“On the surface, (the plan) may have given municipalities too much flexibility and enabled some of them to deviate less from the traditional path than the plan sought to and they needed to,” said Winfield. “You’ve got some strong responses in places like Markham. Toronto itself has stepped up. But in other places the response is somewhat weaker,” he said, after poring over the Star’s numbers. “Mississauga is quite striking. You clearly have leaders thinking in a more ambitious and creative way, and you have others who are basically wedded to the sprawl model and trying to respond to the province within that framework.”

Brampton, Winfield points out, pre-empted the growth plan by designating the entire area inside its city limits for urban expansion – including vast stretches of farmland – so it wouldn’t have to justify allowing new growth outside what’s termed the “urban boundary.”

Winfield said the province still needs to do a deeper analysis that looks at what’s happening across the GTA: not just the densities being planned, but also the population allocations and the kind of communities being planned.

He says it’s time to assess the impact of the province’s massive interventions in regional planning, including creating the Greenbelt – which made a huge swath a no-go zone for developers – and Places to Grow, which oversees what’s left.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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The Conservative leader said that, while the agency has expanded, it has yet to fulfil its central mandate by producing a long-term energy plan.

But one energy expert says the OPA doesn’t deserve all the blame. 91��ɫ Professor Mark Winfield, of the Faculty of Environmental Studies, says the Liberal government hasn’t enabled the OPA to fulfil its mandate.

“There’s no direction from the government to the OPA,” Winfield said. “There’s no overall vision or strategy about where we’re going.”

The Toronto Sun quoted Professor in its :

The Ontario Energy Board thinks you’re not paying enough for hydro so it’s yanking another $60 out of your wallet.

Ontario hydro ratepayers — already hammered by the HST, time-of-use pricing and rate hikes — will pay an added $240 million a year, the Ontario NDP says.

Officials at the provincial crown agency — whose salaries are paid for through hydro bills — decided earlier this year that utilities should be able to boost their rate of return to 9.85% from 8.39%.

. . .

Gordon Roberts, a professor at the Schulich School of Business at 91��ɫ, who made a submission to the OEB on behalf of , recommended a lower rate. “It’s generous,” Roberts said. “Clearly, if the answer comes out on the generous side (for utilities), it’s less fair for the ratepayers.”

Roberts also spoke about the hydro profits issue on CBC Radio and CBC-TV, Sept. 23.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The study finds that the conventional approaches to electricity system planning adopted by the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) in the development of its 20-year Integrated Power System Plan (IPSP) have created a situation where the province effectively has no overall plan for the future of its electricity system.

“The fundamental assumptions that underlay the IPSP have been proven wrong by the events of the last two years,” says Winfield, the report’s lead author. “Electricity demand has gone down, rather than up; new nuclear facilities turned out to cost nearly four times what the plan assumed, and the response to the Green Energy Act is proving that there is more potential to develop renewable energy than the OPA assumed. A fundamentally different approach to system planning is needed,” he says.

Left: Mark Winfield

According to the study, co-authored by researchers at the University of Waterloo, the OPA's failure to properly employ a sustainability assessment approach resulted in a plan that was rigid and relied heavily on nuclear power. This would have left the province’s electricity system unable to adapt to the changed circumstances that have defined the past two years.

“A sustainability assessment approach would have emphasized resilience and adaptive capacity in the development of the plan, and put energy conservation and energy sources that have low environmental impacts and can be added to the system in smaller incremental steps first,” says Winfield. "Options like nuclear power that are large, centralized, inflexible, high-risk and high-cost should have been last.”

The report’s authors, along with a team of faculty and graduate students in environmental studies programs at the University of Waterloo and 91��ɫ, undertook to illustrate how the OPA should have elaborated and applied the sustainability criteria and trade-off rules that it had formally embraced. The exercise involved constructing a properly comprehensive, context-specific set of sustainability assessment criteria for energy system planning in Ontario, and applying these criteria in assessments of each of the main components of the IPSP proposal.

The report, titled “Implications of sustainability assessment for electricity system design: The case of the Ontario Power Authority’s integrated power system plan”, was co-authored by Professor Robert B. Gibson and graduate students Tanya Markvart and Kyrke Gaudreau of the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, and Jennifer Taylor, a graduate student in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The transfer, which Sunrise had previously been ordered to cease performing, caused liquid propane to leak from a hose and triggered the explosion in the early morning hours of Aug. 10, 2008.

The report, which was printed July 9 but only came to light this week, did not specify what caused the leaked propane to ignite. Its findings are not new, according to a 91��ɫ expert on the Sunrise blast.

