Author: 1957chev

Ontario pension scheme, just another “Revenue Tool” for the Liberals?

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

No pension crisis, says Fraser Institute

Calls to expand CPP and create an Ontario pension program rely on misguided analysis.

VANCOUVER — Despite Ontario’s upcoming proposal for its own government pension program, there’s no retirement income crisis in Canada, says a report by the Fraser Institute.

The Canadian public policy think-tank says its study, The Reality of Retirement Income in Canada, finds that analysts, activists, and politicians who advocate for an expanded Canada Pension Plan (CPP), and its Quebec equivalent (QPP), base their arguments on several faulty assumptions, often overlooking all the resources available to Canadians in retirement.

“Proponents of a new government pension program for Ontario, and an expanded Canada Pension Plan, stoke fears of a looming crisis by claiming that Canadians aren’t saving enough for retirement. These claims blatantly ignore the ample resources available to Canadians when they retire,” said Philip Cross, study author and former chief economic analyst for Statistics Canada.

The study notes that focusing exclusively on the traditional “three pillars” of the pension system (Old Age Security, CPP/QPP, and voluntary pensions such as RRSPs) overlooks trillions of dollars in assets held by Canadians (in home equity and other savings) and their largely undocumented support from family and friends (financial or otherwise).

In addition to accumulating large sums of assets, Canadians are waiting longer to retire. One in four Canadians between 65 and 70 years old now remain in the workforce – an increase from roughly one in eight just 13 years ago. This delay in retirement allows more time to accumulate savings either inside the pension system (RRSPs) or outside the system (Tax Free Savings Accounts), and it postpones the drawing down of savings.

Finally, an expanded CPP (or newly-minted Ontario pension program) would require increased mandatory contributions from working Canadians that will likely reduce the amount of money Canadians invest voluntarily elsewhere.

While the study questions the necessity of an expanded mandatory pension system, it notes challenges that may currently exist, particularly for single seniors who never worked and aren’t eligible for CPP benefits. These Canadians often rely more heavily on Old Age Security (OAS) and the Guaranteed Income Supplement (GIS) as sources of retirement income.

Download the study results here.

 

Carmen Krogh speaking at University of Waterloo….Wed. May 7th – 3:30 pm

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Carmen Krogh | Harm from Wind Turbines: What Has Been Known for DecadesExport this event to calendar

Wednesday, May 7, 2014 – 3:30 pm

Harm from Wind Turbines, What has been known for Decades. A review of research on the effects of Low Frequency/Infrasound on people and animals.

The topic of adverse health effects associated with wind facilities is globally debated. It is acknowledged that if placed too close to residents, industrial wind turbines can negatively affect the physical, mental and social well-being of some. In addition to the general population, at risk are the vulnerable such as fetuses, babies, children, elderly and those with pre-existing medical conditions. There is published research on the effects of Low Frequency/Infrasound (LFI) on people and animals dating back several decades. This presentation will provide some of the available evidence drawn from peer reviewed literature, authoritative references, and other sources.

It is proposed that known risk of harm can be avoided by siting wind facilities a protective distance from residents.

Bio:

Carmen Krogh is published in peer-reviewed scientific and medical journals and has presented papers at scientific noise conferences. She is an independent, full time volunteer and for almost 6 years has researched health and other effects associated with industrial wind energy facilities and shares information with individuals, communities, authorities, wind energy developers, industry and others.  Krogh’s background in health care, vigilance monitoring, editing and publishing helps inform her work. She held senior positions at a major teaching hospital; as a drug information researcher; a professional association and the Health Protection Branch of Health Canada (PMRA). She is a former Director of Publications and Editor-in-chief of the Compendium of Pharmaceuticals and Specialties (CPS), the book used by physicians, nurses, and health professionals for prescribing information on prescription medication in Canada. Her goal is evidence-based siting of IWTs that protects human health.

Host
Cheriton School of Computer Science
Event website
https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~mannr/Krogh-Announce.html
Location
DC – William G. Davis Computer Research Centre

Room 1302
200 University Avenue West

Waterloo, ON N2L 3G1

Canada
Map data ©2014 Google

Map
Satellite
200 m

Fighting back Against Climate Alarmism!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

GET REAL, GET ORGANISED AND FINISH IT.

Posted by Pointman on April 24, 2014 · 1 Comment

Tank01

You may get offended or not by some of the things I’m going to say in this piece but they’ll get said nevertheless, so damn the torpedoes and full blog ahead. It’s the acid test of a real friendship to at times tell them they’re acting like a prat, and by the way, your bum really does look gigunda in that dress.

