National Post – October 15, 2010
Lights out on PEI’s wind power dream
By Lorne Gunter
There’s a nice bakery near where I live that recently started boasting it had switched to wind energy to power its ovens. A sign informed customers that the owner recognized an energy-intensive business such as baking generated a large carbon footprint, so he wanted everyone to know he was “taking proactive steps” to reduce his production of greenhouse gasses.
“How,” I asked him, “do you know you are getting only wind energy through the power lines that enter your store? How do only the good electrons know to come into your store and the bad ones pass by?”
Unless you have a windmill on top of your building or out behind your barn, with a direct line from the turbine to the switchbox in your store or home, the answer is there is no way of knowing the source of the electricity you are consuming. Your power meter cannot discern green power from bad, nasty polluting power (which, of course, isn’t anywhere near as polluting as it once was, unless you buy into the climate-change hysteria and have convinced yourself carbon dioxide is a pollutant).
You can choose to pay more for wind power, but so long as you receive your power from “the grid” – the vast network of generating stations and transmission lines that crisscross every province – the idea that you can pay more and receive greener electricity is merely a symbolic, feel-good act. The premium you pay may or may not prompt the production of more “clean” energy. (Go to www.bullfrogpower.com for a video about how they, like other green producers, hope if enough consumers agree to pay a dollar a day more for power, they will be able to erect enough new wind turbines to eventually, some day, maybe reduce the number of coal-fired generating plants.)
It’s no surprise to me, then, that Prince Edward Island’s dream of becoming the world’s wind power megacentre – sheiks with propellers, as it were – should now be crumbling around the provincial government’s ears. Without massive government subsidies, the economics for cheap wind energy don’t exist, and a province of under 150,000 people cannot keep subsidizing expensive energy dreams forever.
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