“It seems to be confirming things that were out there already. It confirms the hypothesis on the cause of the fire,” said Mark Winfield, a professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Winfield pointed out the report calls attention to the fact Sunrise was ordered by the Technical Standards & Safety Authority (TSSA) to cease and desist doing tank-to-tank transfers less than two years before the explosion.

That shows just how little teeth the has, Winfield said. The TSSA is a non-profit, self-regulating organization run by industry officials to administer and enforce public safety laws in areas such as fuels, elevators and amusement rides.

It was created when the former Mike Harris government divested the province of responsibility for safety inspections. Ever since, Winfield said there has been a decline in safety standards, frequency of inspections and propane storage regulations. “It (the explosion) brought it to a head in a very dramatic sort of way,” he said. “In my experience, when things go boom like that, it is usually not ‘an accident’. It is usually the final chain in a whole series of failures.”

While the province passed legislation in the wake of the Sunrise explosion to bring the TSSA more under government control, Winfield said it still remains a separate body self-regulated by the industry. He believes the government should directly control the duties carried out by the TSSA.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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This is one local battlefield of Ontario’s Green Energy Act, whose subsidy program prioritizes small-scale green-energy projects over larger, dirtier ones. In a matter of months, the province has made itself the best place on the continent to make a business case for green energy.

. . .

The irony is these mini-projects set the stage for hundreds of confrontations with small communities that balk at the prospect of a power plant or wind farm upsetting their delicate equilibrium.

“Going to a system which relies on more distributed sources of generation, lots of smaller facilities as opposed to one big one, the worst consequence is you do exacerbate the potential for these social conflicts,” said 91��ɫ renewable energy policy professor Mark Winfield. “Instead of trying to build one big gas facility in Oakville, you’re potentially building 100 wind turbine sites, each of which has the potential to turn into a little donnybrook. “

. . .

It doesn’t help that there’s no clear picture of what Ontario’s future energy needs are: Demand is waning, or at least not growing as quickly as predicted, thanks to the recession and successful, aggressive energy-conservation programs. Capricious natural gas prices that haven’t been rising as much as planned combine with costs (and risks) of long-term nuclear commitments that skyrocketed higher than hypothesized means predicting the province’s energy load decades into the future is a mug’s game.

This makes it far more difficult to weigh the benefits against the costs of projects like Bala Falls, Prof. Winfield says.

“Developing Bala Falls maybe means we don’t have to build a gas or nuclear plant – then you might look at it differently. ... [But] there’s no overall context or plan in which each of these individual projects are evolving; there’s no framework to determine whether you need it or not.”

The complete article is .

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For one thing, those most heavily engaged in environmentalism have become significantly younger – from middle-aged mothers with higher incomes and education in the ’90s, to adolescents and university students today, Winfield says. And that means increased involvement in an age bracket where traditionally there has been little. “This constituency is very important because it’s a whole new generation that is carrying these values forward.”

It’s in part because of this that Earth Hour has become an international phenomenon since launching in 2007 in Australia.

This year will be another record-setting event for organizers, as 1,100 cities in 110 countries have signed on to the event – 100 cities and 22 countries more than last year. It’s a testament to how broad-based support has become for the environment, experts say.

So much so that sorting our garbage in several ways has become part of our normal, everyday routine in Canada – an act of “complex social behaviour” that amazes visitors from other countries, Winfield says. “What’s happening with each successive wave is that the environment is becoming more embedded in our public consciousness.”

To knowingly pollute and show little concern for the environment has become a secular sin, Winfield says. As former US vice-president Al Gore preached in An Inconvenient Truth, it has now become a moral imperative to take care of the planet.

You see it in grocery store lineups, where customers with reusable cloth bags are slowly outnumbering those without. It’s a subtle shift, driven by peer pressure. “These values have become so deeply embedded that if you’re not recycling, your neighbours will look down on you,” Winfield says. “Those are very powerful drivers.”

Similarly, while the environment traditionally falls off the radar during economic downturns, polls show it has endured as a priority during the latest recession.

But the current wave of public support doesn’t impress Professor Catriona Sandilands,  Canada Research Chair in Sustainability & Culture in FES. It means little if it doesn’t translate into constructive public policy, she says. “There’s public anxiety over global warming, but the question is, will this mean any long-lasting presence? I’m less optimistic.”

The climate change talks in Copenhagen were a dismal failure, she says, and Canada has been rebuked globally for being an environmental laggard and an obstacle to progress. Moreover, there’s been no movement to curtail the tar sands, which she calls a gargantuan blight on our environmental record.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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