Anthony Watts recently ran a poll at WUWT that posed the question – “Is it time for an “official” climate skeptics organization, one that produces a policy statement, issues press releases, and provides educational guidance?”

I voted “yes” and I’d like to outline my reasons for doing so.

Any scattered and disparate opposition to an unjust law, policy or controversial issue which doesn’t get organised under some umbrella organisation is not only politically naïve but a consequently weak faction which doesn’t need to be taken seriously. More often than not, they’re comfortable in their armchairs living in their own deluded and secluded cloud cuckoo land.

There’s nicer ways of saying it but if want to be a force to be reckoned with, you have to get all ganged up. You seriously want to take on that exploitive employer, get unionised brothers and sisters. You want political change, form a lobby group. You don’t want that wind farm monstrosity blighting your life, start a local campaigning group. You want equal civil rights irrespective of the colour of your ass, start marching en masse. You want women to have the vote, get those bustles out of the drawing rooms and onto the streets as a mob waving placards and make the powers that be listen to you.

There’s simply no other way to get an issue onto the political agenda, and if you happen to think global warming isn’t a political thing, you pop that blue pill brother and dream on.

Give people a standard they can rally to and if the cause has real popular support, they’ll flock to it and become a bigger voice which will be heard despite any attempts to suppress it. Those attempts will just serve to strengthen group identity and make it a much more powerful force.

The deep primordial history of us as a species is all about getting together and cooperation. You might be rubbish at knapping a flint spearhead, but as long as one of the group can do that specialist thing, everyone is happy. Crap at tracking game? No matter, that runty kid over there is somehow brilliant at it. You might just be a spear carrier, but you know you play your part for the good of everyone else. That compulsion to gang up and work together is by now deeply embedded in our DNA. It’s been selected for. Without it, civilisation would fall apart in a day.

The worst thing you can ever do is sit in grumpy isolation doing nothing more than bitching away to a few cronies, and that’s exactly what’s all too common across the skeptic blogosphere. I call it the whinge and dump mentality and in the whole history of the human race, it’s never achieved anything other than being known as a complete bore to be avoided at all costs. Here they come – run away, run away!

As I look at the poll results to date, out of 2,683 votes cast, the response was 63% Yes, 24% No and the rest going for unsure. Scanning through the five hundred comments below the piece, a substantial majority expressed a “No” for various reasons. That’s an interesting dichotomy but an unsurprising one given the web dynamics of such a controversial issue as global warming.

There are just simply too many polarised people on either side who’ve spent years doing nothing more than venting spleen at each other. It’s become a social activity, a recreational pastime, a macho ego trip, a catharsis for a lot of tangential frustrations. Log in quickly, hurl an insult or two and surf onto the next brawl. Underneath the most combative blogs, out of hundreds of comments, barely a single digit percentage of the comments even reference the original blog topic, whatever it was.

That’s always forgotten in the light of the more important thing of continuing the niggling daggers drawn alley fights between the combatants that have raged on for years and will in all likelihood do the same for many more to come. If there’s a positive to such bad habits, I suppose the individuals in a sense are banding together for mutual support but underneath a blog rather than an organisation, and that’s an isolated waste of energy in what’s too often a never visited backwater as far as Joe Public is concerned.

Obviously, that’s not a characterisation of all people of either persuasion who comment on skeptic blogs but I think we all know it’s uncomfortably close to home in too many cases. What’s more interesting is to consider why a clear majority voted for some organisation as opposed to those who commented and were averse to any such thing.

If ever there was a graphic demonstration that the readers of blogs are quite a distinct grouping from those who choose to comment on a piece, that poll was it. It’s for that very reason that I exercise a zero-tolerance to trolling and although as a result I might only get twenty comments on a piece rather than two hundred of people intent on killing each other via the safe proxy of a keyboard, they’re usually twenty meaty ones. They’re my reward for writing the article and the viewpoints expressed very often round out the piece.

I’m target oriented, I got into this thing to win it, not to spend the next five years doing the same things like some obsessive compulsive stuck in a hopeless repetitive loop. The guerrilla phase served its purpose, but it’s high time for us to come out of the jungle, get organised and finish the thing off as a volunteer militia fighting it together. There’s no other way of putting some big tank tracks on the front lawns of governments around the world.

