Wind Farm Pitch Brings Bluff Bluster

By Todd Aalgaard

Photo by mihai.g from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
Judging from the dialogue, it’s tempting to reduce the acrimony over Toronto Hydro’s wind turbine proposal to myopic, not-in-my-backyard isolationism. Knee-jerk assumptions imagine residents of nearby neighbourhoods so incensed, so fundamentally outraged by progress in their backward little hearts that you’ll eventually see an enormous gate around the whole area, peppered with handwritten signs that read “no hippies allowed.”
It’s a fun way to oversimplify, no doubt. On both sides of this particular issue, however, are concerns over conservation, be they natural, economic, or both. To the proposal’s supporters, an offshore wind farm represents an opportunity for Toronto to move forward as a green, industrially progressive centre, leading the way as a global city for others to follow suit. To its detractors, it means plummeting property values, skyrocketing electricity costs, and a substantial—if localized—ecological impact. It’s like a condensing of every environmental policy debate over the last twenty years.
All of which is pretty impressive for a project that has barely reached the testing phase, and only after a seemingly impassable two-year hurdle.

The Scarborough Bluffs. Photo by End User from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.
In January, it was reported that the Ministry of Natural Resources was rethinking a two-year offshore wind power moratorium, first imposed in October 2006 after a much-maligned proposal to install turbines in Lake Erie. With the legal path cleared and the choice of locale clearly in need of revision, the plan moved forward to anchor a testing device in Lake Ontario, two kilometres off the Scarborough Bluffs. David O’Brien, Toronto Hydro’s top executive, announced an ambitious endgame of developing an offshore, sixty-turbine wind farm on the city’s tab, capable of generating 100 megawatts of electricity.
As reported in the Star on June 25, the offshore site was chosen for its natural reef rising from the lake bed: at ten metres’ depth, the relatively shallow water invites secure, stable turbine installation with greater ease than elsewhere in the area. O’Brien assured Torontonians that, because of deeper waters along the shoreline, there wouldn’t be an offshore wall of wind generators along the entire Scarborough–Etobicoke corridor.
Still, for residents of the Guildwood area, such assurances come not as a gilded promise of green innovation, but like an announcement that Pearson has chosen your driveway for overflow parking. “The first wind turbines will be placed just off shore from the Guild Inn,” reports SOS Windfarm Toronto, a website tasked with exposing the perceived risks of offshore wind farm development. “The plan is to have a row of these turbines stretching from the Don Valley all the way to Ajax.” With the turbines designed to exceed the CNE windmill in height—over 350 feet itself—residents are concerned not only by their visual impact, exceeding bluff-level by 150 feet and topped with revolving beacons, but by potentially “disastrous” environmental consequences.
“The low frequency noise emitted by blades will drive the wildlife away from the bluffs [and] into our living area,” the site continues. Citing threats like pesky birds descending on annoyed local property owners—or into the paths of oncoming Guildwood cars—SOS Windfarm Toronto raises statistics published by The American Bird Conservancy that suggest 900,000 to 1.8 million birds will become fan-fodder to the wind industry every year, assuming it continues expanding at its present rate. Further environmental hazards allegedly include changes in current hastening the bluffs’ rate of erosion; decrepit, hulking wrecks too expensive to deconstruct in twenty years’ time; and the risk of winter storms taking out the expensive, apparently fragile power-generating equipment.
With an index of other caveats, ranging from the economic (“The value of a farmhouse may be affected by as much as 30% if it is in close proximity to a wind turbine”) to the humane (“The French Academy of Medicine warns that [low-frequency, turbine-generated] sounds constitute a permanent risk for people exposed to them”), opponents maintain that the trouble with wind generation, to abridge the website’s overall message, is that it is unpredictable, costly, damaging, insufficient for the city’s energy needs, and that it exacerbates the industrialization of Toronto’s waterfront. Which is where we come back to that whole myopic thing, knee-jerk or not.


A wind farm outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Photo by badlogik.
Acknowledging that, at this point, they are only talking about putting a four-metre-high anemometer in the water to study the proposal’s feasibility, those more eager about the idea point to its long-term benefits. Some critics, according to Jose Etcheverry of York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies, are being “misled,” as reported by the Star last month. “Renewable energy industries could generate thousands and thousands of jobs,” he predicts. Franz Hartmann, another local supporter, remarked that it is “extremely important” to at least assess the plan’s technical viability. At a time of catastrophic economic collapse, the consensus—even among moderates—is that such a historic shift in energy production may be the do-or-die fulcrum upon which an entire global economy pivots.
Among the proposal’s more active supporters are local trade unions, including United Steelworkers local 8300. “The resistance from property owners, in our view, is short-sighted nimbyism,” representative Gail Drever told Torontoist. “The Union has a huge commitment to help the transformation to a green economy. Thousands of manufacturing jobs have been lost, probably never to return.” For this province, she says, such a step toward producing clean energy is an opportunity to return from have-not status and assume leadership in a dramatically changing economy—and not at the expense of a ready workforce. “There are skilled workers who can be trained to manufacture wind turbines and begin to rebuild our manufacturing base,” Drever continues. “This has already been done in Pittsburgh, where approximately 1,400 Steelworkers are now employed building wind turbines.”
After last month’s attempt at an open house collapsed under the weight of its own turnout, Toronto Hydro Energy Services hosted both sides of the debate Monday night at Sir Wilfred Laurier Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, not far from the contested proposal site.