Imagine this scenario: An entrepreneur comes knocking at the doors of a mid-sized Ontario city, hoping to gain the necessary approvals to build a greenhouse vegetable operation on the outskirts of town.

The project would be built in phases, but over five years would cover more than 240 hectares (600 acres). The value of the plant’s construction itself would be worth about $500 million.

Once built, it would produce about 1,900 greenhouse jobs, with an additional 4,000 jobs in indirect employment in sales, logistics and transportation. It would inject an estimated $580 million into Ontario’s economy each year, with vegetable sales to buyers in Canada and the U.S. accounting for $205 million of that amount.

The scale of the project would essentially dwarf the 16-hectare operation being pondered by a numbered Ontario company for land in south London.

Additional details on that proposal were expected later this month.

Now imagine that all the municipal approvals are in place. The greenhouse mega-project is a go — except for one big problem: There isn’t enough electricity to run it.

Old hydro transmission lines can’t handle the load; the province’s electrical infrastructure is the weakest link in an otherwise ambitious, credible and sustainable undertaking.

How long would it be before the Liberal government at Queen’s Park felt the wrath of local businesspeople and politicians reaching to fill the vacuum left by the province’s declining manufacturing sector? Not long, would be my guess.

This scenario may sound improbable — even ludicrous — but for greenhouse growers in southern Essex County, it’s a frustrating reality.

The massive hothouse vegetable industry in the Leamington-Kingsville-Lakeshore area, already the biggest concentration of vegetable greenhouses in North America, can’t move forward because of foot-dragging by politicians and provincial bureaucrats that has lasted years.

Like most forms of agriculture, greenhouse vegetable operations have changed radically over the past quarter century. Small owner-operated greenhouse farms heated by oil, gas and coal-fired boilers have given way to massive operations that employ hundreds and cultivate dozens of hectares under glass and plastic structures in which everything, from soil temperature to irrigation to fertilization, is computer-controlled and monitored. Payrolls of domestic and offshore workers are worth millions, while the growing, harvesting, marketing, selling and shipping of produce are handled by operations teams as slick and professional as in any industry on the continent.

As the popularity and demand for fresh and local food grows, the Ontario Greenhouse Vegetable Growers estimates that the industry’s expansion in Essex County alone over the next five years could easily be worth a half-billion dollars — if only the electrical power were available to support it. And it isn’t.

Leamington Mayor John Paterson, the face of the embattled community in the wake of the Heinz plant closure and who easily won re-election last fall, says the area has become frustrated by the administrative and bureaucratic slow dance being strung out by provincial authorities.

“We’ve said to the minister of energy, we’ve said to the Ontario Power Authority, we’ve said to everyone who will listen to us, if you don’t do this Leamington and Kingsville are stymied. We can’t grow. We’ll start losing industry, which is what is happening right now,” Paterson said earlier this week.

The latter notion — that the electricity problems are forcing growers to examine other options — is a reference to an expansion by Leamington-based Nature Fresh Farms into the United States. Company owner Peter Quiring has announced he’ll build a $200-million expansion in Ohio by 2022, largely to serve American customers. His domestic expansion plans are more modest — due, in part, to the electricity shortage.

So while Toronto bureaucrats fiddle, some Essex County greenhouse growers are doing a slow burn in what feels like a kind of Bizarro world. They drive right past the hundreds of wind turbines that reap the benefits of the Liberal government’s much-vaunted green energy policies, at a cost of many millions, yet can’t get the energy and transmission lines they need to expand already proven agricultural operations and to sell their own power back to the grid.

And don’t even get them started about the wasted provincial money sucked from the treasury in the gas-plant scandal.

This is not a new issue. Former finance minister Dwight Duncan promised to solve it three years ago. It needs to get done — even if it is 200 kilometres from the nearest Liberal seat.

Larry Cornies is a London-based journalist and educator. cornies@gmail.com