Editor: Can it get any more ridiculous?
Ontario is hell bent to close our coal plants and replace them with intermittent wind farms and solar parks – backed up by expensive gas plants.
If you asked someone to design the worst electrical system they could, it would likely be the one described above. The very things you would want to avoid if possible. Expensive and unreliable.
How do you promote an expensive, unreliable electrical system?
Are you stupid? Own a business?
Ontario is the place for you!
Shouldn’t the growers be using renewables like wind and solar? Not if you want your tomatoes.(wind and solar create carbon credits. We need reliable cost effective energy)
Dump the green lobbyists today – Call in the engineers and lets get a system that is cost effective and reliable. I have said this too many times but I will say it once more.
I had a long talk with the senior policy adviser for the Ministry of Energy and he agreed that the best system for Ontario was to put the scrubbers on the coal plants and build a nuke. 10 billion. Cost effective and as clean as we will get.
The green lobbyists plan-60+ billion (that’s a lot of your taxes wasted) for a system that is more expensive, unreliable and in the end not likely any cleaner than the one the policy adviser would build.
“This is about politics” I was told by the adviser. Well folks – heat your home or greenhouse with politics.
Read the story and if you are not outraged by this govt. – you probably work for them or one of the lobbyists.
.
More growers turn to coal
Tyler Hamilton
Energy Reporter
“Coal is expanding in the province, despite a policy to phase out coal,” says Roger Samson, executive director of REAP-Canada, an independent group that encourages sustainable farming practices. “The Ontario government has no plan on how to mitigate this.”
How much coal, potentially, are we talking about? The energy demands of a typical greenhouse are enormous. Shalin Khosla, a greenhouse specialist with the agriculture ministry, says anywhere between 35 per cent to 50 per cent of the costs of operating a modern vegetable greenhouse goes toward energy consumption. The figure is closer to 20 per cent for flower growers.
It’s estimated that greenhouses in Ontario cover 2,823 acres, and that the average greenhouse requires 9,500 gigajoules of energy per acre every year. This works out to 26.8 million gigajoules annually.
Convert that energy into electricity potential and it works out to 7.44 terawatt-hours a year – more than three times the 2004 electricity output of the Lakeview coal-fired generating station in Mississauga (which has since been closed down and demolished).
That’s equivalent to more than one million tonnes of coal being burned annually.
It’s a mathematical exercise that raises a serious public policy question: What’s preventing the entire greenhouse industry from moving to coal, and in doing so, undermining the spirit of the McGuinty government’s coal phase-out strategy?
Not much, it appears. Unlike power plants and other major industrial facilities, greenhouses can burn whatever fuel they want without much scrutiny.
Keith Stewart, an energy expert with WWF-Canada and author of a book on Ontario’s electricity system, calls the situation “perverse” and a reflection of inconsistent government policy.
“Outdated energy policy is giving us coal-fired tomatoes,” he says.
full story at the Toronto Star
Tyler Hamilton can’t seem to write a story without including Keith Stewart in it. Tyler, go find some engineers. Stewart has a Phd in political science and environment. He is not a energy expert nor is the WWF.
I haven’t read his book but I have read enough “green” policy papers to pretty much know what it says. Green politics does not make an energy expert.
Stewart is a lobbyist for the green movement. Gerald Butts the ex-principal Secretary for McGuinty is now with the WWF. Robert Hornung of CanWEA and the Pembina Institute along with his friend David Suzuki are all involved in pressuring the govt. to adopt their policies and in the process are doing great harm to this Province and Canada.
None of these people are employed by the govt. nor are they elected and I don’t believe any of them are engineers.
They are promoters of a massive fraud that goes by the name of “Man Made Global Warming”.
So butt the fuck out of our electrical system.
If you don’t like Canada – go join your mentor Maurice Strong in China. They use lots of coal there. Go bother the Chinese
If any of you mentioned above would like to enter into an open debate, or have a comment-I’m available.
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