In an effort to make their environment green-friendly, several communities in the North are moving forward with projects to help reduce their carbon footprint.
Temiskaming Shores is one of them.
After years of discussions, plans are now set in motion for Canadian Solar Inc. to install three separate 10 MW solar farms within the community including one on municipal property and two on privately- owned property.
“The community sees this as a way to get ourselves more known and to be put on the map for green energy projects,” said James Franks, economic development officer for Temiskaming Shores.
The city was first approached by Canadian Solar in early 2009, with big plans to construct several projects.
In April of 2010, they were awarded three contracts.
They’re now undertaking a development phase, and are under process for the renewable energy approval.
It’s now just a matter of time before it gets approved.
“Worst case scenario, the project will be permitted by late 2012 and under construction in 2013,” said Jeff Roy, representative for Canadian Solar Inc. “But we’re working to get the projects moving much earlier.”
Approximately 133,000 total solar modules will be installed for the project, with an overall provincial content level of 60 per cent, as per the Feed-In Tariff (FIT) plan.
Which means that more than half of the parts constructed for the project will have to be built in Ontario, such as modules and inverters.
“We definitely want to use local firms as much as possible,” Roy said. “Even as we’re doing some of this development for geotechnical studies or other on-site field work that needs to be completed prior to construction.”
Franks said he would love to see local businesses help with the construction phase of the project, but as of yet, there have only been discussions and nothing has been written in stone.
Anywhere from 60 to 100 people could be employed for the construction.
“At peak, it’s a pretty big boom as far as work goes, and the township will obviously feel that,” said Roy. “We will pull as much as we can from the local labour market.”
Overall, the entire project will cost approximately $150 million and will service the community for 20 years.
“Those are significant dollars for a small community in Northern Ontario,” Franks said.
Ambrose Raftis works as head of the Green Temiskaming Development Co-operative, and doesn’t see this project as well as everyone else.
“The whole process is based on ownership,” he said. “If you don’t own it you don’t get anything from it and that’s what we sort of learned here.”
Raftis was poised to see the community have a solar farm installed, but the difference is, he wanted the municipality to own it.
He contacted council on several occasions to inform it of the possibilities of owning a solar farm, several months before Canadian Solar first stepped onto the city’s land, but got little co-operation.
Ambrose said if the municipality owned the solar farm, at the end of the 20 years, it would have about $200 million in access revenue.
“We learned that the city’s total interest in the 20 years would be in the $3 million range,” he said, with Canadian Solar spearheading the project. “We were pretty disgusted with that, going from $200 million to $3 million. Essentially we’re being paid to cut the grass.”
Franks said he sees it as a different story.
“The community would have made the revenue from it if we built it. He’s not wrong,” said Franks. “They’re going to make millions of dollars from this contract. But the reality is, our community didn’t have $150 million to build a project of this size.”
He said the fact that they’re not going to make the profit is irrelevant because they couldn’t have been able to do anything in the first place.
“What we get out of it is a lease rent from the properties, we get some jobs out of the community, some community support,” he said. “It benefits us that way. There is some revenue and some jobs created here.”
