Danielle Smith is no fan of wind and solar power
As a columnist, Smith was a harsh critic of "unreliable" renewable energy
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tl;dr
If you don’t have time to read today’s column right away, here are some of my main points:
The Alberta government’s moratorium on new wind and solar projects was sudden but not a total surprise to anyone who has followed Premier Danielle Smith’s opinion on renewable energy. Smith was a harsh critic of wind and solar power during her time as a columnist and her chief advisor, Rob Anderson, has also criticized the aesthetics of wind turbines.
There is some opposition to the construction of wind turbines in rural Alberta but political pressure from people involved in groups like Take Back Alberta almost certainly played a factor in this decision. TBA plans to show up in force at the UCP AGM in October and its supporters are expected take control of the entire UCP board of directors.
The UCP’s handling of wind and solar projects is remarkably different from their soft and gentle approach towards the oil and gas sector, which was allowed to not pay municipal taxes and leave Albertans with massive orphan well liabilities.
The reasons given for the moratorium have changed. Smith initially said it was to give them time to create proper clean-up rules, then she later shifted the blame to the federal government.
The moratorium announcement came days before the federal government released its draft clean energy regulations. The moratorium will almost certainly play a role in the UCP government’s opposition to any new federal climate change rules.
Alberta premiers getting into fights with Ottawa can sometimes be a good way to shore up support at home and Ottawa getting into fights with Alberta can sometimes be a good way to shore up support almost everywhere else in Canada.
Today’s column
Danielle Smith is no fan of wind and solar power
As a columnist, Smith was a harsh critic of "unreliable" renewable energy
The United Conservative Party government’s decision to impose an immediate 7-month moratorium on all new major wind and solar energy projects in Alberta came as a surprise to many political watchers.
The drastic decision was sudden and it wasn’t featured in any of the UCP’s campaign promises in the election held only 75 days ago. But anyone who has paid close attention to now-Premier Danielle Smith’s newspaper and radio commentary knows she has not hidden her deeply critical and skeptical views of wind and solar power.
“For years, the green movement would have us believe it was possible, and even desirable, to have an energy grid powered entirely by wind and solar, producing free, clean energy forever and ever, amen. We would switch to electric cars and electric heating and all our energy needs would be met. When the wind was blowing and the sun was shining, we’d use what we needed and store the rest and Mother Earth would look upon us and say it was good.
But it is not good.”
That’s an excerpt from an opinion column written by Smith in the Calgary Herald on May 1, 2020.
“Wind and solar have had their chance to demonstrate they were the only answer. They’ve failed. Now let’s get serious about the real options so we aren’t the next ones worrying about freezing in the dark.”
That’s what Smith wrote in a February 2021 column about the failure of the electrical grid during a freak blizzard in Texas.
While politicians like Governor Greg Abbott initially blamed he failure of wind turbines for the blackouts, renewable power generation was a much smaller contributor to the problem than the failure of natural gas plants thrown out of service because of frozen pipes and the state’s lack of connections to the national electrical grid.
But that’s not all she wrote.
"I am tired of placating the fantasy that our modern industrial economy is going to be powered by wind and solar and nothing else,” Smith wrote in her popular email newsletter on July 27, 2021.
"Let's just say, wind and solar only is obviously not the answer," Smith wrote on July 4, 2021.
"To be clear, and I will keep saying it until the message gets through, until cement, steel, fibreglass, mining and transportation are carbon neutral, wind and solar are not carbon neutral,” she wrote on August 2, 2021.
"...after realizing not only that wind and solar could not exist without fossil fuels to create them and back them up – was to assert that we have an overpopulation problem. Do we? They want us to use unreliable energy (wind and solar),” she wrote on August 21, 2021.
“Here’s the fundamental disconnect though: That future world with all that data requires energy. It isn’t going to be powered on only wind and solar and batteries, especially when you factor in drones, robots, and nanocomputers. The two visions of a constantly expanding digital world and only renewable sources of energy are fundamentally at odds,” she wrote on December 5, 2021.
