Saturday, August 18, 2012

Canadian Solar Farm near Cornwall

If you take the train from Toronto to Montreal, about 10 minutes before you get into Cornwall, there's an interesting sight on the south side: the SunE Rutley Solar Farm. It consists of thousands and thousands of solar panels that generate enough electricity to power 1200 homes. It went by too fast for me to get a good picture, but there's one here that, unfortunately, doesn't really convey how big it appears.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Solar Energy projects are fine if they are in the right place. Canadian Solar is putting a huge solar energy project on farmland that has been in active production for generations, driving thousands of steel piles into a vulnerable aquifer that supplies drinking water to thousands of residents and stringing a 10-foot chain link fence across a famous wildlife corridor. All supported by our government.

This is not a farm, it is not a park. This is heavy industry and needs to be put in the right place. Stripping the earth's surface to help the environment is not green energy.

Phil said...

Every time I drive from Waterloo to Toronto I go past this bad boy, http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/clean-energy/halton-hills-generating-station-6415-mw-halton-hills

Facility looks really neat from the road.

Jeffrey Shallit said...

Sounds like anonymous has a bad case of the nimbies.

Who cares if the farm land has "been in active production for generations"? The fact that this site was chosen means the land was cheap, which also means its profitability as farmland wasn't so hot. I don't understand the romanticization of farms.

As for "thousands of steel piles into a vulnerable aquifer", do you have any evidence at all that this would harm drinking water? This complaint lacks all plausibility and simply makes you look silly.

Seanna Watson said...

Here's my "YIMBY" PV project: http://heliospower.wordpress.com/pv-in-the-suburbs/

Unknown said...

YIMBY. LOVE that acronym!
Wish *I* had thought of it!

100% agree with Dr Shallit about the stupidity of the romanticization of farms. After all, those monoculture farms had displaced some forest (or whatever came immediately before), and that forest had displaced some beautiful lake bed, and so on.

I would LOVE to have big beautiful giant electricity-generating windmills & solar farms in MY backyard.

The "issue" of the "ugliness" of wind farms is a 100% non-issue.
Why the F would the "ugliness"
of human construction begin with windmills? Where was all the opposition to the ugliness of a million churches or WalMarts on every corner? Or maybe some people find nuclear power plants ugly? (whether or not they find think they're safe) Or coal plants?