Global warming alarmism is going into the dustbin of history. It’s still got a fair amount of kicking and screaming to do but unless we ourselves get proactive in that endgame and are organised enough to have initiatives and policies already hammered out, we’ll be leaving those things to the tender mercies of those ephemera known as politicians. Make no mistake, it’s only a matter of time until they catch the popular sentiment and ride that bull to power, but entirely for their own selfish reasons and in the way they think it should be done.

I don’t care what particular form an umbrella organisation takes. I know it couldn’t address all my concerns, be led by people I totally like, perhaps not make the moves I would, become a liability at times, be a single target of focused attacks by the alarmists. I really don’t care.

It gets worse though. It’d be primarily a political organisation because it’d have to be and yes, that does mean dragging our hitherto pristine skirts through some muddy puddles, with the added discomfort of no pretty spiffing graphs or neat equations that nobody in the real world could make head nor tail of. And yes, some big fishies in our little pond might very well end up beached by events. There’ll always be casualties but the mission comes first, then the men. It’d never ring everyone’s bell but so what? I’d put on my I’m a big boy now long trousers and get stuck in.

The only shape any such organisation could take, and which I’d have a real objection to, is if it’s a thinly disguised lashup of coneheads who just know repacking and bombarding that tired bloke waiting in the drizzling rain for a bus home after a long day’s work with the REAL science is somehow going to make him get off it at Damascus. For God’s sake, give the poor bastard some credit, he already knows it’s a load of bollocks and at this point just needs nothing more than some decent leadership.

Yes, the science would always be a part of the package but we’ve tried that one to death and we are where we’ve been with that approach for a number of years, so it patently can never be the popular spearhead. Unpalatable as the idea might be, it really is high time for people to evolve out of some comfort zones.

Get it roughly, reasonably or even badly right and I’ll be content to chip flint spearheads or whatever I can usefully do to contribute. Just as long as most of us are moving forward together in some realistic manner.

©Pointman

Wind Turbines are not the solution…..to ANY problem!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

UK’s Wind Rush Leaves Grid Vulnerable to Collapse & Power Punters Foot the Bill

April 24, 2014 by  Leave a Comment
light-in-darkness

Shares in UK candle producers set to rocket.

Like the Germans, the Brits are now reaping the whirlwind of their insane renewable energy policy. Not only have power prices skyrocketed, the perverse economics of that policy has left the UK grid vulnerable to complete collapse.

Britain’s energy needs have been so mismanaged – and the incentives filched from taxpayers and power consumers and directed to wind power so obscene – that there is insufficient capacity to operate a reliable and stable grid and little incentive to build it.

Backing a policy – through a fat pile of taxpayer and power consumer subsidies – favouring a generation source that can only ever be delivered at crazy, random intervals was always going to end in tears.

As a foretaste of what those south of the Scottish Border are up for, last week a spike and then collapse in wind power output saw more than 200,000 homes without power in Northern Scotland. Ah, the vagaries of the wind!

And, with the Muppets on both sides of the House in Westminster who appear to have no understanding of the fact that wind power generation is a technology that was simply redundant before it began, there is little or no hope that the Brits will escape the same fate.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal on Britain’s dark and dismal future.

When Britain’s Lamps Go Out; Green policies destroy the economics of power generation.
Wall Street Journal (Online)
28 Mar 2014

The Faux-green scam, has left Electricity Grids at serious risk!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

America’s Power Grid at the Limit: The Road to Electrical Blackouts

Posted on April 23, 2014 by 

Powerlines, CA Article CaptionBy Steve Goreham

Originally published in Communities Digital News.

Americans take electricity for granted. Electricity powers our lights, our computers, our offices, and our industries. But misguided environmental policies are eroding the reliability of our power system.

Last winter, bitterly cold weather placed massive stress on the US electrical system―and the system almost broke. On January 7 in the midst of the polar vortex, PJM Interconnection, the Regional Transmission Organization serving the heart of America from New Jersey to Illinois, experienced a new all-time peak winter load of almost 142,000 megawatts.

 

 

Eight of the top ten of PJM’s all-time winter peaks occurred in January 2014. Heroic efforts by grid operators saved large parts of the nation’s heartland from blackouts during record-cold temperature days. Nicholas Akins, CEO of American Electric Power, stated in Congressional testimony, “This country did not just dodge a bullet―we dodged a cannon ball.”

Environmental policies established by Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are moving us toward electrical grid failure. The capacity reserve margin for hot or cold weather events is shrinking in many regions. According to Philip Moeller, Commissioner of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, “…the experience of this past winter indicates that the power grid is now already at the limit.”