“...we have a federal Environment Minister who made his name scaling the CN Tower and Ralph Klein’s house to oppose fossil fuels, and we’ve joined the Build Back Better brigade pretending the world can survive on wind turbines and solar panels alone. Canada is not a serious place and our friends in Eastern Europe are now paying the price for it. Such a tragedy,” she wrote on February 28, 2022.
Smith spent decades as a newspaper columnist, talk radio host and political pundit, so she has said and written a lot. And like many of Smith’s public musings, her framing of wind and solar power is pushed to the extreme - almost as if renewable energy is part of the problem.
And I’m sure these quotes are just scratching the surface.
Smith’s chief advisor Rob Anderson has also expressed deep skepticism about the aesthetics of wind powered energy, saying the turbines "ruin the landscape" and describing them as "ugly" (his comments were made during an online broadcast for his Free Alberta Strategy group which inspired the Sovereignty Act).
Anderson and Smith have been something of a Dynamic Duo of the Political Right since he crossed the floor from the Progressive Conservatives to join her Wildrose Party in 2010. They would infamously cross the floor together to rejoin the PCs in 2014. After a few years in the political wilderness he reemerged during the COVID-19 pandemic as the host of Rob Anderson Unfiltered on Facebook and then as chairman of Smith’s campaign for the UCP leadership in 2022.
There has been no shortage of reasonable and thorough criticisms of the moratorium by renewable energy experts and negative press internationally. Anyone involved in the sector, unsurprisingly, believes the stoppage is a bad idea. It even goes against the free-market principals that Conservatives in Alberta have been known to praise.
Calgary-Glenmore NDP MLA Nagwan Al-Guneid, who until her election was the Director of the Business Renewables Centre Canada and is now the opposition critic for electricity, utilities & renewables, penned an op-ed response in the Calgary Herald calling on the government “to end this mind-boggling moratorium on renewables” and focus on "serious economic policy and serious climate ambition.”
Al-Guneid also spoke in length about the issue with Ryan Jespersen on RealTalk.
Minister of Affordability and Utilities Nathan Neudorf publicly admitted the moratorium on the booming industry would be “a little bit of inconvenience now for the next few months.”
That is probably a big understatement for the companies investing in these projects and the private landowners hoping to cash in on the wind and solar boom.
There are certainly people in rural Alberta who oppose the construction of wind turbines, but perhaps one of the groups most important in this decision are the people involved in Take Back Alberta. Opposition to wind and solar is a hot topic with many supporters of Take Back Alberta, the influential political action committee that took over half the UCP board of directors at last year’s AGM and is expected to take over the rest of the board positions at the next AGM in October.
“The incentives all line up in the direction of keeping the moratorium. It keeps TBA happy as the party’s fall annual general meeting approaches. It keeps the gas guys onside. It gives credibility to her claims about the impossibility of net zero by 2035,” University of Calgary Political Science Professor Lisa Young wrote in The Tyee.
How the UCP is handling wind and solar projects is remarkably different from the soft and gentle treatment given to the oil and gas sector, which was allowed to just not pay municipal taxes and has left Albertans with massive orphan well liabilities.
The UCP government even set up a publicly-sponsored advertising company - Canadian Energy Centre - to churn out a constant stream of Facebook ads and giant billboards in American cities promoting the oil and gas industry (the CEC is exempt from the transparency of FOIP requests, so Albertans don’t really know how it operates and spends it funds). Minister of Environment and Protected Areas Rebecca Schulz, Minister of Energy and Minerals Brian Jean, and Minister of Justice Mickey Amery are the three directors who sit on the company’s board.
Interestingly, we only have to go back to May 2023 to find Jean praising investment in wind and solar:
“In 2022, 3/4 of Canada's renewable energy growth occurred under the UCP. “Alberta...has allowed for an influx of new development, and we’re really going see these projects coming online in 2024 and 2025—that’s when the momentum is going to build.”
The reason given for the moratorium aren’t exactly clear and have changed a few times over the past week.
