and concludes:

“1. Wind power does not avoid significant amounts of greenhouse gas emissions.
“2. Wind power is a very high cost way to avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
“3. Wind power, even with high capacity penetration, can not make a significant contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

Read the full document here. wind-power-carbon

Source: http://carbon-sense.com

The following contains profanity, vulgarity, and obscenity.
None of it gratuitous or slovenly used but, rather, used
because the Big Wind Onslaught is so outrageous that
precisely this rich imagery is inevitable and, yes, appropriate.
When you, too, are forced to abandon your home to turbines,
you will see my point. Keep this image—abandoned home—
before you as you read.

how-to-fight-big-windClick here for the full document.

This is a disturbing turn and should give every civil libertarian pause.

Speaking in London Tuesday, McGuinty said the new Green Energy Act his government will soon introduce will prevent the “not-in-my-backyard syndrome” from interfering with the government agenda. If all safety and environmental standards are met, communities won’t be allowed to reject alternative energy projects simply because they’re not wanted, the premier said.

“We are going to find a way, through this new legislation, to make it perfectly clear that NIMBYism will no longer prevail.”

That’s big trouble for Dawn- Euphemia Township, whose residents and municipal council want IPC Energy’s 35-turbine wind farm shelved until a proper study is done of the impact of turbines on human health and the environment. Some scientists believe people have been sickened by living too close to the sound waves and “dirty” electricity they generate.

Few details of the act have been released, and McGuinty wouldn’t say exactly how local concerns will be overridden. But his office has revealed the bill will “address local bylaws and regulations that are used to delay or stop proposed renewable energy projects.”

Despite the mom-and-apple-pie goodness invoked by its name, the Green Energy Act threatens to set a dangerous precedent.

In any democracy worthy of the name, people have a right to object to developments that negatively impact their neighbourhoods and communities. The process is cumbersome and sometimes messy, but it’s designed to prevent governments and corporations from running roughshod over the will of the people.

The premier would be wise to tread carefully on this one.

(FROM THE SARNIA OBSERVER)

“Truth needs no laws to support it.
Only lies require laws to force them upon the public.”

Quote:
The best-kept secret of the wind industry, however, which continues to fool both politicians and the media, is its trick of referring only to the contribution of windmills in terms of their installed capacity, as if that is what they will actually deliver. They talk about a “16 megawatt” wind farm “powering x thousand homes as if that is the contribution it will make to our electricity needs. Yet in reality, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, a turbine will on average produce through the year only a quarter of its capacity.

The success of this deception means that politicians almost invariably exaggerate the potential benefits of wind power by a factor of four. And of course the other great trick is to conceal the fact that all this must be paid for by that huge hidden subsidy.

The real danger of the great wind scam is that it takes the eyes of politicians off the real energy crisis fast approaching us, so that we are not building the proper power stations we need to keep our lights on. That is why it will one day be looked back on as having been one of the most incomprehensible blunders of our age. By Christopher Booker Telegraph 13 September 2008

I resent being called a NIMBY by you and Mr. Smitherman and I have copied your comments to as many people as I can to let them know what Ontario’s leader does when he can’t get his way. As if resorting to schoolyard tactics of name calling will cow the electors, really!

You have no grounds for this bulldozing tactic and you know it!

Coalition Of Residents-Tiny (CORT)
E mail info[at]cort.ca
www.cort.ca

The Honourable Dalton McGuinty
Premier of Ontario
Queen’s Park,
Toronto

Dear Mr. McGuinty;

RE: YOUR RECENT “NYMBYISM” REMARKS AND HOW YOU MIGHT BEGIN TO REPAIR THE DAMAGE

There are always unforeseen adverse consequences when a public figure refers to any section of the electorate using a trivializing, derogatory term. “NIMBY” is particularly offensive to the growing numbers of people across this province who oppose the government’s wind turbine policy.

By now you must be aware of the proliferation of public dissatisfaction you have directly provoked through this inept choice of words and, more particularly, the proposed aggressive legislation to remove public discussion and input into local planning from affected communities. These objections come from conscientious and diligent citizens who believe it is their public duty to question misdirected government policy. They are not mindless luddites who are questioning the massive construction of industrial wind turbine facilities across our province simply because they “do not like them”.
On the contrary, they are well-informed, well-educated taxpayers from many different professions—doctors, lawyers, university professors, teachers, farmers, autoworkers, electricity professionals, journalists, artists and engineers– who have spent a great deal of time doing their research.

