Those places with the highest power prices in the world (Ontario, Denmark, Germany and South Australia) have a few things in common: an obsession with wind and/or solar and zealots in charge, hellbent on driving that obsession.

Over the last decade, Ontario has been overrun with these things: driving power prices through the roof; driving neighbours nuts and out of their homes, altogether; and wrecking underground water supplies.

From Kathleen Wynne down, Ontario’s government has done everything in its power to destroy once peaceful and very prosperous rural communities.

Here’s a primer on how the disaster started.

GOLDSTEIN: Green energy is Grits’ mega-blunder
Toronto Sun
Lorrie Goldstein
25 March 2018

When it comes to the countless blunders Ontario’s Liberal government has committed on the energy file, its passage of the Green Energy and Green Economy Act in 2009 was its worst blunder of all.

It facilitated the waste of billions…

Full-steam ahead: RE disaster turns Liddell into a glittering prize.

Remember all those stories about wind power replacing coal? No? STT has forgotten them, too.

An idiotic obsession with wind and solar power, has sent power prices rocketing and placed Australia’s once perfectly reliable power grid on the brink of collapse.

That those states connected to the Eastern Grid (QLD, NSW, SA, Victoria and Tasmania) avoided a complete ‘system’ black during the Summer just past was more good luck than good management.

During the few short spells of hot weather, grid managers employed what’s euphemistically called ‘demand management’, chopping hospitals and energy hungry businesses from the grid; a tactic not used much since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

States like Queensland and NSW – with plenty of coal-fired plant – are still blessed with an abundance of baseload generating capacity; unlike SA and Victoria.

AGL owns one of those…

Plenty of fiction is needed to explain away the health effects suffered by humans forced to live with incessant, wind turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound.

Wind industry stooges reckon it must all be in their silly little heads. Except that there’s a veritable menagerie of less imaginative critters stuck next to these things, that suffer just the same as the wind industry’s human victims.

Studies in Poland have shown that geese living within proximity of these things suffer increased cortisol levels, indicative of the stress caused by exposure to incessant turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound: Preliminary studies on the reaction of growing geese to the proximity of wind turbines

Out on the American Prairie, researchers in Kansas observed how – after wind turbines went up nearby – rare Greater Prairie Chickens had abandoned their long-established nesting sites within 8 km of turbines: Wind Turbine Noise Causes Greater Prairie…

Offshore wind turbines have the lifespan of a gnat in summer.

Among the lies pedalled by the wind industry is that wind turbines run on the smell of an oily rag and last for more than 25 years.

The pitch is made to beguile the gullible (read, ‘planning authorities’, ‘politicians’, ‘bankers’ and ‘investors’) into believing that their operating costs can be covered out of petty cash – which fits with the other great line about there being nothing as ‘free’ as the wind.

Mechanical wear and tear, including bearing failure is one of the most common reasons for turbines to be put out of action; and is one of the key factors that accounts for the fact that the ‘economic’ life of wind turbines is 10-12 years, which runs contrary to wild claims about them lasting for “25-plus years” (see our post here and this paper).

Top flight German…

Ontario’s farmers keep complaining about the toxic sludge coming out of their wells, while the wind power outfits that have obviously caused the damage, keep lying about it.

Pile-driving and the excavations required for 400m³ of steel reinforced concrete for the hundreds of turbine bases across Chatham-Kent are the only new and intervening factor capable of turning (hitherto potable) underground water a silty black.

Locals know it, and are keen to seek redress from the powers that be:

Chatham-Kent residents take water wells fight to Queen’s Park
CTV Windsor
Michelle Maluske
8 March 2018

A group of Chatham-Kent residents took their fight for better water to Queen’s Park.

Members of the Water Wells First group held a news conference in Toronto on Thursday, hoping to get more attention to an issue that has been discussed locally for more than a year.

The group is upset with the North-Kent wind farm…

Signalling ‘green’ virtue by plugging into coal.

