Alberta’s Solar Boom with Dan Balaban of Greengate Power
Solar boomed in Alberta in 2021. In April the Claresholm Solar Project, the largest solar farm in Canadian history, began feeding solar electricity into the grid. But even before that construction had already begun on the Travers Solar Project, a 465-megawatt solar mega-project, fully 3.5 times larger than Claresholm. These are just two of many projects now under development in solar-rich Alberta.
We met Gregory Lamming (the guy with the I love PV button) at the Claresholm project in 2021 and talked to him about how that solar project works hand-in-hand with grazing the original use of the land (see Solar and Sheep video below).
We sat down with Dan Balaban, CEO of Greengate Power, earlier this year to talk about Alberta’s solar boom.
Energy Transition – Reclaiming abandoned oil wells with solar
Then we met up with Keith Hirsche a farmer and oilman from Taber, Alberta. He’s now building one of the most amazing energy transition pilot projects we’ve seen on Green Energy Futures. Hirsche’s company RenuWell is reclaiming abandoned oil well sites by installing small solar farms on the same footprint.
The projects replace lost oil lease payments to farmers and taxes to municipalities with new revenues from solar farms that are 750 kilowatts to about one megawatt in size. When you consider Alberta has 170,000 abandoned oil well sites there is a huge potential for this pretty cool idea.
Skyfire Energy at 20 – David Kelly started in solar in the very beginning
New the end of 2021 we sat down with David Kelly, a pioneer of the solar industry in Alberta who was there in the beginning. It’s somewhat ironic because in the days when Kelly founded SkyFire Energy solar was a very niche market and one of the bigger customers was the oil industry that needed power in some very remote locations. Kelly and his company built some of the signature projects that marked the ascent of solar at various tipping points over the years. But in 2021 things came full circle for SkyFire that completed its first utility-scale solar project for Enbridge, an oil company.
Canada’s largest solar project came online in April 2021
The Claresholm solar project came online this spring. The 132-megawatt project consists of 477,000 solar modules and will produce enough electricity to power 33,000 homes. This is the largest solar project in Canada, but it won’t be for long.
The Travers solar project we talked about earlier is 465 megawatts and was already under construction when Claresholm went live. This project is 3.5 times larger and most of the electricity has been presold to Amazon that is building a $4.5 billion cloud computing center in southern Alberta.