For several years now they have been trying to share information with you and your ministers on the wind turbine issue. Their warnings have been consistently ignored. (Is it government policy for the Minister of Energy never to reply to letters from the public?) They have attempted to explain how a flawed energy policy relying on unpredictable, overly-subsidized, premium-priced, non-base load wind energy will need to be backed up with the construction of additional publicly funded stand-by fossil-fuelled plants which rely mostly on volatile-cost and limited gas reserves. The addition of more wind energy to the grid will also require huge additions to the transmission system at enormous public expense. This will inevitably lead to a staggering increase in consumer energy costs with consequent detrimental effects on business and employment. Is this an appropriate time to burden our industries even further?

Many of your voters have tried to make you aware that international experience with industrial wind developments has raised health and safety issues, problems with noise and environmental degradation. The media are already pointing to unacceptable health problems for people living too close to wind turbines in Ontario. Wouldn’t it be better government policy to protect rural residents from this unnecessary abuse by simply requiring wind turbines to be sited well away from people’s homes and a long distance from sensitive natural habitats?
The Government of Nova Scotia (February 2, 2009) is now requiring a setback of 1.44 km from non-participating properties, and 1.2 km for project participants (http://www.gov.ns.ca/nse/ea/ glen.dhu.wind.farm.asp).

Unfortunately, there are serious consequences to an approach which ignores legitimate input from concerned citizens. It jeopardizes the economic recovery of the province, the continued success of the Ontario Liberal Party and the health of our participatory democracy.
Would not a public apology for your remarks and a modification of government policy to take into account these very understandable concerns be a good first step to resolving a problem which now has the potential to become more worrying each day, especially as a new election approaches?

I am sure that during your medical sciences training at McMaster University, you came across the concept of evidence-based medicine—a criteria for evaluating the usefulness of any project. As you know there must be unequivocal evidence of positive results, cost effectiveness, proven practical applicability and certainty of the absence of harmful side effects before a new technology can be applied. According to a recent report by the Fraser Institute, “Resource planning ordinarily requires analyses of the benefits and costs of all available sources of electricity generation. Yet the Ontario Power Authority failed to conduct economic analyses to determine the most cost-effective mix of future energy supplies.”

Is it not time to pause in the mad rush to build more subsidized wind power as the State of California has done, so that we can first do some credible epidemiological studies of the health effects on those living nearby?

Would it not be wise to investigate the real economic cost/benefit and actual CO2 emission savings based on the records of presently installed commercial wind energy facilities in other jurisdictions before jeopardizing our grid stability with a further imbalance of unpredictable wind energy?

(Der Spiegel recently reported that “German CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram” despite all their wind turbines. In factGermany has had to build many more coal and gas fired plants. On December 28, 2008, U.K. Telegraph reported that the Advertising Standards Authority has forced the British Wind Energy Association to cut by half its false claim of the amount of harmful carbon dioxide emissions eliminated by using wind turbines. (This is even without adding in additional CO2 emissions from the necessary back-up facilities). Isn’t it time our government began scrutinizing the claims of the wind turbine lobbyists?

Can we afford to ignore international biologists who warn that our precious natural habitats are being irreversibly degraded by inappropriately-sited wind energy projects? Is it really in the interest of Ontarians and our grandchildren for the Ministry of the Environment to continue to refuse requests from citizens to escalate environmental reviews for wind turbine projects as Minister Gerretsen conceded in a recent W-FIVE interview, has been the case for all 19 projects in Ontario? Surely this is not a way of getting votes.
Public investment in wind turbine manufacture as a job creation policy seems a bit far fetched when at present all the established manufacturers are experiencing such big downturns. Wind turbine installation jobs are very temporary and few local people are ever employed. In fact many installers are sent in by manufacturers—often from outside Canada. Neils Gram of the Danish Federation of Industries
states: “In green terms windmills are a mistake and economically they make no sense”. When asked recently if wind energy could ever replace coal fired plants, Bob MacDonald of CBC radio’s Quirks and Quarks stated “wind ain’t gonna do it”. The Fraser Report notes that “the government of Ontario is either ignorant of the latest clean-coal technology or, worse, has opted to ignore it in favour of courting ‘green’ voters.” Is there not greater export potential in developing clean coal technology?

It always takes courage to stand up to powerful commercial lobbyists.
Many Ontario citizens have already displayed that courage. We are now looking to you, our Premier, to join us and support our efforts. I have attached below a few reflections on European experience with wind energy—items that you might not have seen because of your busy schedule. I trust they will be useful to you in revising your approach to this issue. I am also attaching a pdf file from the U.K. Centre for Policy Studies. I urge you to read it at your earliest convenience.

Kind regards,

KS (name removed for privacy of internet posting; individual is a member of Wind Concerns Ontario)
CC: Parliamentary Assistant David Ramsay
Deputy Premier George Smitherman

But when he started reading about wind turbines, the former dean of medicine at the University of Western Ontario said he had a change of heart.

