Winds of change for Ontario

Of all the methods of producing electricity the most common in Ontario are nuclear and coal. Both methods keep our lights on but they share one negative -- pollution.

Coal fired plants are dirty and spew toxins into the atmosphere. Nuclear reactors leave behind radioactive material that has to be stored for hundreds of years.

Another method of producing electricity that I didn't give much attention until August was wind turbines. The technology has become very popular and is said to become even more widely used in the next few years. The upside is that wind turbines produce zero pollution.

I think wind turbines are cool. They're big, white, powerful and tower over everything around them. The one at the CNE I often watch as I'm stuck in traffic on Lakeshore Boulevard.

In August I took the family to beautiful Bruce County to a cottage in Port Elgin. The countryside up there was beautiful, farmland everywhere resting on the shores of Lake Huron. This wasn't the first time we'd been to Port Elgin, we'd traveled there before five years ago. What caught me off guard on this most recent trip though was the number of wind turbines that dotted the landscape. Driving between Port Elgin and Kincardine there were wind turbines as far as the eye could see. For someone like me, a creature of the Greater Toronto Area, the sight of so many of those structures was a sight to behold.

I Facebooked about it and got a reply from a former colleague of mine, Dwight Irwin, who now resides in Ripley (near Kincardine) that wind turbines weren't all they're cracked up to be. There's a lot of opposition to them up there. Noise and vibrations were the most common complaints. They do make some noise I will admit as I stopped at the Bruce Power Information Centre where there were quite a few of those wind turbines set up. But given the majority of the wind turbines were located out in the middle of huge swaths of farmland, kilometres away from any residential areas I found it hard to believe noise could be that big a problem.

The Province of Ontario is on track to quadruple wind capacity by 2015 according to a story in the Toronto Star (http://www.thestar.com/business/article/866129). It's going to cost as much as $14 billion according to the Ontario Power Authority. That's a lot of coin but with Premier Dalton McGuinty vowing to take coal fired plants offline he's got to come up with an alternative fast. And given the new nuclear build at Darlington is on hold right now until the sale of Atomic Energy of Canada Limited -- a federal Crown corporation -- is taken care of wind turbine generation seems to be the direction the government is blowing. Even if AECL wasn't for sale it would still take 10 years to build the new nukes so something needs to fill the electricity void being left by coal plants going offline.

When it comes to electricity there's really no technology that's going to please everyone. We all want the lights to go on when we hit the switch. Nuclear doesn't seem to be going anywhere soon so replacing coal with wind seems like a good idea to me.