As IESO procurement set to launch, rural Ontario municipalities are saying, Not here!! Now at 157

In the absence of any change to Ontario’s regulations for setbacks from homes and noise limits for industrial-scale or grid-scale wind turbines, and as the IESO LT2 procurement looms, more Ontario municipalities are passing resolutions declaring that they are Unwilling Hosts to new industrial wind power sites.

The number of municipalities that have done that is now 157.*

Municipal support is now mandatory for any wind power proponent to get a contract from the IESO.

This is a change from the procurement efforts under the McGuinty-Wynne governments when, despite community opposition (and in the case of at least two municipalities, actual referenda), wind power projects were forced on municipalities anyway.

An example was Amaranth where the Mayor literally begged the government not to inflict any more turbines because of the problems with noise and lost property values—the Wynne government dropped one more on them, anyway.

“Municipalities are trying to tell the government that there are problems with the regulations, and problems with enforcement of the regulations we do have,” says Wind Concerns Ontario president Jane Wilson. “No change, no support.”

The current list of Unwilling Host municipalities is here:

contact@windconcernsontario.ca

*There is no formal registry of Unwilling Host municipalities. Our list is based on news reports and citizen communications, cross-checked with municipal Council minutes where possible.