It was a quarter century ago when I first started thinking
about community energy. Actually it was my friend Narasim
Katary who had the idea. The plan back then (1979 or so)
was to grow artichokes out in the Valley as a source of alcohol to
mix with gas to create ethanol. We had a plan, which
included going to oil companies to get them to locate an ethanol
plant in Sudbury and eventually sell ethanol in Sudbury, and then
Northern Ontario.
It was all part of our sustainability strategy at Sudbury 2001,
an economic self-help group. We looked at different clusters of
economic activity to find opportunities for import substitution
where we could replace imported services with locally created
services to create local wealth and expertise.
It made sense to us to add another cash crop for
Sudbury’s farmers, and even more sense to repatriate
energy dollars to the local community. It was, to be
honest, more of an economic development idea than an environmental
one.
In fact, local economic development initiatives and
environmental concerns are not strange bedfellows. The enemy of
rural economies, among other things, is the notion of economy of
scale. The same thing that makes Wal-Mart economical—huge
scale and the ability to buy everything in China and distribute it
cost-effectively around the world—makes local companies
less competitive except where service, quality, style and
uniqueness trump price.
Economy of scale is always about the unit cost of something.
The projection of scale allows daily newspapers to lay off
classifieds personnel in hometown communities and transfer jobs to
central calling centres or network TV stations to centralize
production scheduling and programming elsewhere, or hotel chains to
have room booking call centres in Bangalor, India.
Today’s buzzword is outsourcing. It leverages technology.
The problem is that it can pick small communities dry with ever
increasing efficiencies if they don’t happen to be
outsourcing centres.
Happily, we are reaching a point where the economy of scale in
some sectors is becoming inefficient again. We need look no further
than today’s forestry industry in Northern
Ontario or Ontario Hydro. Both have blown it.
Both need to be completely rethought.
I spoke recently at a rural development conference in
Collingwood. It included around 350 people working in
government agencies or government-funded agencies with an interest
in rural development.
Two things floored me. First, I had no idea the provincial and
federal governments had such a massive infrastructure dedicated to
rural development. Most of this investment is related to
farming communities.
The second shock was to discover that elements of this
massive program of middle-class welfare are beginning to
get it. They understand that economic development starts from the
bottom up, not the top down. They seem to appreciate that if there
is no homegrown leadership, you are just wasting your money. There
are too many secretariats and working groups running around bumping
into one another and little consolidation of data or experience,
but what else is new? It is a typical Canadian response to a
Canadian problem.
That said, one of the groups I discovered reminded me of the
great Sudbury Artichoke caper. It is called the Ontario
Sustainable Energy Association.
These people are making things happen. They exist to empower
local communities through local co-operative initiatives to
establish alternative energy strategies. They tell you how to get
in the energy business. Recently, they have helped convince the
provincial government to make the groundbreaking decision to pay
local alternative energy suppliers 11 cents a kilowatt-hour to
supply power to the provincial grid.
This is revolutionary. It provides green energy. It brings back
exported energy dollars to the community. It reverses to a small
degree the so-called economy of scale of hydro plants and leverages
technology to put local communities into the energy economy. It is
technology that can empower communities, instead of deflate them.
Go to their website. If you have wind, you must act.
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Michael Atkins is president of Laurentian Media. He can be reached at[email protected]. For more information on the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association, visitwww.ontario-sea.org.