EPA policies, such as the Mercury and Air Toxics rule and the Section 316 Cooling Water Rule, are forcing the closure of many coal-fired plants, which provided 39 percent of US electricity last year. American Electric Power, a provider of about ten percent of the electricity to eastern states, will close almost one-quarter of the firm’s coal-fired generating plants in the next fourteen months. Eighty-nine percent of the power scheduled for closure was needed to meet electricity demand in January. Not all of this capacity has replacement plans.

In addition to shrinking reserve margin, electricity prices are becoming less stable. Natural gas-fired plants are replacing many of the closing coal-fired facilities. Gas powered 27 percent of US electricity in 2013, up from 18 percent a decade earlier. When natural gas is plentiful, its price is competitive with that of coal fuel.

But natural gas is not stored on plant sites like coal. When electrical and heating demand spiked in January, gas was in short supply. Gas prices soared by a factor of twenty, from $5 per million BTU to over $100 per million BTU. Consumers were subsequently shocked by utility bills several times higher than in previous winters.

On top of existing regulations, the EPA is pushing for carbon dioxide emissions standards for power plants, as part of the “fight” against human-caused climate change. If enacted, these new regulations will force coal-fired plants to either close or add expensive carbon capture and storage technology. This EPA crusade against global warming continues even though last winter was the coldest US winter since 1911-1912.

Nuclear generating facilities are also under attack. Many of the 100 nuclear power plants that provided 20 percent of US electricity for decades can no longer be operated profitably. Exelon’s six nuclear power plants in Illinois have operated at a loss for the last six years and are now candidates for closure.

What industry pays customers to take its product? The answer is the US wind industry. Wind-generated electricity is typically bid in electrical wholesale markets at negative prices. But how can wind systems operate at negative prices?

Negative Electricity Prices Article 300

The answer is that the vast majority of US wind systems receive a federal production tax credit (PTC) of up to 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for produced electricity. Some states add an addition credit, such as Iowa, which provides a corporate tax credit of 1.5 cents per kw-hr. So wind operators can supply electricity at a pre-tax price of a negative 3 or 4 cents per kw-hr and still make an after-tax profit from subsidies, courtesy of the taxpayer.

As wind-generated electricity has grown, the frequency of negative electricity pricing has grown. When demand is low, such as in the morning, wholesale electricity prices sometimes move negative. In the past, negative market prices have provided a signal to generating systems to reduce output.

But wind systems ignore the signal and continue to generate electricity to earn the PTC, distorting wholesale electricity markets. Negative pricing by wind operators and low natural gas prices have pushed nuclear plants into operating losses. Yet, Congress is currently considering whether to again extend the destructive PTC subsidy.

Capacity shortages are beginning to appear. A reserve margin deficit of two gigawatts is projected for the summer of 2016 for the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO), serving the Northern Plains states. Reserve shortages are also projected for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) by as early as this summer.

The United States has the finest electricity system in the world, with prices one-half those of Europe. But this system is under attack from foolish energy policies. Coal-fired power plants are closing, unable to meet EPA environmental guidelines. Nuclear plants are aging and beset by mounting losses, driven by negative pricing from subsidized wind systems. Without a return to sensible energy policies, prepare for higher prices and electrical grid failures.

Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism:  Mankind and Climate Change Mania.

Germans are laughing are Green Energy Boondoggle. (It’s either that, or cry!)

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

GERMANY DISCOVERS SENSE OF HUMOUR, LOSES FAITH IN GREEN ENERGY

by 

If there are two things we know about the Germans it’s that they don’t have a sense of humour and that they are greener than the Jolly Green Giant’s favourite emerald St Patrick’s Day outfit.

This hilarious video from a German national TV broadcast instantly disproves both:

What I like about it – apart from its sweary joke about kilowatts – is its palpable and honest outrage about Germany’s disastrous state-enforced transition to renewable energy, the so-called Energiewende.

Hitherto one’s instinct towards Germany’s post-Fukushima rejection of nuclear power and the ongoing green energy policy which is crippling its industry has been: well the silly, credulous idiots deserve it. Serves them right for being so green.

But what’s clear from this video is that Germany’s problems are the same as our problems, which is to say that their economic growth and their standards of living are being held hostage by an out-of-touch political class in thrall to a green, activist-driven ideology long past its sell-by date.