Albertans were first told that new wind and solar projects were being halted to ensure there were proper clean up rules for projects that are abandoned. There should definitely be strict rules in order to avoid the liability mess that has been created with abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells, but a moratorium on new projects is quite drastic.
Smith then shifted blame to the federal government, claiming Ottawa is preventing the development of new natural gas electricity plants as backup generation.
"If somebody adds solar to the grid, you don't need to add backup to compensate for it," University of Alberta energy economist Andrew Leach told the CBC. "It just adds a source of cheap electricity for times when it is sunny outside."
Of course, the moratorium on wind and solar was announced just days before Ottawa released new draft clean energy regulations.
Smith described the draft rules as “unconstitutional” and vowed that they would never be implemented in Alberta, setting up the kind of federal-provincial jurisdictional dispute we’ve all become accustomed to since the UCP formed government in 2019.
It’s the kind of fight that will play into the political interests of Smith’s UCP government in Alberta and could also help Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals hang on to power when the next federal election is called.
Alberta premiers getting into fights with Ottawa can sometimes be a good way to shore up support at home and Ottawa getting into fights with Alberta can sometimes be a good way to shore up support almost everywhere else in Canada.
As an Albertan, I have concerns that the federal Liberals don’t fully understand how big of a role, both economically and culturally, the oil and gas industry plays in the lives of many Albertans. And as an Albertan who has just lived through one of the hottest and disgustingly smokiest summers in memory, it is pretty clear that the UCP government is still not taking climate change seriously.
If wind and solar were the first victims of this Alberta-Ottawa fight, maybe we can predict the next political casualty by reading Smith’s old newspaper columns.
Notley’s leadership on the minds of many Alberta NDP supporters
The Alberta NDP is hosting a series of election campaign debrief sessions this month after the party made significant electoral gains but failed to win the May 2023 election. Hosted by facilitator Amanda Freistadt, a former party treasurer and labour union activist, the regional sessions are planned for Calgary, Edmonton, and Red Deer.
While party activists and supporters will likely have a lot to get off their chests, the future of the leadership of the party remains one of the biggest unspoken challenges facing the party.
Rachel Notley’s future is something that is quietly and carefully broached in NDP circles, but after three elections and nearly ten years at the helm of the Alberta NDP, a change in leadership would be natural.
But there is no rush. We can expect Notley to lead her now-38 MLA Official Opposition into the fall session that is set to begin on October 30 and there is a good chance we will know a bit more about her political future by the end of the sitting.
Early names of potential leadership candidates include Calgary-Mountain View MLA Kathleen Ganley, Edmonton-Glenora MLA Sarah Hoffman, Edmonton-Whitemud MLA Rakhi Pancholi, and Lethbridge-West MLA Shannon Phillips.
Jagmeet Singh coming to Edmonton
In what has become an annual tradition, federal NDP leader Jagmeet Singh is making an August trek to Edmonton. Singh will host a roundtable on housing affordability and attend Edmonton-Strathcona NDP MP Heather McPherson’s nomination meeting on August 14.
Singh will then attend a health care town hall with Edmonton-Griesbach NDP MP Blake Desjarlais, McPherson, Friends of Medicare executive director Chris Galloway and Canadian Health Coalition chairperson and Registered Nurse Pauline Worsfold on August 15. As in previous years, it is likely that Singh could be spotted visiting the Fringe Grounds in Old Strathcona.
While its association with the federal NDP was not exactly helpful to the Alberta NDP in the recent provincial election, Edmonton was one of the few bright spots for the federal party in the last federal election.
In the 2021 federal election, Edmonton-Strathcona became the federal NDP’s strongest riding, with McPherson winning re-election with 60.31 per cent of the vote. The NDP also doubled their Alberta caucus with the election of Desjarlais, who unseated Conservative MP Kerry Diotte in Edmonton-Griesbach (according to a March 2023 statement on his website, Diotte plans to run for the Conservative nomination again).
Danielle Smith and her benighted UCP government are literally tilting at windmills.