![Communities have valid reasons for objecting to huge power projects but government is not listening [Photo: Prince Edward County]](http://www.windconcernsontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Mt-TaborSept27.jpg)
Wind Concerns Ontario submitted a series of recommendations to the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) as part of the “engagement” process on the Large Renewable Procurement (LRP) process on May 3rd.
In a letter to IESO CEO Bruce Campbell, WCO president Jane Wilson wrote:
WCO has been involved supporting individuals and community groups dealing with wind turbines imposed on communities since before the Green Energy Act was enacted. We saw the government’s commitment in 2012 that it would only place wind turbines in communities willing to host them as a positive first step toward addressing the concerns of rural Ontario. The results from the RFP I process, however, made a complete mockery of this policy. The Minister of Energy stated as recently as March 7 that it would be “virtually impossible” for a contract to be awarded without municipal support. Yet, three of the five successful bids for wind turbine contracts in LRP I were awarded to municipalities that did not support the project.
The wind power contracting process shows no respect for Ontario citizens and communities, Wilson said.
The key issue is: neither the government nor participants in the procurement process have listened to valid community concerns or displayed any learning from problems created by the existing projects. Most people in rural Ontario seem to know more about the impact of wind turbines (economic, environmental, societal) than the people proposing projects, who continue to use outdated and limited information to support their proposals. Far from streamlining the process, the Green Energy and Economy Act has created a confrontational environment. Based on local activities such as municipal resolutions, public demonstrations and media stories, it is clear this situation is not going to change until provincial government agencies deal seriously with the problems that have been created by wind turbine projects to date.
WCO recommendations: let communities choose
The recommendations to change the RFQ and RFP process as well as the generic contract are driven by four objectives.
- Activities within the process need to be consistent with the high levels of openness and transparency that the provincial government expects of agencies and municipalities.
- Full disclosure of project information is needed to allow the community to provide meaningful feedback.
- Mechanisms need to be included within the process to measure the responsiveness of proponents to input from the community.
- The process needs to place value on and respect for community views on proposed projects.
Among the recommendations was the need for municipal support to be mandatory. “More than 90 municipalities have declared themselves ‘unwilling hosts’ to wind power projects,” says president Jane Wilson. “They have good reasons for that. But this government has no respect for Ontario citizens and their elected governments, who want to plan what is appropriate and sustainable for their own community.”
Highlights of WCO Recommendations:
Qualification of bidders
Failure to deliver past projects on time should result in disqualification of bidders
Inappropriate behaviours or actions such as clearing land that is habitat for endangered species while a project is still under appeal, should result in disqualification as a bidder
The qualifications of proponent team members should be evaluated: “experts” in noise and health impacts for example, should have appropriate training/education and proper professional credentials
Community engagement
“Engagement” should not be confused with “support”
Public meetings should be more accessible and greater in number, and take place before a municipality is called upon to determine whether it supports a wind power project bid
Communities need much more detail about projects than they were given under FIT or LRP I
Proponents should disclose and have available the full range of documentation on impacts of the proposal including impacts due to environmental noise (potential for adverse health effects), and effect on property value as well as other economic considerations (e.g., airport operations, tourism)
Municipal support must be a mandatory requirement in contract bids
Proponent engagement with Aboriginal communities should be subject to the same disclosure requirements as for other communities
Site considerations
IESO needs to do an independent technical review of proponent submissions
Municipal support
Full documentation should be provided to municipalities prior to bid submission, so that local governments can review the information and comment as to completeness and accuracy
Again, a resolution of support from a municipality must be a mandatory requirement for a bid in the RFP process
contact@windconcernsontario.ca
12 Comments
Lynda
Thank you and congratulations on a job well done. Your recommendations are spot on. If no one listens, something other than policy is the driving force and we all know what that is. It’s green but not energy.
FauxGreen
Given that industrial wind turbines are economically useless, environmentally destructive, dangerous to human and animal health, and visually polluting, there should be an immediate moratorium on any further projects, the existing ones decommissioned, and the Green Energy Act repealed. No amount of recommendations or appeasements will change these facts.
Wind Concerns Ontario
It’s important to work inside the process.
