The village of Guildwood, in southeast Scarborough, is home to some of the more stunning vistas in the city. Viewed from a perch high up on the Scarborough Bluffs, Lake Ontario stretches out like a shimmering mirage. To the east and west, the Bluffs peel back into a dramatic exposition of nature’s force, centuries of wind, rain, ice and snow having pummelled the cliffs gradually northward. Near their lip is some of the most sought-after real estate in Toronto; far below, their eroded faces crumble into a rugged lakeshore.

The heart and soul of Guildwood is the Guild Inn. The Guild had a short life before and after World War II as a progressive artists’ colony, a place where freethinkers could escape the soulless, capitalist strivings of downtown Toronto to embrace creativity, gaze down upon a calming stretch of lake and wander rural Scarborough in peace. Today, although the Guild is little more than a sorry collection of dilapidated buildings, its legacy lives on. Guildwood residents still pride themselves on standing up to abuses of power, perceived or otherwise, and on a strong naturalist ethic that is uniquely tied to the Bluffs.

Lately, they’ve galvanized around a shared hatred of Toronto Hydro and its plans. The city-owned corporation is preparing to survey the winds that blow offshore, a study that involves anchoring a small steel platform to the lake bed between two and four kilometres out. Rising from this platform will be an anemometer, an instrument that measures wind speed and direction using light-imaging radar. Including a power source, a communication system and navigation lights, the whole contraption will be five metres wide by eight metres tall and is unlikely to be visible from the shore.

If the winds prove strong and reliable enough, Hydro will begin drawing up plans for something more ambitious: a large-scale wind farm. They chose the site because it has a 15-metre-deep under­water shelf running parallel to the land, making it one of the few feasible areas off our shoreline for turbine installation. The farm would likely stretch for 25 kilometres along the eastern lakefront, from east of Ashbridge’s Bay to Ajax. By some estimates, it would cost upward of $500 million to build and bring on-line. The turbine towers—perhaps 60 of them, each 90 metres tall—would be drilled into the lake bed. Together, and at full capacity, they could generate approximately 180 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 47,000 homes. This energy could be pumped directly into the GTA’s power grid, avoiding the sig­nificant costs involved in long-distance transmission.

Given the social climate out there—hell, given the actual climate out there—one might expect Torontonians to be ecstatic about this. We live in a province that recently introduced into its legislature the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, a landmark bill aimed at making Ontario a leader in clean, renewable energy. David Miller is the chair of the C40, an international group of cities united in the fight against global warming. And Dalton McGuinty has committed to phasing out all coal-fired power plants in Ontario by 2014.

But in Guildwood, Hydro’s little wind study has resulted in a firestorm of anger, controversy and near-tribal levels of contempt. A small, organized group is determined to quash Toronto’s first large-scale residential renewable energy project.

The prevailing wisdom of the post–Al Gore era is that “going green” is never as easy as the cutesy phrase suggests. City councils and municipal power utilities around the world are learning that although the buzzwords “sustainable” and “renewable” are political winners, voters’ good intentions don’t necessarily translate into taxpayer support—especially when it comes to wind projects. In most cases, the government and its wind energy partners face a long battle before the grid turns green.

As some European cities have learned, citizen buy-in is key. Copenhagen’s Middel­grunden offshore wind farm, located just off the city’s harbour, has been remarkably well received, thanks to a strong public information campaign and an innovative ownership strategy. When they first heard about the project, residents were worried about their view of the harbour, the farm’s impact on aquatic life, low-frequency noise pollution and potential disruptions to the shipping industry, among other things. To alleviate their concerns, the city undertook a comprehensive environmental assessment and included residents in every step of the process. They even organized a field trip to another wind farm, which eliminated fears about noise. (Later studies also dealt with the concern about migratory birds—which, clever beings that they are, tend to avoid wind turbines, as do ships.) It was eventually agreed that the turbines would be placed three kilometres from shore and laid out in an arc, thus mirroring the shape of the historic defences surrounding the city.