Canada’s wind energy industry wants the opening of the country’s largest single-site wind farm in southern Alberta to be the start of something much, much bigger.
Vision Quest Wind Electric Inc. and Enmax officially opened their $100-million, 114-turbine McBride Lake Wind Farm, just south of Fort Macleod, on Wednesday.
The 75-megawatt facility will produce enough electricity to supply more than 32,500 homes annually. But there’s enough space and wind in Canada to build at least 1,000 wind farms the same size as McBride Lake, says Robert Hornung, executive director of the Canadian Wind Energy Association (CanWEA).
“Canada has an enormous amount of wind energy potential,” says Hornung, a former policy director at the Pembina Institute environmental research group, who was hired this summer by the industry association.
CanWEA is holding its annual four-day international wind energy conference and trade show, which ends Wednesday this week, in nearby Pincher Creek – an area with some of the strongest winds in Canada.
“CanWEA is calling on federal and provincial governments to adopt a goal of 10,000 MW of wind power by 2010 – equivalent to five per cent of Canada’s electricity supply,” Hornung says.
The country’s total potential wind power, given recent advances in turbine technology, could be as much as 90,000 MW, he notes. “While wind energy will never supply all of Canada’s electrical requirements, it is not unreasonable to expect this clean, renewable energy source to meet more than 20 per cent of Canada’s electricity needs.”
Canada now ranks behind 12 countries in wind energy development, including Greece and Japan, even though Canada has some of the best wind energy potential in the world.
Texas alone has 1,094 MW of wind energy compared with just 313 MW for all of Canada – about 0.003 of a per cent of the country’s total 110,000-MW installed electricity capacity.
Hornung says federal and provincial policy support for wind energy in Canada is sparse, ad hoc and unco-ordinated.
A federal tax incentive for wind-energy producers is worth less than half of a similar incentive offered in the U.S., where total installed capacity is expected to reach over 6,000 MW by the end of the year, Canadian producers say.
The Alberta government has so far spurned the industry’s calls to match Ottawa’s incentive, or to require power producers to supply a certain percentage of new electricity from “green” energy sources.
Even the McBride Lake facility won’t hold on to its crown as Canada’s biggest single-site wind farm for long. Vision Quest, an independent subsidiary of TransAlta Corp., is seeking regulatory approval for its larger Summerview project near Pincher Creek. It will have up to 75 huge turbines, each mounted on 67-metre-high towers, generating a total 120 MW of electricity.
But Summerview will be dwarfed by a giant 1,000-MW wind farm planned for construction in Quebec between 2006 and 2012.
