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Wind Facts
Believing in the power of the Wind. Why wind is
right – right now.
Canada’s electricity system is at a crossroads. Demand
is rising and many power plants are approaching retirement.
We need more power, and concerns over climate change, air
pollution and acid rain damage mean we have to look at cleaner
ways to generate it.
Wind is an obvious part of the solution. Wind is quick to
install and produces no air pollution or greenhouse gases
that contribute to climate change. In fact, in light of the
latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change, which warns that in order to avoid the catastrophic
impacts of climate change, we need to get global emissions
to peak and start to decline before 2020, wind energy may
well be the best solution right now. “In this critical
period between now and the end of the next decade, we are
really it on the supply side and that is a pretty large responsibility,”
says Steve Sawyer, the secretary-general of the Global Wind
Energy Council.
What are our choices? Nuclear power has no emissions, but
for the technology just to maintain its current market share,
150-180 new plants will need to be built between now and 2020.
The complexities around getting those facilities permitted
and constructed make it unlikely.
Clean coal is an option being pursued by power companies
around the world, but commercialization of the technology
is still years away. The Canadian Clean Power Coalition estimated
that the earliest it can get a planned 500 MW demonstration
plant operating is 2015.
New large hydro is a possibility; it faces long planning
horizons and fierce public opposition to the environmental
devastation caused by flooding huge tracts of land. Small
run-of-river hydro facilities have fewer impacts, but are
becoming increasingly difficult to access. Natural gas generating
plants are easy to build, flexible to operate and produce
fewer emissions than coal, but dwindling supplies and uncertainty
over what fuel prices will be next year, much less 20 years
down the road, make it a risky choice. Other renewable energy
technologies, like solar power and ocean energy, are not yet
mature enough to make a substantial contribution over the
short term.
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