Tuesday - February 15, 2011

Socialist Nations Cancel Green Initiatives

Times of international turmoil are great moments for domestic governments to make important announcements they don’t want to be noticed. Especially if the announcement involves a sudden reversal in policy that could seriously embarrass the government.

So Friday afternoon was an ideal time for Ontario’s Liberal government to take a big chunk of its alternative energy program and chuck it overboard. Attention was riveted on Egypt, where spectacular events were unfolding.  The perfect opportunity for Premier Dalton McGuinty to engineer yet another major reversal, while paying a minimal price among voters.

After years of touting wind projects as a critical piece of the alternative energy puzzle, the government let slip — very quietly — that offshore wind projects are no longer part of the game plan. Turns out there just isn’t enough scientific evidence that offshore wind projects do a lick of good, said Brad Duguid, the energy minister.

“It’s simply a case of recognizing we need to take a closer look at the science on freshwater offshore wind projects,” said Duguid. “Right now there’s only one in the world we’re aware of, in Sweden. There’s a number of issues that need to be looked at before anything could ever be considered for approval.”

A thousand mostly rural residents across Ontario who were awarded solar energy contracts last summer have been told their projects have been put on hold.

That has left many with tens of thousands of dollars invested in projects for which they now have no prospect of getting any income.

“I’ve got $70,000 sitting right out in my backyard,” said Brian Wilson, who lives near Belleville, of his 10-kilowatt solar array. “I can go two doors down and they’ve got $70,000 invested, too.”

But they’ve both been told that they can’t connect to the electrical grid because of technical issues.
...
The province told 20,000 applicants across Ontario last year they had been awarded contracts for solar energy under what they called their microFIT program.

About 3,700 have been connected to date.

But about 1,000 have now been told they can’t be connected in the foreseeable future, because local utilities don’t have the wires or other equipment to carry their power to the grid.

The would-be solar entrepreneurs already had one bitter battle with the provincial government last summer, when the province slashed the rate being paid for power from some types of installations.

Meanwhile, over in the UK:

Carbon Trust funding cut by 40%

Cuts to the government’s low-carbon agency will cancel grants to biofuel projects and cause dozens of redundancies

The government’s leading low-carbon agency has had its funding cut by 40%, causing the cancellation of grants to a major biofuel scheme and other projects, and dozens of redundancies.

The Carbon Trust, whose mission is “to accelerate the move to a low-carbon economy”, will receive £50m from the government in 2011-12. It will end free on-site energy surveys for businesses and 35 of its 216 employees will lose their jobs.

“Public funding still remains necessary and important to achieving our mission, especially in catalysing low-carbon innovation to overcome market failures and in supporting smaller businesses to cut carbon,” said Tom Delay, the Carbon Trust’s chief executive. But with public funding “constrained”, he said, the trust would look to the private sector for investment.
...
But Adam Harvey, a chemical engineer at Newcastle University, said: “The cut is very much against the claim of David Cameron and the government that they would regenerate the UK’s economy via green technology – it’s the exact opposite in fact.”

Harvey’s research group had received a grant from the Carbon Trust as part of an £8m effort to develop biofuels from algae, but the funding has been axed halfway through the project.

From The Daily Bayonet

Solar and wind subsidies are unsustainable and always were.  As as soon as voters woke up to the billions being wasted on greenwashing, [Canada’s] McGuinty changed tack, but he owns the green agenda and is the father of the Green Energy Act come October it may be his end.  Let’s hope so.

“Greenwashing”. What a great term. And now loads of Canadians and Britons are going to suffer, not just the wasted tax money, but because they believed their government’s Green Initiative BS, and invested loads of their own money, “knowing” that the government would continue to subsidize them. That’s all off now. Reality bites, even for the Socialists. None of this will slow Obama down a step, of course.

Angering rural voters, and battering your credibility with the environmental crowd, aren’t great ideas if you run a government that faces an election in eight months. So it’s no wonder that Ontario’s Liberals sought to hide the bad news by releasing it when (they hoped) no one was watching. But the excitement in Egypt won’t last forever, and eventually people will notice that Ontario’s government, once again, has been forced into a humiliating retreat at considerable trouble and cost to individual Ontarians.

Posted by Drew458     on 02/15/2011 at 02:06 PM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Environment • Oil, Alternative Energy, and Gas Prices •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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