CANADIAN WIND

Aside from another misguided experiment in waste (using wind to make electricity to make hydrogen: see EXPERIMENT IN GREED? and HYDROGEN--NOT) this is an exciting project. A little bit of every kind adds up to a whole lot of energy:

Canada’s Cutting-edge Energy Model; Prince Edward Island aims to generate 30 percent of its energy needs from its own renewable resources by 2016.
Colin Woodard, December 21, 2006 (Christian Science Monitor)

- …Ten wind turbines stand along the trail, each 26 stories tall, with blades as long as 125 feet. When workers finish the last one this month, the new Eastern Kings Wind Farm will generate 30 megawatts of electricity - 7.5 percent of the province's power…the wind farm is part of an ambitious plan to enable Prince Edward Island (PEI) - which has no significant coal, petroleum, natural gas, or hydro resources - to meet most of its electricity and 30 percent of its total energy needs from its own renewable resources by 2016. If successful, government officials say, this remote rural province will find itself at the cutting edge of the world's fastest growing energy sector…
- In addition to the Eastern Kings project, PEI's government is backing the creation of a hydrogen-powered village as well as expansions to existing wind farms on the northwestern tip of the island. Private companies, meanwhile, are building plants to produce ethanol from locally grown sugar beets and residential heat from forestry and farming waste. Hydrogen-powered buses and boats may follow, whisking passengers around the island with fuel cells charged by wind-power…
- PEI may seem an unlikely venue for an energy revolution. It's a tiny place, an island the size of Delaware, with fewer people than Arlington, Va., or Eugene, Ore.

- But PEI's small size is exactly what makes it appealing for the emerging renewable-energy industry to conduct pilot projects…
- The electricity-generating potential of the island's greatest energy resource - the wind - was recognized decades ago, and in 1980 Canada built its national wind test center on the island's northwestern tip. When the provincial government adopted its renewable energy strategy in 2004, expanding wind power was the first priority…three new wind farms are nearing completion - two built by a private firm, the other by the public utility, PEI Energy Corp…wind will provide 15 percent of PEI's electricity, reducing the province's carbon dioxide emissions by 90,000 tons each year. The island's overall wind potential is about five times that…
- The government is working on a range of incentives for a range of potential wind farm owners…
- To convert some of that wind to other uses, PEI Energy Corp. and Ontario's Hydrogenics Corp. are overseeing the creation of a $10.3 million "wind-hydrogen village" at North Cape…will use energy from turbines…to split hydrogen from water, store it in special tanks, and use it to power fuel cells…

- When the wind isn't blowing, the fuel cells will be used to power area buildings…It is, however, a demonstration project, and the fuel cells will have little impact in terms of meeting PEI's 2016 energy target, particularly in regards to transportation, which accounts for about 40 percent of the island's energy consumption. Petroleum will clearly remain the primary fuel source for most vehicles…[supplemented with] ethanol made from local sugar beets at a $2 million plant now being built by a local company…
- Other plans include the construction of a biomass plant that will burn wood wastes from provincial forests, and treating used cooking oil and other waste fats so they can be used to power diesel-engine tractors…