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Canada is now one of the world's quickest-growing wind power markets, and could be in the top five in the world by 2009, according to a new study from a U.S. alternative energy research firm.
“Almost overnight the Canadian wind power market has evolved from obscurity....to one of the world's largest and fastest growing wind power markets,” says the report from Cambridge, Mass. -based Emerging Energy Research.
About $18-billion will be invested in the industry between now and 2015, EER projects, amounting to about one-quarter of the growth in North America and 5 per cent of global growth.
The boom in wind power has been prompted by provincial government policy, EER says. The provinces are pushing their utilities to buy wind power as part of a commitment to clean energy, and those utilities have been rushing to sign contracts with wind power developers.
“Government policy, especially at the provincial level, has been far and away the main driver behind the current growth that we're seeing,” said EER senior analyst Joshua Magee.
As a result of the boom in wind energy production, as much as 5.5 per cent of Canada's energy mix could come from wind by 2015, up from 0.7 per cent in 2006, the report says.
The biggest growth will come in Quebec and Ontario, the report predicts, and by 2015 those two provinces will account for more than 60 per cent of the total Canadian wind power market. But British Columbia, which has no wind power yet on stream, will also “explode” towards the end of that period, the study said.
So far most wind power developments have been built by large energy companies that operate other businesses — firms such as Brookfield Power, TransAlta Corp. and Nexen Inc. But independent power producers such as Canadian Hydro Developers Inc. and SkyPower Corp., are also emerging as a key force, the report says.
In 2006, Canada more than doubled its wind power capacity to about 1460 megawatts.
