Money makes the turbines go 'round

From the Globe and Mail online:

Wind power market blowing strong in Canada
By RICHARD BLACKWELL , Globe and Mail Update

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.

...

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.

$18-billion.

With a "B", billion.

With nine zeros, like this: $18,000,000,000.

And how is the Provincialist Communist government's 'We own the wind!" policy going to attract a "fair share" — heck, any share — of this industry?

Short answer: It isn't.

The full report is a bit rich for a blogger's budget, but the free table of contents says it all:

• Newfoundland and Labrador doesn't merit a bar of its own in the bar graph of expected growth in the industry; instead it is lumped into a catch-all category, "Other Provinces".

• The analysis of Newfoundland and Labrador's wind industry is contained in section 3.2.8, "Additional Provinces Contribute Marginally to WindPower Sector"