GUELPH, Ont. – Alternative energy wind turbines are becoming a symbol of the rural-urban divide in Ontario as they spread across the province.
The turbines are a source of revenue for farmers leasing land, but the landscape-altering and often noisy behemoths have also divided farmers from their neighbours and added to the rural view that urban Ontario residents like the idea of a clean electricity source but prefer it hidden in the countryside.
“It has become one of the most divisive and controversial issues in rural policy in Ontario,” University of Guelph energy expert Glen Fox told a Sept. 8 conference on green energy.
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“It is a rural debate that drowns out most others.”
Fox, who works out of the university’s food, agriculture and resource economics department, is skeptical about arguments that electricity created from wind farms makes sense economically, practically or environmentally.
Ontario agriculture minister Carol Mitchell agreed it is an issue and said she hears about it regularly in her riding on the shores of Lake Huron, where wind turbines are a growing business and a growing political concern.
However, she continues to see renewable energy as a good thing for her constituents and rural Ontario.
“There are issues that wind turbines are creating, but I see this as an opportunity for our agriculture community,” she said in a Sept. 9 interview following her maiden speech to the annual meeting of Grain Farmers of Ontario. “Certainly, I hear a lot about this.”
However, Mitchell insisted that the provincial government’s strategy to emphasize renewable energy as a way to close down coal-fired electricity plants is good environmental policy and good rural policy.
“For our agricultural community there are opportunities for renewables, whether or not they be wind, whether or not they be solar or biofuel, biogas,” she said.
“I see this as a wonderful opportunity for our rural communities and specifically our farmers. I believe we are going to be a key component of addressing climate change.”
Fox said the significant investment in wind energy is mainly based on a misunderstanding of the history of wind energy success in Denmark and Germany.
He said recent studies have shown the wind energy initiative in those countries has been an expensive failure, producing unreliable high-cost energy that requires a back-up system of polluting conventional energy plants or expensive imports when the wind is not blowing.
As well, the wind turbines have a limited life span and no use afterward.
Fox said the same future confronts Ontario’s promotion of wind power.
Investments are huge, the electricity has to be subsidized to make it competitive, nearby neighbours of the turbines object to their presence, a back-up system is necessary to fill in the gaps when the wind is not blowing and the turbines have a limited life span.
Farmers also will have to deal with the long-term legacy, he added, because many turbines are on farmland and offer short-term cash flow for producers.
“If you have a tower on your farm and everyone else has walked away from it, a farmer cannot walk away from it,” he said. “It is an unwanted legacy.”
In a later interview, Fox speculated about why wind turbines have been a volatile political issue in Ontario but not in Alberta, where wind power has been a feature in the south for years.
“I think the main explanation is that it ain’t next door in Alberta,” he said.
“There is a lot of open space, steady winds and frankly, the land being used didn’t have much of a job anyway. In Ontario, it is good farmland and there is a proximity to people you don’t find on the Prairies.”
