The Memorial Sports Centre is ready to make the most of sunny days in the Rainy River District.
MP Marcus Powlowski announced the Town would receive funds to help make the Memorial Sports Centre (MSC) near self-sufficient for electricity according to the Town.
Powlowski said on a call with the Times last week that he had recently been notified that the funding would be going to his riding.
“The minister gave me the piece of paper and Secretary of Sport Adam van Koeverden was there at the time and he asked what the money was for,” Powlowski said.
“I told him it was for the hockey rink, which he’s really happy about too, because he’s really promoting that the government invest in sports infrastructure.”
The funding is part of the final tranche being distributed from the 2024 budget’s Green and Inclusive Community Buildings Program.
Powlowski is hoping to be able to come to town to make a formal announcement of the funding in the near future.
Fort Frances manager of Operations and Facilities Travis Rob says the funding helps the MSC get closer to fully supplying its own electricity, which could reduce the facility’s budget significantly.
“This project goes way back to about 2022, when we first started coming together and thinking about it,” Rob said.
“Basically what we’re looking to do is expand on the solar system that is already on the roof of the sports centre. But the goal originally was to be able to operate that facility on 100 per cent solar power.”
Given the draws of heating a swimming pool and cooling two ice pads, electricity is a significant part of the MSC’s annual expenditures.
“One of the biggest operating expenditures outside of staff, obviously, of that facility is power. So if we can carve into that, that’s extremely impactful to the operating budget, and so that was really the goal behind it,” Rob said.
“Since then, we did the microgrid study, we’ve looked at some other opportunities and options that are out there, and we’re able to get some of this funding, finally, to do something with this, and now I’m thinking, maybe we need to expand even on this project in and of itself. What I’m really hoping to do and working on right now is taking it beyond just having solar to provide power to the facility, but build really the memorial Sports Centre its own little microgrid, where we would have not only solar on the roof, but bring some some larger scale batteries to the site, utilize the existing propane generator that’s there. Right now, it is undersized, it doesn’t cover the entire building load. But [we’ll] look at utilizing all of these pieces together to have a system and a site that can sustain itself for prolonged periods of no power.”
Rob said the MSC is one of the Town’s evacuation sites in event of emergencies, so having it be able to run if there’s a lengthy power disruption would be incredibly advantageous.
Giving a frame of reference, generation capability of the rooftop solar array at the MSC will be 500 Kilowatts, which is five times the capability of the array on the roof of Fort Frances High School.
Rob is optimistic about moving forward with increasing the capabilities as well, as with increasing popularity, the cost of solar equipment has gone down.
“The cost of this technology continues to go down, one of these weird things to see costs go down, but the technology is getting less and less expensive. So some of this planning and stuff is pretty old now, so I do want to dive back into it and see if there is room within the budget to implement some of these other pieces, ideally,” he said.
“I’d love to be able to do it all, but that may not be feasible, but I definitely want to do it with some of these longer, bigger picture plans in place so that this could be, if there’s a stage two or stage three to this, where we take it from just just the solar panels to the full micro grid.”
Rob says there’s a lot of work that would have to go into making the system work, so it will take some time but in the end could lead to a big return on investment.
“So there’s a lot of intelligence, there’s a lot of smarts that goes into putting this all together,” he said.
“But there’s also great opportunity, just looking at the power alone for that facility, it’s over $200,000 a year in power just being able to power that building itself.”
Powlowski emphasized how important it was to keep funding the heart of the community like the MSC which holds the town’s hockey arenas.
“You know how central this is to the community, the hockey rink, but also figure skating as well,” he said.
“I know it’s an important part of the community, and it’s really great we’re investing in that kind of thing.”
