Plans to build the largest wind farm in Canada near Letellier, Man., could be in jeopardy. Shares of the Australian company involved, Babcock and Brown Ltd., were delisted from the Australian Securities Exchange June 18 and the company is billions of dollars in debt.
Consequently, people in the Rural Municipality of Montcalm, south of Winnipeg, are not sure if this project is going to happen, said Mitch Duval, chief administrative officer for the RM.
“Right now, there’s a little bit of confusion because there’s no communication between the project proponents and the municipality,” he said. “Right now all we hear are rumours.”
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In late June, residents learned that Riverstone Holdings, an American private equity firm that focuses on energy, had purchased Babcock and Brown’s “wind development portfolio.”
Riverstone touts itself as holding the largest renewable energy fund in the world. The release announcing the purchase states that a new company, Pattern Energy Group, will be created to manage the renewable energy projects formerly controlled by Babcock and Brown.
Riverstone and Pattern Energy were contacted to find out how this purchase would affect the Manitoba wind project, but the companies did not return calls.
Construction of the 300 megawatt wind farm, an $800 million project, was supposed to begin this year, Duval added, and was expected to have a huge impact on the local economy.
“It’s huge in the Red River Valley,” he said. “There’s going to be jobs created, construction jobs, and once the project is up and running, local maintenance jobs.”
Despite the delays, Manitoba Hydro hopes the project will go forward, said Glenn Schneider, Hydro spokesperson.
“I couldn’t give you a deadline for when we want this resolved. Clearly, we like to add more wind to our portfolio. But we’ll just have to see where this reorganization of Babcock and Brown takes us.”
The problems with the wind farm started long before the company’s recent financial woes, said Cliff Cullen, MLA for Turtle Mountain and Manitoba Hydro critic for the Progressive Conservatives.
When the project was first considered, there were more than 80 requests for proposals submitted, but it wasn’t clear why Babcock and Brown was selected.
“The frustration then was lack of openness and transparency of that process,” Cullen said. “That’s really what frustrated the companies. They didn’t really know who was doing the evaluations and what the criteria were for the evaluations.”
The mishandling of this project by Hydro and the provincial government is because Manitoba doesn’t have a clear policy on alternative forms of energy, Cullen said.
“Other jurisdictions are looking at their renewable forms of energy and setting criteria going forward. We’re not doing that. So, in essence, we’re operating in a vacuum.”
