Green Energy Act dies painful, costly death
Siemens is closing its windmill blade factory in Tillsonburg, kicking one of the struts out of the provincial Liberals’ plan to remake Ontario into a manufacturing centre for greenenergy equipment.
That was painful, not least for the 350 workers. Siemens says it’s not selling enough of the 50-metre blades the factory makes to stay in business.
The Tillsonburg factory was one of four children of the Green Energy and Green Economy Act of 2009 (the full title, though the second part usually gets dropped) and the province’s multibillion-dollar deal with Samsung to kickstart Ontario’s wind- and solar-power industries.
The government overpaid for electricity, on purpose, expecting the extra money to build the foundations of a permanent green-energy industry that would supply not only domestic needs but others’ as well.
Samsung did deals with partners such as Siemens to manufacture parts in Ontario for wind and solar farms it opened here: windmill towers in Windsor, blades in Tillsonburg, solar panels in London, inverters in Toronto.
The Tillsonburg operation, in a defunct car-parts plant, became the town’s biggest employer. In 2014, it signed a deal to supply 420 blades for a wind farm near Goderich. The future had arrived. And then, close on its heels, so did reality.
Most of Ontario’s wind farms have been resented as eyesores in the rural areas where they’ve been built; the Green Energy Act took away a bunch of local authority to resist them. Paying extra for the power they generate, especially in those same rural areas, added injury to insult.
Ontario has built a lot of wind farms. We could get nearly 4,000 megawatts of power out of them, at a theoretical maximum output, though it’s never that windy. Even if it were, wind would be just 11 per cent of our power supply, which really depends on nuclear plants (13,000 megawatts), oil and gas (10,000 megawatts) and hydro (8,400 megawatts).
But the building boom is pretty much over. We have more electricity available than we need and now all the politicians care about is stomping down prices.
The Liberals scrapped a big round of planned new contracts for renewable electricity last fall. They show no signs of allowing wind farms in the Great Lakes, which could have meant a ton of business for parts makers. Also, Energy Minister Glenn Thibeault says Ontario will change its basic approach to buying power in the future to what are called “capacity auctions,” the most important feature of which is that they’re agnostic about how the power is generated, other than no coal.
You can damn the Liberals for losing their nerve or for taking up this plan in the first place. The facts support either case. Let’s take stock of where we are.
We have a lot more wind and solar farms than we used to. So there’s that.
We’ve made windmill parts here for our own use, in foreign-owned factories. Never enough to create a self-sustaining domestic industry, let alone one that could compete internationally.
We have several hundred people trained in the blade-making business suddenly looking for work; maybe they’ll go on to bigger things. Though the Tillsonburg plant didn’t lose out to other Ontario blade factories that sprung up and learned to outcompete it, it is closing because making blades in Ontario only made sense when the government insisted on it and backed that demand with cash.
We have the three other factories born of the Green Energy Act, at least for now. The tower factory in Windsor is down to one shift a day from three and is losing a major strategic partner. But it persists.
Not nothing. Not a lot to show for the billions of dollars we’ve spent.