Solar farms vs. farms (for food)

How’s this for a stumper?

The Toronto Star has an article about the debate about solar farm development  on prime agricultural land under the new Green Energy Act FIT rates.  Short summary, solar industry types (led by CanSIA) and farmers hoping to develop some of their land into solar farms are protesting rules for Feed-in tariffs that will restrict solar development on prime agricultural land.

Weirdly enough, it’s a debate where everyone is right, their position is reasonable and none of the claims really run counter to the others.  Strange.  This is my very over-simplified version of the positions and stakeholders:

Farmers: It’s their land and they can do what they damn well please with it.  If they can make more money by turning the land over to electrical production for 20-25 years, no one should have the right to stop them.  The land isn’t harmed, the soil and ground water isn’t contaminated, and the potential outcome of leaving the land fallow for that long could be to significantly improve the potential yield of the land in the future.

Solar Energy Industry Types: The amount of farm land that might end up being used for solar energy around 1/10th of 1%, but this represents the small number of very large scale projects that Ontario’s Solar Energy Industry really needs to develop the scale required to become internationally competitive.  Banning or limiting these projects will diminish the success of Ontario Solar companies and entrepreneurs, and it will cost Ontario many high value green jobs.

Government, Farm minded people & Environmentalists: Prime agricultural land should be used to grow food, solar energy development should take place elsewhere (rooftops, low quality land etc).  They want to avoid this:

Single Land Use - Solar Farm in Germany - Nearly total ground cover

When I first considered this, I thought that they should include an exemption for solar farm development that uses sun trackers – that is, allow this:

At first, my take was, allow this:

Dual Land Use - Solar Panels installed using sun trackers on a farm in Spain, farm is still producing food.

Trackers allow for the land to continue to be used for agriculture, can co-exist with pasture land easily, and are ideal for putting allot of solar power into small spaces like the wind-breaks between fields.  Also, they’re a fairly mature technology with lots of expired patents, so any metal shop that could make an automotive frame can make the things fairly easily.  Lots of the companies on the market don’t actually ship the trackers, they ship the controller that detects the sun and controls the movement, and licence the design and manufacturer to local contractors.

As an added benefit, you get significantly more power per day from the same panels because they’re kept at the optimum angle to the sun (where as fixed panels like the ones in the first picture are close to optimum only for an hour or so each day).  Field results from tracking vary, but 40% to 50%  more energy for the same panels is a safe number to use as a ball park when going from fixed to tracking systems.  With an efficient panel, the extra value of the energy can more than pay for the cost of installing and maintaining the panel, especially in Ontario with the feed-in tariff.

However, thinking on it a little more, I’m not sure I’d actually want to see an exemption specifically for trackers if the ban on farm development went through.

That puts the government in the position of picking and choosing technologies (and defining what is and isn’t a tracker) and it stifles innovation.  Instead, it seems reasonable to require that solar farm projects should not use more than a specific amount of any given farmer’s usable farm land.  Nobody would argue that a farmer shouldn’t have panels on his roof, and it follows that a small row of panels along the wind break between fields or a few sun trackers in among a cattle pasture wouldn’t be something we’d want to ban either.

But it’s less clear what the rule should be if a farmer with 200 arces wants to turn 4 of them into a solar farm.  It’s 2% of that farmer’s land, but could end up contributing significantly more than than 2% to his income.

It’s not a clear cut issue, and whatever the Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure decide, if they’re smart (they are) they’ll keep it simple, won’t pick and choose winners, technologies and won’t ban anything – rather, they’ll put a reasonable and transparent process where solar development on agricultural land is considered on a case by case basis, with clear guidelines of what the goals of the process are.  The occasional project that plans to completely cover hundreds of acres of farm land will know that it has a high bar to to jump, and the farmer than wants to turn a pasture into a little extra profit won’t have to worry.

More Good News for Ontario Renewable Energy

Renewable Energy World just published a well written article about the proposed Ontario Green Energy Act.  I was quoted a couple of times, and enjoyed the article as a whole, although it’s still strange to see what was a 30 to 40 minute conversation condensed into a few sentences.  I’ve linked to co-author Jon Warren’s blog before, and I agree with most of what he has to say.

