I’ve been a bit slow in writing new posts the last couple of weeks, so I thought I’d cheat a bit and share some photos I took recently of two wind power projects in southern Ontario. The first is the Windshare / Toronto Hydro single turbine installation at Exhibition Place near downtown Toronto. It stands in contrast both in location, intent and in scale to Canadian Hydro Developers’ 45 turbine Melancthon I project, located an hour and a half or so north of the city.The main arguments against wind farms stems from an aesthetic point of view, and as such it is difficult to judge without actually seeing an installation in its particular environment. Melancthon I is a LARGE project, and its aesthetic impact is quite different from the Windshare project at Exhibition Place. Despite the fact that the land used for it was previously developed as farmland, it clearly brings about a transformation of the landscape. My impressions are that there is a real need to understand the nature of individual sites, and their suitability not just technically, but in terms of preserving the experiential value of natural landscapes. How these factors weigh against the benefits of wind power vs. alternatives is an issue for debate, which I encourage as much involvement in as possible. As it stands I feel there is still too much debate steered by corporate interests, whether for or against wind power, and very little that stems from real stakeholder positions.
One noteworthy difference between the two projects is in their financing models- Windshare uses a cooperative model in which individuals purchase shares in the co-op portion of the project- the intent is that this will give them rights to the green power attributes of the project (once the obligations to the co-developer, Toronto Hydro have been satisfied). This model provides the advantage of the capacity to directly involve community stakeholders in the payoffs of the project. In contrast, commercial projects provide little direct payoff to community stakeholders (with the exception of landowners who are paid rent), which is another source of criticism of such projects. This is yet another advantage of distributed generation over centralized generation- if the green power created is used by the community, NIMBYism can be minimized.
Windshare, CNE, Toronto
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Melancthon Wind Project
Posted by David Anders 
