The global race to harness wind
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Blown away by the prospect of clean, green energy from the world's winds? Well, there's good news and bad news.
First, the good stuff: wind energy had a rippling banner of a year in 2008. Global potential for electricity from rotating windmills increased by nearly 30 per cent last year – much of it in the U.S. and China. India, too, has been harnessing wind like there's no tomorrow, lining its southern and eastern hills with wind farms. T. Boone Pickens, an American oil man and opponent of the Kyoto treaty on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, took to wind energy with the zeal of a convert. His home state, Texas, accounted for a huge chunk of the U.S.'s new wind potential.
Now the not-so-good: Canada has some catching up to do. This windy land is farming some of its air currents, especially in energy-hungry Ontario and petroleum-rich Alberta, but we're somewhere between tiny Portugal and Denmark in the global rankings. And the federal government isn't making things any easier. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's last budget eliminated a tax break to the wind-turbine industry that insiders say is already hurting business here. As Louise Elliot of CBC news reported recently on The House, Canada's top wind energy companies are increasingly looking to other countries to market their world-class wares.
Not that we aren't building wind farms. Alberta, Ontario and the Maritimes have lots and want many more. With the sea winds blowing all around it, P.E.I. is particularly pleased with its potential. The McGuinty government's new Green Energy Act for Ontario looks to clean power technologies to wean the province off dirty coal and more expensive nuclear and hydro developments.
Quebec and Manitoba are also developing fields of slowly spinning windmills, and British Columbia's Haida First Nation is part of an innovative project to place wind turbines offshore in the Pacific. In the vast territories of Canada's North, where power is almost all produced by burning imported fossil fuels, there are burgeoning hopes that wind and wind-diesel hybrid generators can reduce petroleum costs. The all-important mining sector has its eye on the weather vane of wind energy hopes. The north and the east and west coasts lead the way when it comes to the huge, untapped potential of this country.
The map to the right from Environment Canada charts the raw wind energy potential across the country and offshore. The red areas have the most intense and continuous air movement. Obviously, not all of them are good places to put wind turbines — think of the stormy seas off the northeastern coast of Labrador or the wintry wastes of a frozen Hudson Bay. But detailed weather information for specific parts of Canada help governments and wind energy planners to find out where their efforts should be concentrated — for example, how to balance accessibility of the power grid, wind potential and local concerns about big windmill farms and their effects on communities.
Opponents of wind energy say the big turbines are unsightly, make noise and can cause health problems. Government and industry scientists say there's no proof of the latter despite a small but growing resistance movement to wind farms in rural Ontario and elsewhere.
The inevitability of rising oil and gas prices, climate change concerns and the endless potential of wind might win the argument in the end. Already, the city of Calgary is powering its light-rail C-train with wind power, and hydro giant Quebec says it hopes to be generating a massive 2,004 MW from windmills by 2015. The Canadian Wind Energy Association, an industry body, says the country is edging into the global Top 10 and climbing the ladder, even with the current economic downturn. Across the land, there are plans to boost capacity by a quarter or more this year.
The sight of giant propellers, whooshing away on the skyline or even at sea or on the Great Lakes might soon become as common in Canada as hydro dams, big smoke stacks and transmission lines.