Let the wise invisible hand of the free market get us out of the predicament of the triple threat (climate change, peak oil, and natural resource depletion).  This is the premise behind the newly unveiled Renewable Electricity Plan that the Nova Scotia Department of Energy has put forward.

The province declared back in 2001, along with all of the Atlantic Premiers, that we would cut our emissions to 10% below 1990 levels by 2010.  As of 2008, we were 9.9% higher, having increased our emissions related to electricity generation by 38%.  In 2008, 45% of Nova Scotia's emissions came from burning fuels to generate electricity.

The details of the plan

The plan proposes to dramatically increase our use of wind energy, and biomass energy to meet the target of generating 25% of our renewable energy by the year 2015.  This represents more than double the amount of "renewable" electricity that the province currently produces.  In 2009, Nova Scotia already produced 11.3% of its electricity from "renewable" sources (defined by the government as wind, hydro, tidal, biomass), and imported an additional 5.2% of it's electricity from out of province (assuming that the electricity came from New Brunswick, it may have been largely nuclear energy being imported, which is not renewable).

The impetus behind this Renewable Electricity Plan is to phase out our use of coal fired power plants in order to reduce  both greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on imported fossil fuels.  The Nova Scotia plan calls for some of the new "renewable" power to come from energy imports (draining wealth away from the province), 100 MW of new corporately owned generators (the NewPage biomass plant accounts for 60% of this), 100 MW of mainly new wind turbines owned by Nova Scotia Power, about 70 "renewable" projects owned by municipalities, first nations, and non-profits,  a new 60 Megawatt forest-burning (biomass) plant owned by the ...