FauxGreen
Generally you’re right, but not when:
– the process “creates a confrontational environment” where it’s rigged to guarantee only one outcome,
– government promises are made and its subsequent actions make “a complete mockery” of those so-called commitments,
– the authorities have “no respect for Ontario citizens and their elected governments.”
That being the case, “working inside the process” to somehow make it a better one, when in the end we would still end up industrializing rural Ontario with useless, costly, destructive wind turbines, is futile at best.
ScepticalGord
FauxGreen, you may be right.
But, let’s hear your plan of action … all options should be considered.
If your information is confidential, then you know who to contact.
Sommer
At the same time as I acknowledge that, I am enormously grateful to Jane Wilson and all at WCO for their step by step approach and effort to reverse these wrongs, it may also be time to bring in the anti-racketeering team to examine the rigged process. People who are facing the adverse impacts on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly basis and who are absolutely refusing to leave their cherished homes in order to seek protection from noise, low frequency sound modulations and infrasound radiation have serious reasons for their impatience.
This has challenged all of us to our limits…but with either approach, we have to find our ways forward and resist this agenda to make rural Ontario uninhabitable. It’s time for people to educate themselves about Agenda 30 so that they can see how this fits into a much larger context. Rural people all over the planet are experiencing the pressures to relocate to ‘human settlements’ /cities and this, in my opinion comes at a time when humanity needs to do the exact opposite and get back in touch with the earth and the myriad of fragile interconnections in nature.
I’m grateful to WCO for providing a forum for this sort of conversation.
Wind Concerns Ontario
Thanks for your comments–will pass along to the Board
FauxGreen
I have some suggestions:
1. INFORM the public, your family, friends, neighbours, communities, local government. Do it via blogs, internet news channels, comments sections, letters to media, at dinner parties—whenever, however, and wherever. Necessary to counteract the manmade climate change propaganda (which is why we have useless wind turbines) coming from corrupt government, collaborator educators, co-opted scientists, lazy, stupid, biased mainstream media, corporate appeasers, fake environmentalists.
2. CHALLENGE and hold to account your political masters. Who is funding them? Trace back the money that ends up in their pockets. Who is influencing them? For example, unelected, unaccountable environmental NGOs (especially the foreign-funded) have undue influence over government policy and our laws—they even draft the legislation, as was the case with the Green Energy Act. Who gets rich from the fake “green” policies?
3. MOUNT court challenges. For example, against democracy-robbing legislation such as the Green Energy Act, government fiscal malfeasance and mismanagement, breach of fiduciary duty, and corruption. Don’t know how to do this, but smart legal minds might.
4. VOTE manmade climate change governments out of office. Demand and elect politicians, true public servants, who genuinely aim to restore democratic rights and personal freedoms, who understand the real meaning of evidence-based policies, who are there to actually serve the people, and not their cronies and donors.
5. UNDERSTAND the big picture. The manmade climate change catastrophism, with deliberately demonized carbon dioxide getting star billing (in reality it’s plant food without which there would be no life on earth), is a smokescreen and phoney rationale for establishing global governance. (For example, we’ve already heard Trudeau talk about Canada being “post-national country”!) The globalist cabal want forced wealth redistribution, an end to national sovereignty and personal freedom, removal of property rights, de-industrialization, de-population, pernicious “carbon” taxes (it’s all in Agenda 21). To achieve that they come up with “green” schemes (and the legislation to enforce them) that will supposedly “control” the weather and “save” the planet. Hence nasty, useless, harmful, un-green, dangerous, unreliable industrial wind turbines—and their associated 800-ton concrete bases, bird-and-bat-slicing un-recyclable blades, rare earth mineral magnets, collector lines, turbine access roads, transmission lines, transformer substations, inability to be built or function without fossil-fuels, and unprecedented rights over people, communities, landscape, environment, wildlife, and your money.
Pat Cusack
I agree with FauxGreen.
Segue C
Few people are truly comfortable working “within” a process which is part of the UN”sustainability”Agenda for a “New World Order” and so tainted with corruption it must be repellent to those love freedom and so destructive to health and prosperity it is the antithesis of good governance.