Wind Farm Projects Contested in Ontario

I actually didn't link to the above chart because it is from the website you linked too. 

I found the site quite interesting.

Conservation  has a lot of potential but it by itself is not going to solve the problem. In the future we will probably need a lot of electricity to power transportation, if we want to stop using fossil fuel.

My personal preference is a combination of wind and hydro. With the base load coming from wind and hydro filling in the peaks and low wind periods.  For that we need large water reservoirs to built potential energy during surplus wind generated electricity, by pumping water into these reservoirs for use during slack wind periods. Hydro power is easy to get on and off line.

yep

A population cap in Canada (Say, 35M) would help immensely. More people will mean more electricity consumption, regardless of any other conservation efforts. Staggering hours of schools and businesses (offer tax incentives) would even-out power useage, improving efficiency. More use of Combined Heat, Cooling and Power ('cogeneration') for institutional and even residential use saves gobs of energy (waste heat is used for heating and cooling, instead of dumped into the atmosphere, or a lake). Organic waste (polyethylene, paper, slaughterhouse offal and forestry byproducts) can be burned for power in existing plants, instead of coal.

There have been reports of health effects associated with wind turbines. The low-pressure wakes their blades also pop the lungs of bats and birds. When the 'environmental' Kennedys don't want them on their Martha's Vinyard compound, that says something. Turbines are also ugly as sin, erratic and costly to maintain. Neither is nuclear power an option: it's dangerous, the waste issue hasn't been solved and the total life cycle costs are horrifying (CANDU's have cost 400-500% more to decommission than to build). In the long term, very radical technologies should be invested in...like the Fusor, Dense Plasma Focus, and so forth.

With so many problems with regards to climate change and its consequences in other countries,it is probably unrealistic to cap Canadas population at 35 million.  Climate change will probably force a lot of people to seek places where they can survive.

Sure wind turbines are ugly, but so are the cars, highways and those three garage door bungaloes that litter our landscape. Do we have the time to develope new technologies to deal with the CO2 problem? It are the local people in communities that are the resource that have to be used to remodel those communities towards a sustainable existence. Relying on the Monsantos of this world to deal with these problems would be utter stupidity, since sustainability and profit are incompatible. 

Bubbles,

We, as a sovereign country, have a choice in how many people are allowed to settle here. There is a limit to how humanitarian we can be, especially with societies that have irresponsibly-high birthrates. Transfering more people from the warm 'South' to the Great Frigid North essentially means more heat... (Even 'hydro' isn't environmentally-friendly, either.) GM crops haven't been able to squeeze more than a few percent more output out of crop yields. Water supplies are worrisome, too, meaning reduced crop yields. Restarting global family planning has to be done, to reduce the population--before nature does it for us.

Cogeneration is hardly a 'new technology'. Many campuses, businesses, and other institutions use this. So can you: it's nothing more than a generator, with the exhaust and cooling waste heat either warming your house, or running a cooling (AC) system. Basically, the ~30% of energy thrown away as waste heat (or wasted, making heat) is used for a productive purpose. A 'high-efficiency' furnace is actually wasting energy that could be first used to make electricity, with heat as a byproduct. The big, industrial cogenerators usually use gas turbines, but a natural gas-fuelled piston engine works for small installations (houses). Geothermal heat (heatpump) systems are well-proven, along with solar thermal. And there's a lot of real estate on the roofs of those 'ugly' bungalows and the sides of those office towers for photovoltaic cells... (Even on wind-powered yachts, people prefer solar panels to flakey wind turbines.)

Also, staggering commercial and school hours would help immensely. Flattening out peaks in consumption would improve the overall efficiency of powerplants and the electric grid. There would be other, non-electrical benefits, too, like reduced crime and less need for huge roadways that are all-but-vacant outside of rush hour.

Protrucio,

Have a look at this.

In Canada we have a lot of lakes that can serve as natural reservoirs. For example one could pump water from Lake Ontario, with windmills, back into Lake Erie and then collect the power as needed Through the power station at Niagara Falls. All one would have to figure out how much fluctuation one can tolerate in the lake levels to determine how much backup power one can draw on.

PW,

You should check the per capita carbon footprint. Canadians have an output of around 17 tons of carbon per year. The average person in India has an out put of 1.5 tons, Each Canadian is more then ten times more destructive on our climate then a person from India. Can you see that blaming the high birthrate is a bit of a red herring when it takes more then ten kids from India to do the climate damage of one Canadian new born? Mind you that might be a good reason to restrict immigration, not to indoctrinate more people to our destructive lifestyle. Maybe we could make a deal with India, reduce your birthrate to ours and we reduce our per capita carbon footprint to yours. I wonder what that would do to our birthrate?

