The 2011 Ontario Elections and Renewable Energy

http://members.shaw.ca/cjgaughan/prince_wind_farm_photo_gallery.htm
The Prince Wind Farm, on the shore of lake Superior, installed 2006, made possible with a 20 year Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) - owned by Brookfield Renewables:
http://www.brookfieldpower.com/_Global/5/documents/relatedlinks/730.pdf

Introduction
Last Thursday Ontario had their provincial elections, and about the only winner was Ontario's Green Energy Act (GEA). The liberals lost several seats to both the conservative Tories (PC) and to the New Democrats (NDP), who are actually a lot more liberal/progressive than the Liberals generally are.

The breakdown of votes is starkly geographical. The NDP won the north country (very industrial - mining and forestry) and some industrial areas like Hamilton, the Tories (alias PC) won the suburbs and most of the farming regions in southern Ontario, while the Liberals won big in the cities of Toronto/urban/some industrial regions in metro Toronto, Windsor, Ottawa and London. Here is a map of this: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/politics/ontario-election/results.html. The net results were 53 seats (37.6% of vote) for the Libs, 37 seats (35.4% of the vote) for the PC's, 17 seats (22.7% of the vote) for the NDP, and no seats for the Greens, with 2.9% of the vote.

But, taken another way, 64.6% of the people voting in the province were in favor of the Green Energy Act/renewable energy (though many may have quibbles with it). Only the Tories were profoundly pro-pollution (coal, nukes, natural gas), nominally because this is lower cost electricity, and especially when most of the external costs of these are dumped on society and taxpayers in obscure and oblique manners.

Discussion
The GEA has proven to be a very successful way of generating manufacturing jobs, bringing in new investment and also replacing coal and natural gas sourced electricity. The bill for the GEA was passed in the spring of 2009, and officially went into effect in October of 2009, so it has only had about 2 years of application, and much of that time was spent getting contracts, doing the fieldwork needed for resource analysis and environmental permits, as well as ordering the equipment. It was particularly focused on finding jobs for the more than 100,000 auto workers who were put out of work in Ontario in the Great Recession, especially with the bankruptcy of GM and Chrysler and the squeeze on Ford. The near term goal was 50,000 new jobs in the renewable energy and energy efficiency (home and building insulation, especially) sectors.

In many cases, the factories to make major wind turbine components and solar PV panels are themselves still being constructed or are just becoming operational, such as the new wind turbine tower plant (for Siemens turbines) in Windsor that will use steel plate from the Sault St. Marie (Ont) steelworks. Next year, Ontario will install more PV panels than will states like California, which has a significantly better solar resource than does Ontario. In 2010, Ontario installed 168 MW (DC), second in North America only to California, which installed an estimated 180 MW (DC) that year; in 2011, if supply keeps up with demand, Ontario is likely to install around 600 MW (DC) of PV capacity, worth an average of about 70 MW on a continuous basis, but worth a lot with regards to supplying summer peak electricity. However, the difference that allows a poor solar resource area like Ontario (it's not a desert) to do better than a place like California is in the pricing systems employed and in the strong emphasis on the manufacturing/job creation/wealth creation in Ontario's Feed-In Tariff versus the subsidy and tax avoidance based systems in the US, especially California and New Jersey. (see http://www.ases.org/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Ontario-jumps-to-second-in-North-American-PV.html&Itemid=27).

While PV electricity is mostly about job creation and less about average electricity production (most PV electricity in Ontario will be made in May, June, July and August, with very little in the remaining months), wind electricity is where the bulk of the new renewable energy (expressed as (MW-hrs/yr)/(hrs/yr) = MW) will be made. It is mostly wind that will replace the electricity formerly made by Ontario's coal burners, or which will make up for the avoided natural gas consumption as a result of the cancellation of two gas to electric facilities that were proposed near Burlington. Their present 1656 MW worth of wind turbine installations (see http://www.canwea.ca/farms/wind-farms_e.php) include about 495 MW (30%) installed under the GEA pricing system/after October of 2009, and with another 3946 MW lined up and "in the queue" (see http://www.canwea.ca/farms/PDF/Pipeline-List.pdf). Combined, these should displace an average of 1600 MW of average delivered energy derived from polluting sources. In addition, several billion dollars worth of long distance transmission lines are also being built to tap a hydroelectric and several wind farms located near or north of Lake Superior. The new turbines will represent an investment of near $8 billion and support tens of thousands of jobs. If half of the jobs go to Canadian workers/companies, that is 64,000 job-years of direct employment over a four year period. There is an estimated 13,000 MW of wind turbine capacity also awaiting FIT contracts (longer term projects); the major excuse for the delay is in getting access to transmission lines to the Toronto metro region.