Those virtuous few driving all-Electric Vehicles are bound to ignore the fact that their cars really run on coal. A few posts back, STT covered Energy Minister, Josh Frydenberg’s latest flight of fancy: Fossil Fuel Renaissance: Australia’s Energy Minister Promotes Coal-Powered Cars

While there’s nothing wrong in theory about all-Electric Vehicles, if they really were a sensible substitute for petrol or diesel-powered vehicles, they’d already be jumping off the shelves. Except, for some strange reason, they aren’t.

Trevor St Baker is the founder of ERM Power, an energy retailer and generator. Here he pokes the groovy ‘green’ bear by stating the bleeding obvious: all-EVs run on coal.

We’ll need a lot of coal for electric cars
The Australian
Trevor St Baker
12 March 2018

The energy renewables zealots and their calls for the closure of coal-fired power stations — ­expecting solar and wind to…

It’s often forgotten that the diminutive David slew the gigantic Goliath. Discipline, nerve and strategic resolve is what wins battles. And in Western Victoria, there’s no bigger battle than that brewing between wind power outfits and local community defenders.

One of the best of those is retired country lawyer, Tony Edney. He’s the handsome devil seen on the right in the picture above, taken at the wind power fraud rally in Canberra, June 2013.

Ever since then, Tony has been fighting against the wind industry’s lies, bullying and contempt for rural Australians.

Here’s a brilliant piece Tony penned for the Hamilton Spectator.

The Problems with Wind Farms are Real
Hamilton Spectator
Tony Edney
22 February 2018

There is now simply too much information in the public domain for the wind industry and its many, often ill informed supporters, to continue with any integrity their relentless attacks on the credibility…

What the wind industry hates most are facts; facts about rocketing power prices, massive subsidies, chaotic intermittency, incessant noise and consequent harm to neighbour’s health, the destruction of birds and bats, the destruction of underground water supplies, turbines spontaneously combusting, disintegrating or throwing their blades to the four winds. We could go on.

On this occasion, however, we’ll hand over to our American cousins from the North American Platform Against Windpower, who deal with all of the above and more in a cracking and compendious letter to the Ohio Power Siting Board (and others) about plans to spear a clutch of massive Vestas 3.45 MW whirling wonders into the shores of Lake Erie, in Cleveland, Ohio.

In the Matter of the Application of Icebreaker Windpower, Inc., for a Certificate to Construct a Wind-Powered Electric Generation Facility in Cuyahoga County, Ohio
Case No. 16-1871-EL-BGN
Sherri Lange, Al…

The evidence proving the unnecessary damage done to wind farm neighbours by the noise generated by giant industrial wind turbines is mounting by the day: Germany’s Max Planck Institute has identified sub-audible infrasound as the cause of stress, sleep disruption and more (see our post here); and a Swedish group have shown that it’s the pulsing nature of low-frequency wind turbine noise  (‘amplitude modulation’) that is responsible for sleep problems in those forced to live with it (see our post here).

In a World first, Australia’s Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) held that “noise annoyance” caused by wind turbine generated low-frequency noise and infrasound “is a plausible pathway to disease”, based on the “established association between noise annoyance and some diseases, including hypertension and cardiovascular disease, possibly mediated in part by disturbed sleep and/or psychological stress/distress.” The AAT also slammed wind turbine noise standards as irrelevant and, therefore, totally…

You can wreck a first world economy in a heartbeat by relying on heavily subsidised and chaotically delivered wind and solar power.

Australia is well on the way to doing just that, and South Australia managed to destroy all vestige of private enterprise (we don’t count Commonwealth defence contracts, State make-work construction schemes and otherwise sucking on the taxpayer’s teat) in less than 15 years.

The chaos delivered by wind (see above) and solar has been met with plenty of talk about mega-batteries and pumped hydro. But that kind of talk don’t come cheap. SA’s Premier stumped up $150m of taxpayer’s money for a 100 MW battery that could power his little backwater for all of 4 minutes.

Then there’s the fevered talk about Snowy 2.0. Likely to cost around $10 billion and take a generation to build, with AGL getting back into coal, rather than out of…