As the video notes, every single German must now pay Euros 240 a year (“a total of 21.8 billion Euros for power which on the market had a value of only 2 billion. That’s sick!”) in order to subidise worthless green energy projects – such as the ugly wind farms for which swathes of forest are being cut down and the ludicrous solar panels now found on every other roof (in a country not exactly known for its sunshine) – which, as even Germany’s former Godfather of Green Professor Fritz Vahrenholt has now conceded, are the wrong solution to the wrong problem.

The absurdities of Germany’s energy policy are so myriad and manifest it’s difficult to know where to begin. Since 2005, Germany has spent 100 billion Euros (nearly $140 billion) on green energy. Yet in the last three years, the carbon emissions that this economic suicide was supposed to prevent have actually been increasing. One reason for this is its ban on nuclear energy.

To make up the energy shortfall – wind and solar being hopelessly unreliable at providing baseload power – it has been having to use more filthy lignite-fired power instead. (Which, incidentally, is also happening in Japan) (H/T Benny Peiser GWPF)

It is hitting Germany’s economy hard:

German exports would have been €15bn higher last year if its industry had not paid a premium for electricity compared with international competitors, according to a recent analysis by the Energy Consultancy IHS.Germany’s manufacturing suffered already €52bn in net export losses for the six-year period from 2008 to 2013. The figure was calculated by linking changes in the net volume of German manufacturing exports to changes in energy costs, using an economic model that accounted for other variables such as exchange rates. Almost 60 per cent of the total loss (or €30bn) came in energy-intensive industries: paper, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, non-metallic mineral products and basic metals.

Smaller companies were disproportionately affected. Unlike heavy energy users such as BASF and Thyssen/Krupp, small companies are not eligible for exemptions from the energy bill surcharges that cover the costs of the move to clean energy. Even more worrying for Germany is a clear trend for investment to go abroad. IHS found that direct investment abroad has accelerated at the expense of domestic investment and the cost of energy was the most important driver of this shift.

Yet, as in the rest of the world (with such odd, notable exceptions as Tony Abbott’s Australia which is on the verge of repealing its carbon tax), the insane policy as being driven on by the government regardless of what the people think.

But the present coalition government, despite its intention to lower the burden for consumers and industries, is still determined to double the amount of renewables till 2030.

In the last survey, only 24 per cent of Germans felt confident about their country’s energy policy, while 73 per cent were dissatisfied and ill at ease.

Welcome to the club, Germany.

Kind of hard to accuse animals of suffering from “nocebo effect”…..but I’m sure they’ll try!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Re: Wind turbine noise

22 April 2014

Ladies and gentlemen sorry to get to the debate 2 years late, but I hope you find my contribution worthy. (1)

When it comes to psychogenic illness, it seems unlikely it is an illness that affects animals. This paper was published in 2013 from Poland, if I may quote. (2)

“The study consisted of 40 individuals of 5-week-old domestic geese Anser anser f domestica, divided into 2 equal groups. The first experimental gaggle (I) remained within 50 m from turbine and the second one (II) within 500 m. During the 12 weeks of the study, noise measurements were also taken. Weight gain and the concentration of cortisol in blood were assessed and significant differences in both cases were found.

Geese from gaggle I gained less weight and had a higher concentration of cortisol in blood, compared to individuals from gaggle II. Lower activity and some disturbing changes in behavior of animals from group I were noted. Results of the study suggest a negative effect of the immediate vicinity of a wind turbine on the stress parameters of geese and their productivity.”

In Portugal a study from Portugal suggested that foals born near wind turbines developed Equine Flexural Limb Deformities.

Also “Biologist Dr. Lynne Knuth, in a letter to the Public Service Commission of Wisconsin, testified as follows: “The problems with animal reproduction reported in the wind farms in Wisconsin are lack of egg production, problems calving, spontaneous abortion (embryonic mortality), stillbirth, miscarriage and teratogenic effects:

In chickens: Crossed beaks, missing eyeballs, deformities of the skull (sunken eyes), joints of feet/legs bent at odd angles.

In cattle: missing eyes and tails (updated Excerpts from the Final Report of the Township of Lincoln Wind Turbine Moratorium Committee).”” (4)

There is more here. (5)

In conclusion it is possible in humans wind farm illnesses could be psychogenic. In animals it maybe a bridge too far.

