Hulleye Comes By!

I’ve always been suspect of high-publicity government decisions that tout changes for the better. With the public desire for green policies on the rise in Canada there is ample potential for marketing and political hedging to take advantage of this.

A perfect example is a proposed solar farm that will be built near Sarnia, Ontario. It will only supply 40MW of power (last year we peaked at 21000 MW usage) so this is a drop in the bucket at ~0.2% of our peak usage. Yet it will cost significantly more per unit electricity than any other generation method, and while many lobbyists for the solar energy market will label it as a non-carbon emitter and safe for the environment there is no mention of the impact involved with developing and building the solar cells themselves, which is admittably small but should be stated. The real question to ask though is why there is a rush to develop? Clearly there is a lot of potential in solar energy, but until it becomes cheaper/more efficient maybe we should stick with wind/nuclear/hydro to minimize our CO2 emissions in Ontario. Of course the real motivation may be that people in the business community who have close relations with the government stand to make big gains:

Not much is known about OptiSolar, though many of its private investors are Canadian. It was co-founded by Randy Goldstein and Phil Rettger, who previously founded the Calgary-based oil sands technology and project developer Opti Canada Inc.