere northwest of Kingston.

Ain’t that nice. Let’s pull the plug on any energy generating project in high-density/high-energy using communities like Oakville, especially if there are a good deal of higher end residents there that might support one’s political party, and shove it in a rural area where there are fewer votes.

Ain’t it nice also that Hudak’s Conservatives, in particular, peddle pseudo science from the billionaire Koch brothers and other Republican petro-industry interests in the United States that green energy is a health plague and some sort of ‘Commie’ plot.

No wonder, in a sense, people who oppose renewable energy projects like wind in rural areas protest so much, even though these are the kind of energy facilities Ontario should be moving forward with.

How disgusting that crass politics by all parties gets in the way.

For more information on this issue, you can review the report of the Auditor  General of Canada by clicking on http://www.auditor.on.ca/en/reports_en/oakville_en.pdf .

(Niagara At Large invites your views on this issue just so long as you share your views along with your real first and last name in the comment boxes below.)