The Oil Drum

4 comments on The Round-Up: October 21st 2006

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

AlanfromBigEasy on October 22, 2006 - 10:44pm

Does anyone have a schedule for retirement of Ontario coal plants and nukes ?

Electrical consumption is going up. So a squeeze is coming.

So far, Canadian wind efforts have been tentative (hydro is not exhausted), so is Ontario likely to go heavily wind ?

Or call Manitoba about developing that 5 GW of hydro or Quebec ?

Best Hopes,

Alan

BTW, Canada should send a group down to the US-Mexico border and check out the walls there. Might be useful for future reference.

Comments can no longer be added to this story.

roel on October 23, 2006 - 6:46am

I doubt anyone has such a schedule, including the government, because of that squeeze.

There is a recent Globe and Mail article on wind that's relatively good, focus on consolidation in the industry.

It's based on numbers from the Canadian Wind Energy Association

While the bigger boys are stepping in, the smaller are promoted as well (so they can be bought up later?!). It all goes to the idea that Canada is for sale, basically, not sure that's such a great thing. Hydro Québec still has big dreams of exporting power, and that will require hydro projects to go online. It would be nice if Canada could try to conserve some energy, but I don't see that in the cards.

Excerpts:

Foreign wind energy giants -- seeing the Canadian market in a fast-growing phase that mirrors where Europe was 10 years ago -- will likely be among those buying up smaller Canadian wind industry players or joining Canadian joint ventures. There have already been a few international forays into the Canadian market, before Airtricity's purchase of Gale Force:
Spanish wind giant Acciona is a partner with Suncor and Enbridge in several projects, including the soon-to-open 30-MW Chin Chute wind farm in Southern Alberta.
This summer German financier HSH Nordbank AG, a big investor in energy projects, bought a minority stake in private Toronto wind farm developer SkyPower Corp.
British-based Renewable Energy Generation Ltd. paid $29.1-million for AIM PowerGen Corp., an Ontario developer that has projects planned in six provinces.
North Dakota-based heavy steel fabricator DMI Industries has opened a wind-tower manufacturing plant in Fort Erie, Ont.

While there will likely be fewer players fighting for the big wind farm contracts over the next few years, there will still be room for some very small players, said Robert Hornung, president of the Canadian Wind Energy Association.
"[The provinces have] a growing interest in developing small-scale wind energy projects of one or two turbines," he said. Nova Scotia, for example, has awarded about a dozen contracts for projects of 2 MW or less, and Ontario is going to launch a similar program for projects under 10 MW.
The idea, Mr. Hornung said, is to broaden participation by "encouraging municipalities, co-operatives, or groups of farmers to proceed with their own projects."