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LETTER: Is a solar farm feasible, given St. Albert's location?

"We need to request an audit by an independent company that will not profit from this type of project."
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As a scientist it has always seemed obvious solar energy would play an important long-term role in the future of human energy needs. After all, we’ve been using it for space exploration to power satellites and Martian rovers.

For local, small-scale use, solar panels provide a great option as a summertime off-grid power supply when coupled with overnight battery storage. The technology has given us nice summer garden lights. And with the development of large-capacity lithium batteries, solar energy is even starting to make headwinds into the future of live-aboard catamarans.

Even for larger-scale use in some favourable geographic regions, solar energy has become a significant part of the energy mix. But can it scale up to supply energy to a large community in the northern latitudes? Unfortunately, this has not yet been demonstrated, fiscally or logistically.

Canada’s high latitude, with its cold, snowy winters and short days, is not well situated for large-scale solar energy. The further north, the less practical it is. Although the long summer days do provide many hours of sunshine, during the winter months the sun is visible for only a short period of time, during which it remains close to the horizon. This forces the sunlight to travel through a thicker cross-section of energy-absorbing atmosphere, thus reducing the solar irradiance received by the photo-voltaic (PV) cells.

I grew up in St. Albert and currently am a St. Albert property owner, so I’m concerned about how the proposed solar-farm project will impact our taxes and how it will affect our city in the future. The ATCO study has suggested this project could be profitable, but are they an unbiased source?

Long-term benefits to stakeholders are entirely unknown to anyone with respect to renewable projects in Canada, simply because they haven’t been around long enough to study. Solar cells and solar inverters contain toxic chemicals and naturally deteriorate over time. They have an estimated lifespan of 20-30 years, after which they need to be carefully disposed of and replaced. So, it’s possible these farms will eventually become financial liabilities rather than revenue assets.

There have been some early failures, for example the Medicine Hat and the Blind River solar farms. Admittedly, one used a different technology (concentrated solar thermal) and the other had financial issues. Nevertheless, these failures demonstrate the marginal economics of solar farms located in high latitudes.

Council members should provide greater clarity of what are the near- and long-term plans for a success case and contingencies for a failure outcome.

It would be prudent to have an evidence-based procedure to investigate and consider the costs, ramifications, and returns of a solar-farm project of this particular design, in this particular location.

We need to request an audit by an independent company that will not profit from this type of project. Should projections for net benefits, both in electricity resource and financial return, be unacceptably small or risky, then investment in this project should be carefully reconsidered.

Robert Paul, Geophysicist, St. Albert and Jakarta, Indonesia




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