More wind power for New Brunswick

March 4, 2008

The New Brunswick government has announced another wind project for the province. This one is a 99 Megawatt project to built at Caribou Mountain near Bathurst.

Other recently announced wind projects a 64.5 Megawatt wind farm at Aulac and a 49.5 MW farm at Lameque.

This is part of the provincial government’s commitment to bring 400MW of power into the grid by 2010. All of these projects are being built by private companies which will sell the power to NB Power.

Now this is good news, especially since NB has been noticeably lagging behind the rest of the provinces in renewable energy generation. To put some context around this, NB Power has a total capacity of 3324 MW, which should rise to approximately 3724 MW after all the wind projects are brought online. At that time, energy from a renewables will represent about 11% of the total energy production potential in the province.

That’s not bad. But considering that the other 89% of our power will still come from hydro, nuclear and fossil fuel plants, it’s only a start. Hopefully, these wind projects represent a real move towards clean energy and are not just a political maneuver to distract from the fact that the same government is poised to dump 1.4 billion dollars into refurbishing the nuclear reactor at Point Lepreau or that Environment Canada has recently released a report indicating that arsenic levels in the water near the Grand Lake coal-fired power plant are between 6 and 20 times acceptable levels.

Realistically, the real goal should be to reduce energy consumption. It is completely unreasonable to ever expect renewable energy generation to allow us to continue along at our current level of energy consumption. Until we drastically change our lifestyle and attitudes in this regard, we will be bound to energy that is created using environmentally damaging methods.

So kudos to the provincial government for the recent wind initiatives, but don’t stop there. There’s so much more that can be done.

Posted in Canada, New Brunswick, Renewable Energy