“I thought, ‘Holy Toledo, there are some issues here.’ ”

Dozens of wind turbines have already been built or proposed in Southwestern Ontario, as Queen’s Park tries to wean Ontario off dirty coal-fired electricity plants and reduce its reliance on nuclear power.

McMurtry is calling for health studies into the wind turbine farms popping up across Ontario with backing by the provincial government. With towers nearly 100 metres tall, and blades half that long, the turbines can be an imposing sight, even from afar.

“At minimum, they should be doing a survey of people around wind farms and getting a sense of how many people are complaining of problems,” he said.

“If there is enough evidence, they should mount a formal epidemiological study,” McMurtry said.

In the U.S. and Western Europe especially, where wind farms are more advanced than in Canada, complaints abound about the low-frequency sound the giant windmills generate.

In Canada, Ontario is one of the only provinces with any regulations governing wind farms, requiring a noise-impact assessment for areas up to 1,000 metres from the wind turbine.

McMurtry is concerned about the health complaints he’s heard from people living near wind farms, including sleep disturbance from the noise of the giant turbine blades.

“Once you have sleep disturbance for a few days, you aren’t going to be feeling well,” he said.

Last week, the province announced it’s backing six new wind farm projects, including three in Chatham-Kent, that are expected to create 558 jobs.

Total investment in the new farms is expected to reach $1.32 billion.

McMurtry, who has taken his concerns to Ontario Energy Minister George Smitherman, said it’s going to be an uphill battle to convince people to look hard at the health implications because turbines have become closely associated with green energy.

“It has got an iconic, symbolic status that really carries a lot of weight and there is a very powerful, worldwide lobby group behind it,” he said.

McMurtry said turbines smaller than the ones being installed may be better than the monsters now going up.

“Harness the wind safely. Let’s look at other alternatives. There are better, smarter options,” he added.

Monica Elmes, of the Chatham-Kent Wind Action Group, an organization opposed to the wind farms, said the turbines will be an unreliable, intermittent source of electricity and a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“All Ontario residents are truly the losers in this scam,” Elmes said in an e-mail.

By John Miner
Sun Media
The London Free Press
1 February 2009

WIND CONCERNS ONTARIO MEETS WITH MINISTER OF ENERGY AND INFRASTRUCTURE 1/26/09
TORONTO, Jan. 26 – Wind Concerns Ontario held a meeting this weekend with the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure George Smitherman. The informal meeting at the invitation of Mr. Smitherman was held to open up a dialogue about the many issues raised by Wind Concerns Ontario. The constructive discussion at the Ministry of Energy offices centered mostly on the subjects of the Health and Safety impacts of industrial wind power development on residents. Three executive members of Wind Concerns Ontario were in attendance.

TO view the briefing presented to Smitherman: Please describe the situation honestly.

Dr. Robert McMurtry M.D. F.R.C.S(C), F.A.C.S. Professor Emeritus of Surgery at the University of Western Ontario spoke about the need for an epidemiological study into the health impacts of industrial wind turbines and the inadequacy of current setback guidelines with regards to people. Adverse health effects are being noted by people in Ontario who live near wind turbine installations. Dr. McMurtry has been gathering data from health specialists around the world who are documenting medical evidence of physiological adverse effects of the noise from wind turbines. Many case reports and case series have emerged but no authoritative epidemiological studies. As the Ministry of Environment (Ontario) regulations are inadequate such a study is imperative. Dr. McMurtry also pointed out the resolution of the French Academy of Scientists and the Darmstadt Manifesto from over 100 scientists in Germany regarding set-backs.

Mr. William Palmer a Professional Engineer discussed the need for provincial standards to be established to protect the public. Palmer noted that in the case of Hydro One Networks Inc. a distance of 500 meters from wind power developments has been set in order to protect their electricity transmission lines. However there is no requirement as to how far away wind installations must be from roads and lot lines. He cited cases where wind installations in Ontario are as near as 50 meters from non participating neighbor’s lot lines. It was then pointed out that this is the recommended municipal bylaw information from CanWea, the Canadian Wind Energy Association.

Mr. Palmer also discussed evidence collected over two years to show the change in wind profile that makes wind turbines particularly annoying at night, and described why the cyclic noise produced by wind turbines makes them more annoying than a steady sound.

Beth Harrington, media relations coordinator for Wind Concerns Ontario explained why she volunteered for that role. “I was a believer in Wind Power like everyone else until I discovered that in Prince Edward County wind developers were applying to install 13 industrial turbines between two Provincial wildlife areas, along an environmentally protected shoreline in one of Canada’s most important and internationally recognized bird areas. It seemed wrong!”

A briefing file was also prepared and delivered to Mr. Smitherman which outlines Wind Concerns Ontario’s main levels of concern:

1. The adverse effects of industrial wind on the public’s health, well being and safety as well as the environmental impacts on birds, wetlands, conservation areas and environmentally protected shorelines. The absence of full environmental assessments for any project to date was noted.

