Solar power for 17,000 homes
It’s showing that Canada can be at the forefront of this worldwide energy revolution
Who doesn’t crave a little sunshine, especially this time of year? Certainly those involved in building Canada’s biggest solar project to date, and what will be one of the largest solar power generation farms in North America do.
Unveiled last month as part of what’s called the Grand Renewable Solar Project in Haldimand County on the north shores of Lake Erie and along the Grand River, the farm, when up and running in the spring of 2015, will produce 100 megawatts of energy a year — enough to power about 17,000 homes.
The project is but one piece of a larger $5-billion initiative between Samsung Renewable Energy and the province of Ontario to create a cluster of solar and wind projects that when all told will generate about 1,400 megawatts of green power.
The solar portion of the initiative is being developed by Samsung, Canadian Solar — which is also building a nearby plant to produce and supply the solar panels — and ABB Canada, who with Bondfield Construction is literally moving the dirt around as well as providing the equipment and engineering know-how to install 120,000 foundations that will hold 450,000 solar panels on the 800-acre farm.
It is a significant step forward in adding renewable energy to Ontario’s grid and reducing reliance on coal and other fossil fuels to keep the lights on. It also catapults Ontario into an elite club of countries like Germany and Denmark who are at the forefront of making solar a mainstay of their energy production strategy.
“It is an interesting trend in that it’s showing that Canada can be at the forefront of this worldwide energy revolution,” says Jose Etcheverry, co-chair of the Toronto-based Sustainable Energy Initiative and an associate professor with York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. “The reality is that PV [photovoltaic] prices have come down big time, which makes a project like this make all the more sense.”
Indeed, beyond the obvious benefits of harnessing clean power from a free and unlimited source, the solar portion of the project demonstrates the economic viability of PV technology, which like televisions, CDs, printers, mobile phones and other technology products has come down in price significantly, thanks to both innovation and mass production.
“The big change has been the cost of the solar panels themselves,” says Gary Shaw, vicepresident and general manager of power generation, at ABB in Burlington, Ont. “The cost-per-watt of a solar panel four years ago could have been in the range of, say, $3 a watt, and these days you’re looking at less than $1 a watt.”
And the more solar production online, the cheaper is the cost of the power it produces. According to global energy think-tank Ren21, the price per kilowatt hour of electricity that solar produces has fallen by more than half in the past five years.
Indeed, of the US$244-billion committed to renewable energy projects globally last year, solar power was by far the leader, receiving 57% of total new investment, according to Ren21’s annual renewable energy report. It also ranked Canada among the top five countries globally for total renewable electric capacity.
The Ontario government’s feed-in tariff program — though an ongoing source of controversy and debate — has helped to propel forward the province’s solar industry. Launched in 2009 to promote renewable energy and create jobs, the program provides various subsidies for those who invest in renewable energy.
It also pays a discounted rate for power generated by solar and other renewable energy.
To be sure, solar has its challenges, one obvious one being that the sun goes down or hides behind the clouds. There are also setup and system costs, particularly for a commercial project like the one in Haldimand that in the short run makes solar a still-expensive proposition.
Yet a growing number of countries globally are reaching what is called grid parity, where the cost of solar generation is competitive with that of traditional fossil fuels — a trend Prof. Etcheverry believes is likely to continue.
“It has been much maligned on the global front but the numbers speak for themselves,” he says. “At the end of the day this is an industry that is supposed to grow to be among the most important energy sectors in the world, and in Ontario that is where we appear to be going.”