How Summerside — and Prince Edward Island — are leading the energy revolution in Canada

On a small island, and in a good smaller metropolis, a serious vitality revolution is taking kind — and it’s all due to a will by the individuals who dwell there to do issues a little bit bit otherwise.

From wind farms to large photo voltaic parks, large issues are occurring in Summerside, PEI, a metropolis on the East Coast of Canada with a can-do angle, and a will to behave as a case research for the remainder of the nation on learn how to unleash the renewable vitality revolution.

The group’s signature undertaking is a $69-million, 80-acre photo voltaic undertaking that will likely be logging on later this 12 months.

It’s referred to as the Summerside Sunbank and as soon as it’s totally operational, about 65 per cent of Summerside’s energy will come from renewable vitality produced regionally. That’s a outstanding feat for any metropolis in Canada, particularly one as small as Summerside.

The Sunbank undertaking, together with a number of different vitality and good grid initiatives, displays a spirit of independence that residents are pleased with right here.

Greg Gaudet, {an electrical} engineer and Director of Summerside Electrical, merely calls it “autonomy” — not counting on international vitality markets, which might take wild swings “based mostly on what’s occurring on the earth.”

As for the can-do angle, the mayor, Basil Stewart, says, “Issues gained’t occur on their very own; you’ve bought to make them occur.” At all times fast to achieve for a metaphor, Stewart, who’s served as mayor of Summerside for over three many years, says he likes to consider himself and his workforce as “work horses, not present horses.”

Summerside is a city of 16,000 alongside one of many narrowest stretches of Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province. It’s simply 4 kilometres from the north shore of the Island to the south.

Surrounded on each side by the ocean, there may be an abundance of wind and photo voltaic vitality on the Island — and therein an financial alternative that this unassuming little group has been profiting from for the previous few years.

It’s now eager to indicate the remainder of Canada — and the world — how it may be carried out.

Power independence 

For many years, Summerside relied on electrical energy transmitted through an underwater cable from New Brunswick, simply throughout the Northumberland Strait.

However the metropolis needed to interrupt freed from its have to depend on different provinces for its energy provide, and with wind and photo voltaic, it noticed a chance to take action.

Summerside was in a singular place as a result of it owns its personal electrical utility. It means the residents are the house owners and might decide their very own vitality future. “We have now our personal electrical utility, and we’ve had it for 100 years,” says Stewart.

Mix that with an formidable push by metropolis officers to hunt out federal and provincial cash for renewable vitality tasks, and town made the push for vitality autonomy.

“The horse and wagon nonetheless could also be allowed on the highway,” Stewart provides, referring to vitality methods of the previous, “however the possibilities of getting run over are way more typically now with the best way the world is altering.”

It’s a lesson international locations like Germany and the Netherlands are studying the onerous manner proper now. They’ve lengthy trusted imports of Russian fuel, however with Moscow largely remoted by Western nations, there are fears the Kremlin may flip the faucets to Europe off at any time.

Takeover makes an attempt

Marlene Campbell, a programming coordinator with town’s cultural workplace, lately co-authored a guide documenting the 100-year historical past of Summerside Electrical, the municipally-owned energy utility.

The guide, titled Lighting the Approach: The Story of Summerside Electrical, 1920-2020, particulars how way back to 1928, vitality firms from exterior Summerside have been attempting to persuade residents that they have been “getting a nasty deal” with their municipal energy plant.

However true to the ‘get it carried out’ angle of residents, the city caught to its weapons and held on to its regionally owned and operated facility.

Within the ensuing many years, the native plant grew to become an enormous level of satisfaction, and it’s stayed that manner. However folks needed to combat for it.

“Having the utility has allowed Summerside residents to have so lots of the advantages that they in any other case wouldn’t expertise,” Campbell informed World Information. These embrace a serious restoration of the boardwalk, gleaming leisure amenities, and electrical energy charges which might be a fraction of the associated fee they’d be if Summerside have been importing extra of its energy from out of city.

“The massive utilities are owned by shareholders. , the extra you’ll be able to put [the price of] electrical energy up, the more cash they get,” Mayor Stewart says.

It’s a mannequin that’s “group minded” and “enterprise minded,” says Bobby Dunn, the enterprise improvement and gross sales supervisor for the electrical utility firm.

Dunn is liable for rolling out a smart-grid program that makes use of specially-designed home equipment like furnaces and water heaters in residents’ houses to retailer extra vitality within the type of warmth.

The “Warmth for Much less” program primarily permits these home equipment to double up as batteries — storing extra vitality inside folks’s houses, and feeding town’s vitality grid in instances of want, together with when the solar isn’t shining or the wind blowing.

“Our objective was to maintain that vitality in the neighborhood,” says Dunn.

The truth that extra vitality is saved in ‘reserve’ permits Summerside Electrical to supply residents electrical energy at about half the going price elsewhere, Dunn says.

The system advantages the group very like money financial savings in your checking account would profit you in a time of want.

It’s additionally a enterprise technique.

“If you happen to’re a businessman, you recognize that you’ve got dependable, secure vitality [here],” Dunn says.

“Summerside,” says Steven Myers, the provincial vitality minister, is the “gold normal for vitality transition.”

It goes to indicate what can occur when residents management the keys to their very own vitality future. “It was a very smart move again within the day to maintain [Summerside Electric] in native possession,” Myers says.

The Samsø mannequin 

Summerside isn’t the primary small municipality to attempt to go 100-per cent renewable in brief order.

Twenty-five years in the past, the group of Samsø, situated on a tiny island off the mainland of Denmark, determined it could usher in a speedy shift to renewables. Like PEI, most of Samsø’s energy got here through an underwater cable and was generated by burning fossil fuels, largely coal.

However Samsø determined early on it could shift — investing in each on-shore and off-shore wind, in addition to photo voltaic farms. Like in Summerside, it dedicated to investing no matter income was generated from these amenities again into the group. By 2007, Samsø was producing sufficient energy via renewables to offset no matter fossil gas emissions have been nonetheless being generated.

Prince Edward Island, like Samsø, needs to develop into as self-sufficient as attainable. In 2019, vitality officers visited Denmark to learn the way one other island group managed to make use of the facility of solar and wind in their very own yard to maintain the lights on.

The important thing to Samsø’s success, Myers recounts from his go to, is that its residents got a stake within the transition.

“They felt prefer it was their windmill, not just a few entity’s windmill,” Myers says. That’s exactly what’s occurred in Summerside.

“When residents can see the place the cash has gone, it provides you a greater social licence to proceed to construct.”

And that’s what’s been occurring in Summerside, says the mayor.

“A municipality is not any completely different than some other enterprise. If you happen to’re not shifting forward, you’re shifting again.”