Callahan’s Cleveland Diary

I’m back.

On Wednesday we left the Point Pelee area (now forever to be known in our family as The Mosquito Coast) and headed 250 miles north to Tobermory, at the tip of the Bruce Peninsula between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay.  Half of our trip was on Highway 21, known as the Bluewater Highway because it skirts Lake Huron’s eastern shore.

It should soon get another name: the Windfarm Highway.

In 115 miles of farmland between HW 21’s southern terminus near Sarnia and its turn inland at Southampton, we saw more than 175 utility-scale wind turbines in some stage of operation or physical construction.  Most are part of three big projects: the 110-turbine Enbridge Leader project between Port Elgin and Kincardine, the 38-turbine Suncor installation south of Kincardine near Ripley, and Epcor’s 22-turbine Kingsbridge 1 project just north of Goderich.  There’s also the 5-turbine Huron Wind operation next door to the Bruce Power nuclear plant at Tiverton, and a few other small installations scattered along the highway.

That’s a total rated generating capacity of more than three hundred megawatts, sprouting three hundred feet above the lakeside corn and hay. And it’s only about half of the utility-scale windpower planned for the area by various developers and the Ontario Energy Ministry.

Here’s one of the 110 Enbridge turbines, a Vesta, still under construction south of Port Elgin:

Click the picture for a full-size version in which you should be able to pick out at least four neighboring turbines in the distance.  (This particular project stretches out for nine miles along the highway.)

The reasons for concentrating all this wind development along HW 21 are simple:

• lots of open farmland to lease, and
• prevailing winds that blow from the west and southwest across the flat surface of Lake Huron.

The same reasons apply along rural Highway 3, where the prevailing southwest winds come in across miles and miles of Lake Erie.

(Unfortunately for northern Ohio, our prevailing southwest winds blow across us into the lake — which is the basic argument for getting Cleveland’s wind development a few miles out into the water. But of course, building 300-foot turbine towers in thirty or forty feet of water isn’t at all like building them on nice, solid cornfields.)

Anyway, Ontario’s Windfarm Highway was a pretty impressive sight for a boy from Ohio, where windpower development is still pretty much… well, all wind.

P.S. Here are a couple of pictures from the first Big Wind project we discovered in our travels — the 44-turbine Kruger windfarm along Highway 3 near Port Alma.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 12:44 pm and is filed under Community technology, Utility blogger. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.