They have been claming to have a fusion reactor in the near future for many years now. We can see about its application when it happens, but till then we have to do with what we know that works.

So how long would a small natural gas engine be able to run between major overhauls? 4000-6000 hours?

Geothermal is an option for heating, because you can triple the equivalent heat output from a windmill.

That video is your evidence??  A dude sticking a camera outside a car door, on a foggy scene, recording his engine running and what sounds to me like a high speed drill reaming into metal, or something similar.  It's a regular sound around farms. 

And how come the sound doesn't change when the dude is taping the windmills wind at his back and then wind in his face?

Bubbles--CO2 emissions and food/water consumption are entirely separate, but really important issues. But bringing lots of people to a cold country won't help.

The jury's still out on the health effects of wind turbines. One theory is that they produce a flicker that makes people ill. This is like the coalbed methane issue. You can't just dismiss people's concerns out of hand. And all the big proponents of wind power suddenly go NIMBY when somebody wants to build them in their backyards. There was a University of Calgary study that proved wind turbines are responsible for large numbers of deaths of birds and bats, when the low pressure wake from their blades explodes their lungs.

I don't know why solar thermal isn't explored more. It's efficient and can use tricks, like molten salts or Na/K to store thermal energy for running when the sun goes down. Wind turbines are just too flakey for reliable power and chemical batteries are very inefficient and expensive for off-peak storage. I remember an article years ago, in Popular Science, where (get this) Kuwait was testing a small solar thermal Stirling generator to run pumps for oil pipelines, so they wouldn't waste exportable oil products running them.

Sineed, yes all the turbines are HUGE.  It's just that there's a couple hundred of them spinnig quite a distance outside downtown TO.  And they do make a constant noise when they spin.  I would suggest starting a petition to have turbines installed all along the Lakeshore in the GTA.  Wonder how far that'd get? 

I spoke with a man who lives right on Lakeshore road outside of Port Burwell.  His house was surrounded by turbines and he didn't have a problem with them, but as Bubbles says, many people do feel the turbines affect their health or comfort of living. 

The Green Energy act means no NIMBYISM.  I was there when McGuinty announced parts of the plan in London.  But, as it's turning out, the only people getting wind turbines in their backyard are rural people.  And where is the power most needed? 

My best guess is that the infra sound from a wind turbine might effect some people but not others.  However, I think such an idea could be refuted or verified by a double blind study, but I've not seen either side of this part of the debate undertake such a thing.

Farmpunk makes the most salient point about the location of wind turbines.  The GTA shore needs to be lined with them-- if they are such a great idea-- before they install another one anywhere else.

And, I think we need to be more agressive in conservation.  I think we'd all be better off on a lot of levels if illuminated advertising was illegal, just for starters.   And maybe there aught to be a size limitation on T.V. screens.

Which introduces the elephant in the room.   On all environmental issues, if the degradation of the environment is as bad or likely to be half as bad as projections indicate, then all these "grass roots" initiatives are a joke.   Things aren't going to change until government starts regulating business in a big way.

What is worse the low feq sound or respiratory inducing(and all the health related costs) illnesses of coal plants? Because it's not like transporting hydro from NWT to my city would be cheaper than the abbundance of wind we have here. We also have nuclear and we have already seen all the problems that happens from that mess. Floods can be bad, turbines can be torn down, but radiated soil is there for a very very long time.

There's a guy in Kintore who's had a backyard windmill for years.  I noticed this weekend while driving by that he's upgraded substantially.   Must be paying.

One other annoying thing about wind turbines is the red flashing light, for those that like the night sky.    They are very intrusive, and I'm not at all convinced they are necessary.

Another element in all this is transmission loss.   The further the consumer of electricity is from the generation, the less efficient the transmission.  In some places, this loss can amount to 15%, depending on the infrastructure.   This is yet another reason why wind turbines should be located all along the shore of the GTA, and tied to that market. 

I'm very sceptical about "smart" technology, particularly the so called "smart" meter.    If it doesn't tell me in real time what the price per kilowatt hour is, then it's useless.  Perhaps worse than useless.  

The only effect I see this gadget having is to shift the peak hours.   We won't be paying less.   

Ah, and that's another thing that has to change in Ontario.   When demand is high, prices rise.  When demand is low, prices rise.