Gas Plants Redux...But With Torys And Wind Farms

From PCPO MPP Todd Smith:

Prince Edward County, ON — Responding to a request for clarification by CCSAGE Naturally Green regarding the PC Party’s position on wind projects currently “in the pipeline”, local MPP Todd Smith has confirmed by letter that, under a PC government, such projects will not be allowed to proceed if there is no municipal consent.

Smith referred to the text of Bill 42, the Affordable Energy and Restoration of Local Decision Making Act, introduced by Tim Hudak in the Ontario Legislature in 2012. Smith said, “The intention here is quite clear that, regardless of where in the process a project is, provided a project is not connected to the grid, it is our intention not to go ahead with it unless it has municipal consent. Clearly, the projects planned for Prince Edward County do not have municipal consent and thus, would be cancelled.”

Its worth noting that Tim Hudak has said in the past that projects in the pipeline will be allowed to proceed, so this sounds like a bit of free-lancing on Smith's part.  To make the stupidity of it even greater, Todd Smith is for The Marmora project, which is a pumped energy storage facility meant to work as a battery to store power from wind-farms and other intermittent energy sources.  Anyway, lawsuits be damned, apparently! How Hudak's Tories can criticize the OLP for cancelling those gas-plants while getting set to go down exactly the same road--except this time pandering to a different set of voters over a different power generating source--is beyond me.

PS. The analogy to Trillium's cancelled wind farm doesn't really hold, I don't think.  That project was early on in the process.  No contract was in place.  

Tim Hudak's Energy Policy, Such As It Is

Tom Adams, who occasionally achieves sanity when writing about energy issues, gets about half-way there in his piece yesterday, in particular when he touches on the pumped-storage project up in Marmora:

[PCPO MPP Todd ] Smith has ...hounded the Minister of Energy over why he has “delayed in arriving at a contract to produce power” for the pumped energy storage project in the Municipality of Marmora and Lake. Proposed by Toronto-based Northland Power, the project is designed to counter the grid problems caused by fickle wind and solar output – which Northland also develops...

After having visited the site for that pumped storage proposal in January, Mr. [Tim] Hudak labelled it “environmentally friendly” and complained that the Liberal government was “dragging its heels” on the project. Without the benefit of any publicly disclosed cost/benefit studies or public consultations with anyone other than proponents, he declared that the project “makes sense.”

Here's the kicker.  Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak's energy plan would kill Ontario's green energy sector, but go forward with an expensive ancillary project explicitly designed to store green energy.  That is very much like keeping your car battery manufacturer running after you've closed the auto-plant.

And this is regardless of whether Hudak's plan will break existing contracts, costing the province bazillions, as argued here, or not. He has said on a number of occasions that projects far enough down the pipeline will be allowed to go through; some of his MPPS have claimed a PCPO government will shut done everything, no matter what the cost.