Canada has become the second-most favourable place to invest in green energy projects after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government rolled out a tax credit in last month’s budget, according to Rystad Energy. The headline in the Finanical Post reads “Canada jumps to second place for green energy projects after tax credit”, as if this is a good thing.
On the contrary, Rystad says the renewable energy investment tax credit raises the value of some projects more than 50 percent over their lifetime. It’s a dangerous thing when governments inflate projects that can’t stand on their own two feet.
The offering of a 30 percent tax write-off for renewable technology deployed before 2034 pushes Canada ahead of six others, including Turkey, Portugal, Vietnam, the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany in the support offered for green energy, said Rystad’s report. But as Financial Post noted last Spring:
Canada’s federal budget contained almost $83 billion over the next decade in investment tax credits directed toward clean manufacturing, electricity generation and carbon capture. The subsidies, along with increased health spending, are poised to swell the country’s deficit but were touted as necessary to achieve the country’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050.
Financial Post, April 25, 2023
In other words, if you want to know why there is a mad rush to build wind and solar farms when neither technology is sustainable or reliable,1 it’s because you’re paying for it. It’s not about the environment, it’s about economics. Hopefully, Alberta’s new government will step in before Trudeau’s agenda has destroyed both. The “black gold rush” that brought jobs and wealth to the West has been usurped by a “green rush” that only benefits fleeting green energy corporations, leaving higher taxes and electricity costs in their wake, as we now see wherever green economics has taken hold.
Increasing carbon taxes punish average Canadians while lining the pockets of wealthy energy corporations with federal subsidies.2
Second place feels like last place.
- cf. Call for a Moratorium[↩]
- cf. “Global warming a ‘fear campaign’ by scientists ‘hooked on government grants,’ Greenpeace founder says”[↩]
Wind Concerns is a collaboration of citizens of the Lakeland Alberta region against proposed wind turbine projects.