Wind power cheaper than nuclear in Ontario

In a recent phone conversation with Prowind vice president Luke Geleynse, I asked him to compare the costs related to wind power with nuclear, knowing that nuclear energy has a history of massive cost over run and it's hard to calculate the factual costs. The industry specialist and experienced entrepreneur focused on current wind costs in Ontario as he expands his Kemptville company significantly with large scale wind farm projects:



Geleynse continued:
"Even with all the pre-construction and planning assessments like spring and fall migration bird counts and such factored in, a ten MW (stands for megawatt: 1,000 kilowatt) wind farm will cost in the range of about 25 million dollar. Therefore it costs roughly 2,5 million per installed MW wind power."

Canada's biggest nuclear facility, Bruce nuclear power plant, produces around 4700 MW - not only 30 percent of the time as for wind turbines in Ontario, when the wind is actually blowing, as renewable energy critics may say, but all the time.

editor's comment: the following quote comes from the Sierra Club of Canada's website. I recommend to google Bruce shut downs and you'll get a better idea how that statement translates into reality:

"The four Bruce “A” reactors lasted on average less than half of their expected 40-year lifetimes, before being shut down for long-term repair work. The Pickering “A” reactors lasted only 25 years, despite having been re-tubed at a cost of $1 billion following a disastrous pressure tube break at Pickering reactor #2 in 1983. The shutdowns left Ontario Power Generation with 12 reactors in operation — four at the Pickering “B” station; four at the Bruce “B” station; and four at the Darlington station. The closure of eight reactors was the largest single long-term nuclear shutdown by any nuclear utility in the world."

Geleynse proceeded to say: "Following that cohesion, I can accept to triple the costs as per MW wind power, because wind power capacities have to be tripled to produce the same amount effectively. In such moderate correlation the MW wind power corresponds with costs of around 7,5 million. So to build a 4700 MW wind facility we would need 35,250 billion dollar. But if we were to build at that scale our costs would easily be 20 percent lower, resulting in 28 billion dollar. No future fuel costs, no pollution, no waste, no costs put on the tax or rate payer, distributed generation, simply fantastic."

Looking at about 40 billion dollar cost of Bruce power so far and given the much larger vulnerability of massive, central power generation to earth quakes, growing storms of a changing climate, terror acts, decommissioning, storage, transport and abuse (depleted Uranium used to bomb Iraqis now accounts for a massive increase in birth defects both on sides of the Iraqi and US population) of used fuel, there should be no more difficulties to figure out a reasonable choice for Ontario and Canadian tax payers ....

This conversation followed a field day in April, on which I was able to video tape a data gathering day in the year long projecting phase, before any wind turbine is even installed. Click on play to watch the footage.