Ethosolar on Cover of Examiner

The Barrie Examiner recently interviewed Ken O’Brien, an EthoSolar customer.

Mounted on a swivelling axis, they’re programmed to follow the sun, absorbing a maximum amount of its rays. The collected energy, clean and green, is then sold back to the province’s hydro grid for 80.2 cents per kWh.

The O’Brian house, probably 100 feet away, continues to be fed power from Ontario Hydro, at a cost of about 12.5 cents per kWh.

It’s a beauty, made-in-Ontario program that anyone with a bit of land, or good-sized rooftop, is eyeing.

“I tried to put them where it would take the least amount of agricultural land,” said the farmer, who refuses to retire and continues to look at his land with the eye of an entrepreneur.

Two banks of 24 panels, each measuring 12 by 40 feet, are mounted on concrete pillars at a total cost of about $90,000. The anticipated annual rate of return is 12% to 15%, meaning that they will have paid for themselves easily within 10 years, leaving the last 10 to 13 years of the

20-year contract for income generation.

If the panels are still good after 20 years, the electricity they generate can then power the house.

But it’s all still new for the O’Brians, who hadn’t yet seen a cheque from Hydro One.

“If the return is what it’s supposed to be, along with that tower over there,” says O’Brian, pointing to a satellite tower on the opposite side of the property, “that’s much better than just farming.

“The young farmer today has got to produce what people want.”

Farm income, he says, isn’t just about the traditional wheat and soybean crops, or beef or dairy farming anymore. As independent business people, farmers have to look at alternatives, like energy generation, commercial land uses, organic farming, and alternatives like goat milk.

The market, he stresses, will dictate what the farmer should consider producing. But the availability of land can also give the individual farmer the opportunity to diversify.

The odd panels, like the O’Brian project, have been popping up here and there along with the crops since spring as the result of Ontario’s Green Energy and Green Economy Act.

For Ontario farmers, the provincial program has been a bonus.

“That’s a great investment,” said Dale Litt, senior appraiser with Farm Credit Canada, an agriculture lender.

Solar and wind energy production are quickly finding their way onto farmland as a result of Ontario’s new initiatives. And that is having an impact on the value of the land.

“We’re starting to see a premium on land with turbines on it,” he said, citing an increase of wind mills on land along the shores of Lake Huron.

In its recent survey, Farm Credit Canada found that the average value of farmland in Ontario increased by 4.3% in the first half of 2010, representing the highest average increase across Canada.

In south-end Barrie, physics teacher Marty Lancaster launched the Apollo Solar Project with concerned students. They raised money to buy their first 12 panels, installed on the roof of Bear Creek Secondary School.

With additional publicity, and money gleaned from the sale of the green power to the grid, they plan to install their own electricity-generating station containing 50 panels. The students will then use the resulting income for environment-friendly initiatives throughout the school.

But it’s not just bits of land and rooftops hosting the panels. If California-based company Recurrent Energy has its way, 10 farms around Barrie and Orillia will be producing mostly solar energy within the next year or so, tying up those properties with 30-year contracts. Other companies are scoping the local landscape, searching for other farms on which to erect panels.

Ontario’s plans for solar electricity production is divided into two programs: the MicroFIT (feed-in tariff) program for smaller programs, under 10 kilowatts, and the FIT program where larger parcels of land, like farms, are used to produce 10 kilowatts of power or more.

The FIT program could mean that solar is well on its way to becoming the newest, large-yield crop. Ontario farmland has become such an important aspect of Ontario’s solar production plans that the Ontario Federation of Agriculture has been involved in price negotiations with the provincial government on behalf of farmers.

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