Caroline solar meeting draws red line on rural renewable energy projects

CAROLINE — They’re mad as hell and they’re not going to take it.

Now, the tiny hamlet of Caroline is becoming Ground Zero in the battle against contentious renewable power plants on prime agricultural farm land.

And if a Tuesday public meeting is any indication, it’s about to turn into an all-out war against what residents see as ‘woke renewable energy’ in general and the UCP government’s electricity policies and the mandate — or lack thereof — of the Alberta Utilities Commission (AUC) to enforce them.

About 150 people turned out for a public meeting in the local community centre to discuss strategies to fight conditional development approval that had been granted by the AUC late on Friday, February 28.

Although relatively small in numbers, it represented nearly a third of the entire population of the town, which numbers about 500 men, women and children — but not including a presumably equal or greater number of pets.

And despite project developer PACE Canada LP insistence that the vast majority of residents support it — 71% either submitted no reponse or supported it in a survey — the concensus that emerged is that the majority clearly do not. 

And in fact, neither do a half-dozen other municipalities across central Alberta that have mobilized against similar projects in their communities and are banding together to fight them.

“Caroline, as a village of 500 people, may not have enough power or influence on the UCP government, because that's where the change needs to be made,” Russell Barnett, a chartered accountant who moved to Caroline three years ago, told The Western Standard.

Barnett has found himself the defacto leader of the ‘Rural Alberta Concerned Communities Group’ — for lack of a better name. In addition to stopping the present solar application, Barnett said his group wants to raise awareness in the UCP government that its renewables policies are being overlooked and even ignored by government agencies such as the AUC.

“I'm not sure if the UCP is aware of some of the contention and the resistance to the AUC decisions,” he said. “And the AUC forces this through. They override land use bylaws. They ignore municipal councils. They ignore groups like we have here in Caroline, and so the only way to rein this in is with the UCP government stepping in and saying: ‘Listen, we gave you the mandate, and you're not following it’.”

According to Barnett, there are 22 communities in rural Alberta that now have solar farms with 7,155 acres of agricultural land already “under glass.” The AUC is now projected have 25,000 additional acres under existing applications awaiting approval.

“And nobody wants this,” Barnett insists.

At the heart of the issue is a series of amendments to Caroline’s land-use bylaw that were implemented after it reverted to a hamlet late last year. 

Decades of falling population, a shrinking tax base, and lower per-capita funding transfers from the government of Alberta essentially left the town insolvent and unable to pay the long-term debt on major infrastructure projects it already had, namely a water treatment facility to rehabilitate marshlands surrounding the town.

In a bid to attract more industrial development, Caroline’s land use bylaw — a decades old legacy document that dates back to the founding of the town in 1951 — needed to be amended to allow for solar farms. Simply because they didn’t exist when the town was incorporated.

The existing bylaw covered mundane things like restrictions on building gates, fences, and demolition and the number of RVs allowed in agricultural districts. Definitely not the siting of industrial power projects.

Starting around 2018, PACE — a partnership between UK investment company Pathfinder Clean Energy and Germany’s Golbeck Solar, proposed a 14-megawatt facility on the town’s northern border. At 80 acres, it’s almost as large as the town itself.

In this case, the proposed solar farm is to be built on land reserved for future residential development including parks and schools.

What followed was a long, drawn out process that suffered succesive delays stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic and the UCP government’s moratorium on renewable power projects. Then, effective January 1, Caroline was merged into Clearwater County.

PACE, which isn’t a solar power producer per se, has built or is in the process of building similar projects in Hana, Youngstown and Joffre which are all recieving pushback from local residents.

Rather, it’s an investment fund structured as a limited partnership that finances the projects using combinations of government incentives and greenhouse gas emissions credits before selling the facilities, usually within two years of completion.

And in fact, it is allowed to build the project even though commercial offtake agreements to sell the power are “on-going” according to PACE’s website. Company officials didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Succesive speakers at Tuesday’s meeting questioned the business case for the facility — given that the population and power demand is going down, not up — and complained it doesn’t meet the criteria for the UCP government’s new renewables policy that was enacted in 2024 protecting esthetics as well as practical considerations such as abandonement liabilites.

In fact, those don’t have to be adressed until after the project is sold, or more than two years after it presumably comes into operation.

Even though the company recieved a letterr of support from the former town council, none of its past or present elected officials were in attendance at the meeting, which was duly noted.

“The ultimate goal is to get in front of the UCP and, you know, preferably Daniel Smith,” Barnett said. “If we don't stop this, we're gonna have three times more what the entire world already has, and we’re already ‘leading’ (in renewable devlopment) right? So it's a whole jam.”

In a harshly worded response letter to the AUC dated March 14, Barnett summed up the conclusion of Caroline residents, calling the entire approvals process and raoinale for the decision “absurd.”

“The ridiculousness of many of your conclusions, particularly your dismissal of the absence of solar-specific regulations in outdated local plans, undermine the integrity of your public interest mandate,” he wrote. 

“ Your process is flawed because it treats the proximity to homes, parks, and the hamlet as a mere technical detail, rather than a fundamental violation of our community’s vision, municipal rights, and the UCP’s post-pause priorities, exacerbated by the developer’s biased role in consultation and the additional conflicts of interest in reclamation and agricultural practices.”