1. http://www.bmj.com/content/344/bmj.e1527

2. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24597302

3. https://www.repository.utl.pt/bitstream/10400.5/4847/1/Deforma%C3%A7ao%2…

4. file:///C:/Users/DaveA/Downloads/viewdoc.htm

5. http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/62126

Competing interests: Freedom2Choose (F2C) are mainly known as a smoker’s rights group. I and our organisation have never received money, expenses or grace and favour from tobacco companies or agents. However I have been paid and remunerated by Pfizer who make smoking cessation drugs.

Dave Atherton, Chairman

Freedom2Choose, Flat 2 Wellington Passage, London E11 2AL

Contracts signed for wind turbines favour the industry – NOT the farmers!

/ 1957chev / Leave a comment

Contracts signed by more than 1,000 farmers for the collapsed midlands’ wind energy projects should be reviewed as a matter of urgency, a legal expert has warned.

While the midlands wind energy plans are in limbo following the failed energy export negotiations between the Irish and British governments, Nora Fagan – a member of the Law Society’s commercial business panel – says the lease options negotiated by energy companies could still have serious long-term consequences for farming families.

Ms Fagan, who outlined her concerns at a recent Law Society seminar in Tullamore, told the Farming Independent this week that the main legal problem centred on the contracted options.
“While the wind turbine companies may only be leasing a hectare of land from a contracting farmer to construct the wind turbine, the option is placed as a burden on the entire farm,” she said.
“This ensures that the energy companies have access to the land for the necessary cabling and ducting required for the transmission of electricity from the turbine, but it also has an impact on the zoning of the land.
“The effect of signing such an option essentially places the farm within a legal vacuum for the period of the option,” Ms Fagan claimed.
Many farmers who signed the agreements with Element Power and Mainstream Renewable Power believed they were only pledging one hectare of land for wind farm development, but Ms Fagan said a clause in the agreements meant no registrations could be made on the farm without the consent of the wind farm operators.
Restrictions
 
“These legal restrictions cover a wide range of issues including leases and mortgages and indeed farmers have recently discovered that the transfer of land for housing sites has been prohibited,” she claimed.
Ms Fagan also warned that the income from the wind farm leases – the bulk of them initially for five-year periods – will be treated as commercial income and not farm-related income.
“Many farmers have received a payment of €1,000 from wind farm companies for the execution of the option over their farm. These payments are fully taxable and do not qualify as income that can be set off against ordinary agricultural reliefs. Their net benefit after tax relative to the personal restrictions they impose on the farmer is questionable,” she said.
Some lease agreements reviewed by Ms Fagan suggest that the energy companies will indemnify farmers against the loss of certain reliefs.
However, she stressed that the reliefs identified were those which existed at the moment and that the farmer was not indemnified against any subsequent or amending reliefs which may be introduced in the future.
“Considering some of the lease agreements have a life of 30 years with an option of another 30 and the payments are fully taxable, farmers and their families may find themselves in a worse situation in the years to come than they are today.”
Fagan also insisted that the options currently owned by the energy companies were “fully assignable” without the prior consent of the landowner.
Options
 
“Wind farm companies are multinational and trade their options on the international markets so it is quite possible that the options could transfer to another company at some stage during the lease and the landowner will have no say in this transfer or how it may affect his or her farm,” she said.
She has called on the IFA, who assisted farmers with the wind farm lease option documents, to renegotiate the necessary amendments to these leases.
The wind farm proposals for themMidlands envisaged Element Power and Mainstream investing €8bn in the construction of 1,200 wind turbines in seven counties as part of a plan to export energy to Britain via an Irish Sea inter-connector.
Bord na Mona had also proposed investing over €1bn in a wind energy hub on cut-away bogs in the midlands. However, the semi-state company last week announced the project as originally planned would not proceed following the collapse of energy export negotiations between the Irish and British governments.
Energy Minister Pat Rabbitte stated last week that midlands project “would not proceed”, saying the negotiations stalled because of “the economic, policy and regulatory complexities involved”.
Reacting to Ms Fagan’s claims, Element Power told the Farming Independent that it does not publicly discuss its commercial arrangements with landowners.
“Element Power has entered into agreements with hundred of landowners across five midland counties.
“Each of these individuals has obtained their own independent legal advice.
“The format of the agreement was negotiated at length between Element Power and the Irish Farmers’ Association and its legal advisors and has since been reviewed by approximately one hundred different solicitors across the midlands,” said the statement.
Mainstream Renewable Power was contacted last week for a comment on Ms Fagan’s claims, but had not responded to our query before we went to press.
The IFA declined to comment when contacted.