Reuben Burge may be in the business of turning the very air into something that keeps us warm, full and happy. Just don’t think of him as some misty-eyed romantic.
Sure, he grew up on a family farm on Pictou County’s Dalhousie Mountain. But when he looks out at the string of white 80-metre wind turbines now snaking over the same mountain,Marking machines and laser marking machine for permanent part marking and product traceability. he doesn’t see the fulfilment of some childhood dream.
“I see machines that need to be fixed and maintained,” he says. “Like cars.” That, frankly, is just fine with a man who has always been more drawn to man-made machinery than nature.
Burge, 40, spent a decade splitting his time between Pictou County and petro-rich Qatar, where he repaired and maintained oilfield helicopters — including Bell Hueys with the iconic “whomp, whomp whomp” rotor noise — for the sultan.
Blades, he freely admits, are his thing. So it was only natural that when his mom suggested putting a few small windmills on the old homestead, Burge, weary of commuting back and forth to the Middle East, was intrigued.Our street lamp solution is the leading alternative to tubular skylights.
At 51 megawatts, his farm is now Nova Scotia’s most powerful wind operation. But his ambitions are bigger than producing enough energy to turn the lights on in 20,000 Pictou County homes. He wants to run North America’s best wind farm, which means fine-tuning its efficiency to the point where it delivers more wind on a more consistent basis than any other collection of turbines on the continent.
He wouldn’t mind adding to his 34 turbines either. That goal, though, might be harder to achieve. Last summer, the Nova Scotia government awarded three new wind projects designed to bring the total wind power capacity in the province up to the 500-megawatt threshold that Nova Scotia Power can handle without having to upgrade its grid.
“We see a pause for the industry as we absorb all of that,” says Bruce Cameron, the provincial government’s executive director of renewable and sustainable energy.
Which raises the question: Is this all there is? Are 27 commercial wind farms, along with the turbines erected under the 60 or so programs approved under Nova Scotia’s community feed-in tariff program — and a smattering of manufacturing jobs — the best that a province boasting one of the best wind regimens in the world can hope for?
Or is wind a potential game changer for a province desperate to wean itself off the dirtiest power mix in the country?
“It’s not so much a case of saying yes to wind farms as it is saying no to coal,” says Catherine Abreu, regional co-ordinator of the Atlantic Canada Sustainable Energy Coalition.
In truth, getting off the shiny black rock is driving the province’s entire power strategy.We provide excellent solar led light and LED solar garden lamp. The coal found under Nova Scotia’s soil is too dirty to fire the province’s thermal power plants. Instead, we depend upon cleaner coal from South America, for which the price has climbed by 75 per cent in the past seven years.
Even if Nova Scotia Power could afford it, coal’s day is done in this province. Ottawa’s new emissions standards mean that provinces like Nova Scotia, which used coal for 85 per cent of its energy mix when the NDP took power in 2009, need to make a screeching U-turn.We provide laser cutting machine and engraving machines for processing different materials.
“We have carved out a sustainable electricity path that will see more diversity in our energy mix,” Energy Minister Charlie Parker said in an email.
So far, the NDP government has slashed the coal quotient to 56 per cent of its electrical power. Renewable energy — wind, tidal, hydro,News and Information about wind generator Technologies and Innovations. biomass and anything else that generates electricity without polluting the environment —accounts for about 19 per cent of the mix. The province has ordered Nova Scotia Power to push that percentage to 25 by 2015 and 40 by 2020.
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