I’ve written in support of the Green Energy Act already, but this is fairly thorough treatment of what this act will specifically mean for renewable energy companies in Ontario.  Definitely worth a read.  Jon doesn’t say too much about some of the other advantages that Ontario has right now for renewable energy ventures.  First off, the Ontario Green Energy Act, and the Clean Tech Investment Fund are just the tip of the iceberg for government funding opportunities in Ontario, and many of the other funds are cozying up to Green companies as well.  Add to that federal government programs like the SR&ED and IRAP, along with the SDTC, and local support, funding and research collaboration from groups like OCETA, OCE and even start-up support from the MaRS DD, and basically it’s not just renewable energy companies, but renewable energy innovators and entrepreneurs that are getting the love.

SR&ED is a great example – you get a direct cash reimbursement of up to 35% of research expenses up to $2 Million, and %20 on excess amounts.  It’s not specifically a renewable incentive, but ANY company no matter how small that’s actually doing research can qualify.  Basically, there are good incentives at the Federal level, and Ontario is upping the ante.  Throw in all that under-utilized automotive infrastructure and I guarantee you that there will be more than a few clean tech success stories in Ontario.  Will Ontario be the next Germany?  In the sense of being a solar energy success story, sure.

One small clarification, the photo of a solar panel installation is credited to Morgan Solar, and it’s not emphasized that we took the photo, but the panel pictured is not ours.  That photo were taken by our engineers on a day where we were helping some people from the Toronto Atmospheric Fund run some tests on the PV array installed on the Automotive Building at Exhibition Place.  They needed to take some measurements, and we happened to have the gear required to do it, so we lent a hand.

Thoughts on the Ontario Green Energy Act

Disclaimer.  I was exhausted after a long, hard, but very good week when I wrote this.  So forgive me if I ramble or if my tone wanders.

I’m in the Ottawa airport waiting for a flight home to Toronto.  My main reason for coming to Ottawa was to hear George Smitherman, Ontario’s Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, talk about the proposed Ontario Green Energy Act.  I was a true believer in this before I heard him speak the first time last November, and the more I read or hear about this piece of legislation the more convinced I am.

Too often, politicians use lofty sounding rhetoric, but this really will make Ontario a  North American leader in renewable energy, conservation and energy policy.  This will create jobs in clean technology and lead to less carbon emissions and pollution in Ontario.  If we’re lucky, this will prove to be a model too tempting not to copy.

It’s also a politically risky move that includes controversial and in some cases, extremely unpopular provisions, like anti-NIMBY policies and more natural gas fired power plants.  These are not elements of a “crowd pleaser” act.  People like to use language like “the importance of not overruling local planning decisions” and “not consulting the community”, but it’s just NIMBYism dressed up.  I’m sympathetic to people who don’t want a wind farm or natural gas power plant in their community, but Toronto is downwind from the dirtiest smokestack in the western world.

Really, Nanticoke is that bad.  From a a summary of the CEC Taking Stock 2004 report (quote from this PDF):

In Canada, a single facility was responsible for eight percent of all toxic air emissions – Ontario Power Generation’s Nanticoke Generation Station. The largest power station of its kind in North America, Nanticoke’s eight 500 megawatt generators produce a total of 4,000 megawatts of power at this 30 year old facility.

The Nanticoke plant was also responsible for the second largest onsite air releases of mercury – some 226 kilograms (497 pounds) – by a Canadian electrical facility…

Like I said, I can understand why people might not want a power station near their house, but when you’re planning a provincial wide power grid, and you want to shut down something that big, you’re not going to make everyone happy.

In a reply to a comment on a previous blog post,  I said this energy act looked like the “least bad” option.  There are bad parts, there will be unintended consequences and negative effects, and in some cases there are even things I hate, but at the end of the day, I’m going to withdraw that statement.  I think this is a good energy act.  It will lead to better conditions in Ontario for green energy entrepreneurs, for companies serious about green energy projects, and for people looking to migrate into a sustainable industry.

And we’ll get to breathe less vaporized mercury for the privilege.  Sounds good to me.