With the survival of the GEA, more wind power can now be developed in Ontario, and at a pretty significant rate, especially compared to NY State, which has very similar wind energy resources compared to the inhabited portions of Ontario. To date, most turbines have been installed in southwestern Ontario, near the Lake Erie and Lake Huron shorelines (these are where the best onshore winds that are near the major population centers are located between Windsor to Kingston happen to be, with the major electricity demand especially centered on the Toronto-Burlington-Hamilton region). The existing transmission lines in the province are mostly monopolized by nuclear facilities (3 complexes, 20 reactors in total) and the coal burners (those lines will soon be freed up), though the new $2.3 billion line from the Lake Superior region will allow wind power from that region to be shipped to southern Ontario/Toronto.

Wind turbines are not easily hidden, though on the plus side, they also produce electricity at reasonably affordable prices. PV systems, especially rooftop or small 10 x 10 meter units located in back yards and farms do not have a large "visual presence", but their electricity sells for 78 c/kw-hr, which is between 10 to 20 times present "market rates" and about 6 times more than large wind turbines. The PC party tried to use wind turbines as well as the price of PV electricity as a major campaign issue, but that appears to have failed, even though their tactics were well received in the farming/suburban zones that they carried. There was also a huge contingent of "anti-turbinites", well financed and well coordinated with similar organizations in the U.S. odds are, these Canadian groups also got backing from the oil, natural gas, nuclear and coal based industries and owners. And unfortunately for them, but fortunately for the vast majority of people, time is not on the polluter's side.

For the time being, corn production (very big in southern Ontario) is actually profitable due to high corn prices that are cause by ethanol prices that are set by the world petroleum prices. Most farmers can be ambivalent about wind turbine income under those conditions. However, wind turbines can supplement a farmers income to a significant degree, because lease payments are a direct profit, and do not significantly affect their crop yields (at 180 bushels/acre, the 1/8th of an acre covered by roads and the turbine and would be about 23 bushels, worth roughly $161/yr (lease payments are between $5,000 to $10,000/yr). Similarly, local property tax revenues will also be at least those levels. Each 1000 turbines installed across Ontario is also a transfer of $20 to $25 million/yr from urban to rural areas. If corn prices or corn yields slide for some reason, wind turbines will be quite welcomed by farmers. In 5 years (the time for the next election), these transfer payments of $100 million/yr in return for electricity to urban zones will become a major economic factor in rural Ontario politics. The removal of the Green Energy Act would be a direct threat to such activities and to such steady income that so many will appreciate.

Similarly, as employment in renewable energy manufacturing, and especially wind turbine manufacturing keeps expanding, this will also start to develop a constituency of its own - voters (workers, and those who employment depends on those workers/businesses) and businesses, as well as major banks that are financing these developments. This snowballing effect is called a "virtuous economic circle", where the social and political feedback mechanisms lead to even more renewable energy development. In 5 years, with hundreds of thousands of people who know someone working in the renewables business and close to 50,000 people actually directly employed, the pro-renewable voting block will be significantly stronger. After all, it was only 2/3rds of the Ontario voters this year who supported the GEA. The Liberal-NDP coalition needed to run the Ontario government will actually force the ruling party to adopt more progressive positions, such as no more expansion of the dreadfully expensive Ontario nuke business (it is responsible for most of Ontario's existing debt). And that is a good thing...

2011 was an extremely bad year for any politician to run for office, since the rotten economy that was unleashed by George Bu$h and Company via the sub-prime fiasco/mortgage based bond frauds/assessment frauds has left a lot of people ready to vote out anyone in office, assuming they even bother to vote (historically low election participation this time). The fact that the Green Energy Act has a constituency of three of Ontario's four major parties (Libs, NDP, Greens) and a strong majority of the voters seems pretty impressive, though you would never know it based on the grumpy corporate owned media in Canada (similar to the U.S. right wing, corporate philosophy/belief system).

And for NY businesses looking for growth anywhere, you can at least look to Ontario (and to a lesser extent, Quebec). After 2012, wind turbine installations will effectively cease and desist with the end of the US tax avoidance based incentives. But, the renewables gold rush will still keep on kicking strong in Ontario, thanks to the FIT requirements of guaranteed primary access to the grid and a fixed price based on the cost of production plus a reasonable, socially determined average profit rate for the investors.

Too bad NY's state government won't take the hint, and get FIT, at least in the near future.

Also of note, see http://www.cleanbreak.ca/2011/10/07/liberals-re-elected-in-ontario-green-energy-act-and-feed-in-tariff-program-live-on/ and http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/07/us-ontario-energy-idUSTRE79651420111007.

DB