Massive Calgary-area solar project rejected in favour of wildlife conservation

A large solar project that was proposed to be built on a parcel of land south of Calgary near a lake listed as one of Canada’s most important areas for birds has been rejected by the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC).

Frank Lake is a wetland important to hundreds of species of birds, ranging from ducks to trumpeter swans and peregrine falcons. The wetland east of High River is listed as one of the Important Bird Areas in Canada.

According to the AUC decision released on Thursday, the commission is not convinced that the overall benefits of the project outweigh its negative impacts.

“Foothills Solar submitted that the project would be in the public interest for a variety of reasons, including reduced greenhouse gas emissions and other local economic benefits.

“However, the potential for the project to result in high bird mortalities, and the impacts of the project on the Frank Lake IBA and the social and environmental values that it represents are unacceptable,” states the AUC report.

The Alberta Wilderness Association said there needs to be solar development for Alberta to approach net-zero carbon goals but development should not come at the expense of vulnerable species and habitats.

“Frank Lake is internationally recognized for its significance to nesting and migrating birds,” said Ruiping Luo, AWA conservation specialist.

Luo said AWA supports putting renewable energy projects on brownfields or in industrial sites.

“There’s a lot of areas that have already been disturbed. There’s a lot of footprint from roads and oil and gas and from previous development that could be reused for things like this. From our perspective, so much of the native habitat has already been lost — those should be the target areas for any new developments,” Luo said.

“There are a lot of wind projects and a lot of solar projects that have been proposed and it’s kind of a crazy time. It’s the wild west,” said Cliff Wallis, president of Cottonwood Consultants. He was an expert witness during the hearings representing the local land owner group.

Wallis said, while projects like these are on private land, they involve public resources like wildlife.

“The birds that use the areas and the pronghorn that migrate through these areas, the farmland issues — those are all public interest things that need to be discussed,” he said.

He’s advocating for a comprehensive policy in Alberta to deal with the boom in solar and wind projects.

“We need to have that discussion. Do we want a threshold for certain classes of farmland to be protected from these things? Do we want migration routes for pronghorn to be respected? Should the projects be closer to where the power is being used? Right now it’s, ‘let’s develop as many of these as fast as we can.’ That’s the policy,” Wallis said.

“There are an incredible variety of birds that nest in the Frank Lake area. It’s a cacophony of sound in the spring.”

Livingstone-Macleod NDP candidate Kevin Van Tighem supports the decision. The retired superintendent of Banff National Park said, “quite a few people” in the area — both  involved in agriculture and those worried about wildlife — had concerns about the project.

“We definitely need to continue to expand our diversity of energy sources in this province and there are smart ways to do it but we don’t need to compromise values that are important to us. We can have both if we plan well and if we have a good regulatory bodies that make principal decisions,” Van Tighem said.

Global News has reached out to the federal and provincial governments and has not received comment.

The 150-megawatt Foothills Solar Project was proposed by Elemental Energy Renewables Inc.

In a statement responding to the AUC decision, the company said:

“Elemental Energy is in the business of building renewable energy projects that benefit our environment, our communities, our partners, and our future generations,” Dan Eaton, director of project development, wrote.

“While we are disappointed in the decision, we are continuing to work with our project partners Cold Lake First Nations and other stakeholders to review the AUC decision and identify opportunities to move the Foothills Solar Project forward.”