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I’m picking a bone with Bill Greenwood

Re. Bill Greenwood’s June 19 column on cars and powerlines, headlined Left-leaning groups miss hard reality:

Re. Bill Greenwood’s June 19 column on cars and powerlines, headlined Left-leaning groups miss hard reality:

The article certainly shows he has not done his homework on the proposal to build a 500 kV electrical line between Edmonton and Calgary.

In fact, the application by TransAlta, and the 2004 Alberta Energy and Utilities Board report which started the whole thing, mention electrical exports several hundred times.

In fact, everyone with an electrical meter in Alberta will pay for this privately owned export oriented line.

In fact, the City of Calgary and its electrical utility, Enmax, opposed this line as being too costly. Neither of these organizations is really a bastion of socialism, as Greenwood implies, although Enmax does have an extensive green electricity program in place and expects to be supplying primarily green electricity to the City of Calgary and surrounding areas within the next few years.

In fact, the Edmonton to Calgary line is really just to service the coal-fired electrical plants west of Edmonton and it has nothing what-so-ever to do with getting wind farms, mostly located south of Calgary, onto the grid.

If Greenwood was inclined to do more than simple name calling, he would have known this by looking at a map.

The hard reality is that Greenwood has simply not done his homework and by pandering to those who are too lazy to do their own homework, he brings the level of discourse down several notches and certainly does not help the credibility of the Advocate as a source of informed comment and news.

Ken Larsen

Benalto