2. Proper land use regulations such as used for hydroelectric in order to protect rural economies, historic landscapes, quality of life and remove the disruptive change from rural to industrial.

3. Economic sustainability including financial burdens on Ontario taxpayers, municipalities, manufacturers and businesses through high costs of wind generated power.

4. How do these developments fit in with Ontario’s economic and industrial strategy?

Wind Concerns Ontario is committed to energy conservation and the development of responsible alternative forms of energy. This organization of volunteers continues to research the harmful health, safety and environmental impacts of wind power development in Ontario and resolves to continue to urge that the Ontario Government establish a clear and responsible set of strict guidelines on wind power development going forward which will protect the citizens of this province.

For more information contact:
Beth Harrington
Media Relations
Wind Concerns Ontario
647 588 8647
416 481-6424
www.windconcernsontario.org

John Laforet is the President of the Liberal Party riding of Scarborough Guildwood.

200 Picton area residents braved frigid temperatures Thursday night to hear about the serious health risks associated with Industrial Wind Turbines.

Dr. Magda Havas Ph.D., Associate Professor of Environmental and Resource Studies at Peterborough’s Trent University and one of the world’s leading research experts in the areas of electromagnetic pollution, radio frequency radiation, ground current and dirty electricity delivered alarming warnings about the dangers to human and animal health, posed by Industrial Wind Turbines.

Dr. Havas was the featured speaker in Picton. Havas identified two significant problem areas that pose substantive threats to the health of those living or working in proximity to wind turbine developments – Infrasound or Low Frequency Sound emitted by the turbines themselves and both Dirty Electricity and stray voltage related to the electricity produced by turbines.

The human body feels and reacts to sound waves that we cannot hear. These waves, in the low end of the sound spectrum (under 20 Hz), are well documented to cause nausea, joint pain, insomnia, depression, agitation, increased blood pressure and possible heart problems. It is also a major cause of Vibroacoustic Disease which can lead to vision problems, digestive problems, cardiovascular problems, and circulatory difficulties.

Since infrasound can carry over very long distances, Dr. Havas says that the jury is still out on how far away from people Industrial Wind Turbines should be located. She quoted the French Academy of Medicine guidelines which call for a minimum setback of 1.5 kilometers and Dr. Nina Pierpont of New York State, who has done comprehensive research into turbine related illnesses, who calls for a minimum of 2 kilometers.

But Dr. Havas was quick to point out that infrasound is not the only danger to local residents posed by wind turbines. She is particularly concerned about the impacts of “Dirty Electricity” also a byproduct of Wind Turbines in Ontario, “… the worst part of it is that it could all be eliminated with proper design and care”, Havas said. “However, there is a cost involved….do you think that they will spend the money necessary to correct a problem that they refuse to admit even exists?”

Some of the symptoms created by Dirty Electricity in the home resemble those caused by infrasound. They include nausea, sleep disorders, headaches, dizziness, tinnitus and irregular heart beat. Havas has done important research into this area and studies have identified substantially increased rates of cancers, increased blood sugar among some diabetics, skin sensitivities, and other equally disturbing conditions.

Havas’ presentation followed that of Bill Palmer a Professional Engineer with experience in risk assessment and public safety. Palmer identified the fact that Hydro One has setback guidelines to protect their critical Hydro lines from possible turbine damage but the Ontario Government has put no setbacks in place to protect people. “Hydro requires a setback of 500 meters from their most important lines – to protect against mechanical damage from a turbine collapse or blade failure”, Palmer said. “Unfortunately, no such guidelines are in place for public safety to protect people traveling on roadways, in their fields adjacent to a turbine, or in their homes…..There are no guidelines in place to protect citizens from these same mechanical risks that Hydro One has setbacks for. He went on to show how the calculation of the setback required for noise from wind turbines needed to take into consideration the change in wind profile at night, the cyclic nature of wind turbine noise, and the low frequency component of wind turbine noise.”.

Moderator, Dr. Robert McMurtry, founding Assistant Deputy Minister of the Population and Public Health Branch of Health Canada and special advisor to Roy Romanow during the Romanow Commission, expressed concern about the lack of public protection in place. He agreed with Palmer and Havas that Industrial Wind Turbine developments must be controlled and that the current Public Health Guidelines concerning setback distances must be reassessed. Even the recommended setback distances of 2km may not be appropriate – epidemiological studies are necessary to set the record straight.

In addition, government has a responsibility to ensure public protection from dirty electricity by establishing guidelines prohibiting ground current from Industrial Wind Turbines.

For more information contact:
Beth Harrington
Media Relations
Wind Concerns Ontario
647 588-8647
416 481-6424