Jan. 26, 2012
Here is an article I've written about projects located in nearby places I intend to bicycle to this year.
Surrounded by solar jobs
By David Hoffman
January 26, 2012
By the end of next year eight huge solar power stations around Smiths Falls will be feeding 70 megawatts of electricity into the Hydro One network. During the daytime all of our local electricity will come from these generators without air pollution, waste products or even moving parts.
Locally, a solar farm is about constructing rows of thousands of racks that support rectangular solar panels in a big open rectangular field, wiring them all together to feed the Hydro One grid and then moving on to construct thousands more in the next big open rectangular field. In short, it is about local jobs building abundant, clean local electricity.
Situated eight kilometres southwest of town, the first two solar farms built in our area are called Elmsley East and West. Developed by Electricite de France's New Energy Canada (EdF ENC), Elmsley can be seen from Bay Road east of Tower Road, about two km north of Highway 15. Construction began in June 2010. Together the two projects are designed to employ 86,000 solar panels to generate a peak of 24 megawatts. EdF ENC says they represent an investment of over $300 million.
The company opened a 23-megawatt solar farm south of Arnprior at Galetta Side Road and Highway 17 in 2010. Construction employed a peak of 150 workers. EDF ENC's solar director Jon Kieran was vice chairman of the Canadian Solar Industries Association in 2010.
The solar panels were built by Suntech, the world's largest manufacturer, based in San Francisco. Up to February 2011, Suntech had delivered over 13 million panels around the world. Suntech was founded in 2001 by China's Zhengrong Shi, now a 49-year-old billionaire.
The Elmsley site has large deposits of surface rock which, EdF ENC's operations company enXco Service Canada Corp. says, required an innovative drilling and grouted pile solution. However, construction was suspected of disturbing nearby well water, which also revealed that municipalities and townships have surprisingly little control over the impact of such building. Since then, the Ontario environment ministry determined well water "turbidity" was caused by drilling the post holes and expected that the turbidity would eventually settle. It wasn't an easy call because residents had no baseline water tests to point to, before the fact. As a result, the solar farms to follow around Smiths Falls will have to provide well water monitoring up to 500 metres away before, during and after construction.
The next six solar farms are being developed by San Francisco-based Recurrent Energy, and they are conveniently called RE Smiths Falls 1 through RE Smiths Falls 6, each one of 10 MW peak output. They will be built a few km north, northwest and southeast of our town on tree-bordered open fields similar to that of EdF ENC's Elmsley projects.
Annual power generation from each 10 MW solar farm is forecast to be 14.7 million kilowatt-hours, equivalent to the electricity used yearly by 1,400 average homes. In terms of productivity, that's like a plant factor of about 33 percent, 12 hours a day.
Construction begins on RE Smiths Falls 5 and 6 before this spring as site conditions allow.
Public meetings for all six of Recurrent Energy's Smiths Falls solar farms have been completed. According to company spokesman Brett James in Toronto, it is likely the next two solar farms, RE Smiths Falls 2 and 4, will be provincially approved early this year so construction at one can start in the first half of the year and the other later in 2012. Approval of the last two, RE Smiths Falls 1 and 3, will be possible later this year so that site preparation can start this fall.
The Recurrent Energy solar farm that will be nearest to town is RE Smiths Falls 1, which will be built south of Eric Hutcheson Road, west of the VIA Rail Line and north of Otter Creek, barely a 1.5 km drive from Brockville Street's County Fair Mall. Students from nearby Smiths Falls District Collegiate Institute could probably walk there in 15 minutes using trails behind their school. Fittingly, the 48 hectare site is also bisected by Hydro One's big transmission line corridor. Electricity will be fed into the power grid by interconnecting with Eric Hutcheson Road's existing distribution line at a transformer substation. Construction was originally proposed to start last November but site preparation probably won't start until this fall.
On the south side of Otter Creek across from RE Smiths Falls 1 will be RE Smiths Falls 6. The 33 ha site extends down to South Elmsley Townline Road, three km southeast of Eric Hutcheson Road. A 30-year land lease agreement has been signed along with a 20 year contract to sell power to the Ontario Power Authority. Construction was planned to start last July but approval came from the Ontario environment ministry only in the first week of 2012, so it will begin in the next few months.
If a foot path was built between these two solar farms (and a foot bridge over the creek and wetlands between them), it would take over half an hour to walk from end to end.
Recurrent Energy's other four solar farms will be built northwest of Smiths Falls. Drive three km west on Perth-bound Highway 43 to Glenview Road, home of Glenview Iron and Metal, and six km to the end of Glenview to Buttermilk Hill Road and you find the site of RE Smiths Falls 2 on an uncultivated parcel extending two km northwest to Drummond Concession Road 10. Construction of this project was planned to commence last July but now is only likely to start before this July.
Backtrack on Glenview a kilometre to Armstrong Road and proceed west two km to find the sites of RE Smiths Falls 3 and 4. These will occupy a three-kilometre long strip of land extending up to Concession Road 1. Construction of RE Smiths Falls 3 won't begin before late 2012 but ground may be broken for RE Smiths Falls 4 this summer. RE Smiths Falls 4 will be accessible from 319 Drummond Concession Road 1.
RE Smiths Falls 5 will go two kilometres further west down Armstrong Road where it meets Station Road on a 40 ha parcel that runs north to Dopson Road. Construction of this project was proposed to start last July but now looks like it will begin this spring.
James says Recurrent recognizes local support is an important issue and they intend to be "a good corporate citizen in the area for many years to come" and to utilize local expertise.
In the United States, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that a megawatt of solar can add $240,000 to the local economy. If that were true around Smiths Falls, these eight projects would inject over $20 million into our area. Meanwhile, following the well water flap from the EdF ENC Elmsley project, municipalities, townships and residents are concerned about a boost in infrastructure costs caused by solar farm construction, mainly resulting from road wear caused by trucking in all of the components, often on unpaved routes.
This electricity will certainly be useful. Power output from solar farms tends to correspond with daytime demand peaks, highest in summer when everybody turns on the air conditioning, although output on less-than-optimum cloudy days will be relatively higher in winter because solar semiconductors work more efficiently in cold temperatures. The big difference is that construction of these solar farms is employment closer to home, and the power from them will also reduce transmission line losses compared to that from distant power stations.
Hydro One is paying over 40 cents per kilowatt hour for electricity from solar farms--now--but the whole point is to ramp up solar panel manufacturing so that power costs less later. This is very different than the funding mechanisms used to get Canadian solar off the ground in the 1980s after the oil shocks and nuclear disasters when the solar industry was supported by combinations of research funding and project cost-sharing grants. Today, projects get paid when they are productive, creating a business environment that opens solar up to the routine financial spheres of investment and insurance. The combination of global mass production plus cost-saving innovations mean that the cost of solar electricity and traditional fossil-fueled electricity will converge in the near future.
David Hoffman is a freelance writer and bicycle mechanic in Smiths Falls.