Wind turbines at sunset near the Transalta McBride Lake wind farm project near Ardenville, Alta., on Oct. 4, 2022.Guillaume Nolet/The Globe and Mail
Rural municipalities in Alberta say companies that build renewable power projects in the province should be subject to a bond that will cover the cost of disposing of solar panels and wind turbines when they reach the end of their lives to ensure taxpayers and landowners aren’t left footing the bill.
Alberta leads Canada in the sheer number of renewable power projects being built, bringing jobs and a flood of new revenues for rural municipalities in the form of taxes. But the development is also causing consternation.
Energy projects have stung rural communities before. Orphaned oil and gas wells litter the province, left behind by bankrupt operators or run partially dry then sold to small companies that can’t – or won’t – pay to plug and mitigate them. And municipal councils and landowners don’t want to be stuck with a similar problem when it comes to solar and wind assets.
In some regions, such as Foothills County, south of Calgary, oil and gas infrastructure left over from the first oil boom – a century ago, when reclamation rules were non-existent – continues to cause problems.
“We haven’t learned from that lesson, so it’s frustrating for me as we keep repeating this,” Foothills Reeve Delilah Miller told The Globe and Mail in a recent interview, stressing the need for more robust rules for renewable projects as well.
Ms. Miller’s municipality was one of two that sponsored a resolution at the Rural Municipalities of Alberta (RMA) fall convention, since passed, urging the province to learn from its mistakes with fossil fuels and deal with the end-of-life issue for renewables before it’s too late.
The resolution asks the government to mandate the collection of adequate funds for a cleanup via, for example, a reclamation surety bond as a condition of project approval, with the amount of the bond based on data-driven projections of actual reclamation costs.
The Coaldale Solar facility, a joint venture of Concord Green Energy and the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, near Coaldale, Alta., on Oct. 5, 2022.Guillaume Nolet/The Globe and Mail
It’s the second time Foothills has proposed a resolution covering renewables. The first one pushed for some kind of solar-panel recycling program, after which the province implemented a pilot project.
“In European countries and even in the U.S., some of these solar panels and wind [turbines] have reached their end of life, and the companies that have installed them are long gone,” Ms. Miller said.
“It’s prompted a similar situation that we’re having in Alberta with our oil and gas industry, where we’re having to do the cleanup on our orphaned wells. That’s where this derives from, because I could see the writing on the wall here.”
Evan Wilson, the senior director of policy and government affairs at the Canadian Renewable Energy Association (CanREA), says Alberta is already an incredibly well-regulated jurisdiction when it comes to end-of-life considerations for renewable energy projects.
Provincial regulations developed in 2018 include conservation requirements and reclamation standards for decommissioning renewable energy sites. Companies remain liable for decommissioned sites for five years to ensure the land is properly reclaimed and must file statements indicating where the end-of-life financing will come from.
“I think our members really understand the gravity of the situation in Alberta – how seriously people take their land and what the expectations are. So they really want to meet landowners where they are on this,” Mr. Wilson said in a recent interview.
Landowners ultimately have a veto over the building of renewable energy projects on their properties. Mr. Wilson said that means developers have to be responsive and address any concerns “or they’re not going to get access to the land.”
Ms. Miller said while the reclamation directives are useful, “the piece that’s missing is there is no bond that they’re requiring these companies put up,” so the financial burden of a cleanup may eventually fall to landowners, municipalities or the province.
Sheep roam at BluEarth Renewables Burdett Solar Facility project, County of Forty Mile, near the hamlet of Burdett, Alta., on Oct. 4, 2022.Guillaume Nolet/The Globe and Mail
Renewable projects generally have a shelf life of 25 to 30 years.
RMA president Paul McLauchlin – himself a biologist, environmental scientist and renewables proponent – worries that the relatively short time it takes renewable projects to reach a return on investment means they could be sold off to smaller companies that can’t deal with a cleanup.
“Without having some sort of bonding, some sort of insurance, we could quite easily – all over the landscape – have derelict renewable projects. Because we’ve seen that with oil and gas,” he said in an interview.
Mr. Wilson countered that, unlike an oil or gas well, even when a renewable project reaches the end of its life, the solar or wind resource remains, as do established relationships with landowners and transmission connections to the power grid.
“You may have to retire the technology that’s there, but you’re thinking about options for repowering in the long term as well,” he said.
“Because if something is going to be profitable, and a location is going to be a good investment in 2022, it’s likely to be a good investment again in 2050, and you’re going to want to put just new turbines there and new solar panels.”
At the end of the day, he said, the renewables sector is aware that Albertans care about their land and want to protect it.
“People’s concerns about what happens at the end of life is legitimate, and we’re happy to keep having these conversations.”