Wind Power in Canada

• Main Author: Valentine, Scott
• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Oxford University Press 2015
• Subjects: Canada; Northwest Passage; Northwest passage
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780199862726.003.0010

In August 2007, the ice sheets choking off Canada’s Northwest Passage receded, permitting passage without the aid of an icebreaker for the first time in Canada’s 150-year history. Although this development presents economic opportunities, it also exposes enormous ecological threats that, 50 years ago, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau professed Canada should strive to avoid. Lamentably, Canada has played a role in this environmentally invidious development due to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions it has produced in prolific quantities over the course of its comparatively short history. This chapter highlights the barriers to developing a cohesive national energy strategy in a federal system where the states—or in Canada’s case, the provinces—enjoy constitutional sovereignty over electricity generation. More than any other case study covered in this book, this study on Canada demonstrates how political institutions can produce conditions that make it difficult to fully exploit wind power potential, despite public support for such an outcome. As of the end of 2012, Canada boasts the ninth highest amount of installed wind power capacity in the world. Based on this statistic alone, it is tempting to conclude that Canada’s wind power development policies merit recognition for being comparatively successful. However, in order to equitably assess performance in stimulating wind power development, one must also take into consideration the contextual factors which influence wind power development potential. When one does so, it becomes apparent that when it comes to wind power, Canada is a Ferrari in a world dominated by Fords. Three factors, in particular, bestow Canada with an astonishing high degree of realizable wind power potential. First, although geographically Canada is the world’s second-largest nation, it enjoys one of the lowest population density ratios in the world demand. The strategic benefit of Canada’s sheer size is that wind farms could be geographically dispersed to significantly attenuate the ...