Ontario ministers (i.e. Duguid and Wilkerson) have continued to justify forcing the installation of wind turbine projects into communities that don’t want them by claiming the greater good is being served – specifically that wind energy allows Ontario to burn less coal, thus preventing the early deaths of hundreds of people due to asthma etc.  Their “hundreds of people” claim is highly dubious in the first place – see the research by Ross McKitrick.  In the second place, as I have shown over and over again, there is no connection between wind energy production and lower coal production.

As always, me being me, I continued to wonder where all this wind energy went. The most obvious answer is that it was exported, at great loss, to Ontario’s neighbors.  Certainly Ontario’s exports in almost all cases exceed whatever the wind is producing.  But when I ran the numbers, the relationship between wind production and exports was roughly the same as between wind and coal – which is to say, almost non-existent.  However, the relative shapes of the two sets of curves was close enough that I started wondering what the relationship of coal production was to exports.  And since I’m writing this posting, you know I found something interesting. Continue reading Ontario’s Exports →