Assessing impacts of wind farm has real-world relevance

James Griffiths - recipient of an Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council - was drawn to the M.Sc. program in Environment and Management at RRU because it encourages learners to find a synergy between their thesis and their workplace.

by James Griffiths, M.Sc.
senior manager, wind development
Sea Breeze Power Corp.

I approached my thesis research by laying out some criteria. It had to be feasible in the given timeframe, it had to be valuable to my employer and it had to qualify as a science topic. Most importantly, I wanted it to be useful and relevant to the world.

I was very interested in ecology, planning, sustainability, consensus building and GIS mapping and eventually found a topic that met all of these criteria – after only changing topics three times!

I settled on an investigation of Ecosystem Based Management (EBM), which is a promising planning framework being developed on the B.C. coast. I was fascinated by the decade of dialogue on this - work that had been occurring between coastal communities, industries, First Nations, governments, NGOs and academic institutions.

I felt very privileged to be able to make use of the recommendations that had arisen from this work in the form of the EBM Planning Handbook and the B.C. Government’s Land and Resource Management Plan for the North Coast area.

These plans described a system of land use planning designations at various scales; targets for various indicators of environmental, social, and economic health; and processes for further planning. I was impressed by the rigour of it and I was pleased that consensus had been reached on most of these recommendations.

I decided that my contribution would be to examine the EBM approach in detail as it related to a large coastal wind farm development. The EBM work had been done with a major focus on forestry, mining, and tourism – but wind energy was just now emerging as a real possibility on the coast, and several of the proposals are very large in scale.
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I chose as a case study Sea Breeze’s proposal to install 1000MW of wind power - larger than any existing wind farm today - at the remote Aristazabal Island.
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I wanted to know whether these wind farm proposals might be in line with the approach of EBM, and whether the disturbance targets laid out in the EBM plans were relevant to a wind farm. I chose as a case study Sea Breeze’s proposal to install 1000MW of wind power - larger than any existing wind farm today - at the remote Aristazabal Island.

My approach was to create various maps of this island, each of which represented the suitability of a location for wind energy development. Each layer was based on a different factor that contributes to suitability. For example, the economic layers were based on predicted wind speeds and construction costs. The ecological layers were based on rare ecosystems, streams, lakes, and riparian areas. The social layers were based on predicted locations of First Nations cultural resources and also areas of high visibility to local kayakers. All of these layers were then combined to create an overall suitability map and I designed a preliminary wind farm layout with the aim of minimizing impacts to low suitability areas.

Sea Breeze is sure to gather more accurate spatial data, as well as more input from First Nations, before moving forward with a site. Nevertheless, this first analysis showed that the vast majority of the EBM disturbance targets were easily met by this wind farm layout.

I looked in further detail at the nature of the ecological impacts due to a wind farm, both from the direct footprint and also indirect impacts to the surrounding region. My analysis concluded that EBM targets should include a measure of impacts to airborne wildlife, habitat and flight paths if EBM is to be properly applied to the planning of wind farms on the B.C. coast.

Looking back, I’m glad I found this fit in my thesis project but, at the same time, I think that there’s lots of research out there that needs funding that is not particularly aligned with the needs of the private sector, and I hope that funding for these continues and, in fact, increases. I plan to continue developing ideas from my thesis research with EBM practitioners and First Nations; and hope that if and when this wind farm is developed, the recommendations may prove useful.

Coursework in the M.Sc. program in Environment and Management covers a wide variety of topics pertinent to environmental work and allowed James Griffith to write a thesis with a direct synergy to his workplace while an Industrial Postgraduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council provided him with funding to cover tuition and living expenses during his on-campus sessions.