Wind power is the fastest growing energy sector. It is profitable. It is competitive with coal, diesel, natural gas, or nuclear. But Canada is lagging behind in wind energy.

Source: Canadian Wind Energy Association

This map shows Canada's wind energy potential, most of which is clearly offshore:

Offshore wind farms necessitate large wind turbines, and there is currently only one large wind turbine manufacturer in Canada: Turbowinds Canada Inc. of Belgium. Their largest wind turbines are designed for inland applications, which according to the map above is the wrong approach for Canada. Its American competitor Enron Wind (which did not go bankrupt along with its parent company) does indeed manufacture giant wind turbines for offshore applications, and in fact will be manufacturing wind turbines for most of the large offshore wind farms being proposed and/or built in Europe.

The Canadian dollar is undervalued, so buying from Enron would be a waste of taxpayers money. It would be better to provide incentives for Canadian manufacturers to build the turbines. An authoritative list of renewable energy businesses in Canada, including manufacturers, services, retailers, etc. would be of great utility and is an essential part of any business plan. Contacting the Toronto Board of Trade would be an option to find out if they have a list of material/component suppliers for wind turbine manufacturers in Canada. If they don't then going to your local public library and looking up wind turbine manufacturers in Scott's Directory is the next step.

A glut in the Canadian sustainable development market will be obvious if it exists. If Canada does not have any significant component suppliers for offshore wind turbine manufacturers then we will have to buy them from companies like Enron Wind, with the inevitable cost associated with the weak Canadian Dollar. When I say weak, I am referring to the combination of purchasing power and currency exchange rate. For example the MacDonalds Big Mac is essentially an identical product anywhere in the world, and will cost x-units of currency to purchase it. When you compare how much it will cost in Canada versus the US, and then look at the exchange rate, you can see that our currency is undervalued. It will cost us over 20% more to purchase anything American, as described by The Economist

(I think some guy got a nobel prize for that!)

Another problem with Canada is that wind power is located away from population centres, meaning that transmission losses could make it less profitable. Combine that with the extra cost of buying American and you've got a potential problem. We've got to get a Canadian-based manufacturer to produce large offshore turbines. To do that we need a comprehensive list of component suppliers and services, and a big boost to our Canadian-American currency exchange rate.

Also to avoid electrical transmission losses I suggest targeting the hydrogen production market. Hydrogen is a renewable storage medium for electrical energy. Hydrogen can be stored compactly either as liquid, slush, or in sodium hydride, and shipped elsewhere. As you may know sodium hydride is a hypergolic compound, which reacts violently with water, and even humid air. These companies have found solutions to the problem of using it as a high-density shipping medium for hydrogen, safe even for use in automobiles:

Millennium Cell Hydrogen Storage & Transport Solution
DaimlerChrysler's Natrium Fuel Cell Vehicle
Article describing hydrogen storage technology

You see it doesn't really matter how far away it is, you can ship it up the St. Lawrence using big converted oil tankers, or by rail without resistive losses along powerlines. Negligible fuel is lost along the way. The hydrogen can be used by industry in different manufacturing processes or it could be used as automotive fuel. So providing electricity to distant customers is not necessarily the best use, I think we have potential to eventually manufacture hydrogen for automotive uses.

Germany is way ahead of us: Article in Naturalist.com

This supports my prediction that European countries will move toward renewable energy long before the rest of the world, since their oil supplies are more limited. Even so I think they will be importing most of their energy. To bad we can't do a complete changeover to renewables in the short term, but we have to wait for the existing facilities to pay for themselves, and fall into disrepair before replacing them. That's another thing: all new infrastructure should be renewable, including facilities that replace old power generation stations.

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