In February, 2011, the Ontario Government imposed a moratorium on four Trillium Wind Power’s proposed offshore wind power projects. While speaking at a court hearing on Tuesday, the company’s lawyer Morris Cooper said that the Government’s move involves political science, not the environmental one.
A 420 MW project on Lake Ontario almost acquired $26 million of funding when the decision on moratorium was made. Now, Trillium Wind Power is taking legal action to get $2.25 billion of loss compensation from the Ontario province.
The Government said that it needed time to perform more scientific studies on the effects of offshore wind turbines on health and environment. But the company says that the decision was made in bad faith, as the Liberal Government tried to weaken the opposition to offshore wind projects in the run-up to the provincial election in October last year, thestar.com news portal writes.
On the other hand, provincial lawyers say that Trillium Wind Power accepted a business risk in the time it began seeking for wind power agreements with the Government and in the moment when the moratorium was declared the company had no contract or any tangible rights.
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Offshore WIND staff, August 15, 2012; Image: Trillium Wind Power