The Town of Fort Frances will be sending a request to support the installation of a battery storage facility to be built on the former lagoon property to its Chief Building Officer for consideration.
At Monday night’s meeting of town council and administration, Mitch Lepage, Rob Coulbeck and Alex Eidson of SB Energy US Holdings One, Bioveld Energy Ventures and Brothers Marketing Inc., made the request of council to garner their support for the building of a battery energy storage facility. Lepage noted the request is an additional component of the zoning amendment that was previously undertaken to allow for the building of such a facility on the former lagoon property in the first place.
According to Coulbeck, the facility would be home to an approximately 150-megawatt battery energy storage to the old mill lands. Coulbeck said the facility would help to support the local electricity grid in terms of reliability, and also support the Ontario grid as part of the province’s move towards renewable energy.
“The project would be participating in the IESO (Independent Electricity System Operator)’s long-term RFP, in which they are looking to develop approximately 1-million megawatts of new capacity across the province,” Coulback added.
“Our project would be about $300-million of investment, of which we’re also looking at 35 to 40 local construction jobs.”
Coulbeck explained that the location for the facility, the former lagoon property at Eighth Street West and Cornwall Avenue, will be home to either a lithium ion battery or a flow battery. The battery itself would provide up to 600 megawatt hours.
“We’re looking at installing the latest technology,” Coulbeck said.
“There will be associated grid equipment and transformers, as well as the battery storage. It enables the redevelopment of the industrial lands. We’re also looking at doing extensive outreach to the community to get their input on how this would impact them.”
Around the time the prospect of a cryptocurrency mining, solar farm and energy storage facility at the lagoon property was first raised, members of the public who lived nearby voiced their concerns about the noise that is traditionally generated in such a set-up. Coulbeck said once the energy storage facility has been completed, the noise level is would produce is “minimal to no environmental noise.”
Coulbeck noted the request to council for a resolution supporting the facility is not a requirement of the project, but a soft request.
“The IESO, as part of the RFP process, recognizes that local communities and municipalities have a great say in making sure that projects similar to this are supported by the local communities,” he explained.
“They don’t want to make it feel like this is being forced upon the communities. This is really, what we’re looking for, is a resolution that you support this. The IESO appreciated the fact that all of these major infrastructure changes do have an impact, positive hopefully in all cases, on local communities and therefore this is their soft request that we get this resolution in support of the project.”
Coulbeck said the decision as to what type of battery will go into the facility will be made before the team submits their proposal to the IESO in December of this year. Councillor Andrew Hallikas voiced his support for the project, but also acknowledged there could be concerns around a large scale facility using lithium ion batteries, which have been known for catching fire. Eidson stressed that the facility would be made as safe as possible, and that some of those problems stem from operating in a much different environment.
“I just wanted to quickly flag that SP Energy has experience in building large-scale solar plus storage facilities,” he said.
“We follow very, very strict safety guidelines. It includes cooling systems for the batteries as well as connection to water supplies, so there’s no risk of fire, or certainly as minimized as possible. Also, I think worth flagging is most of those stories come from super hot, arid environments. You’ll hear about it more in an Australia Outback environment, or southwestern U.S., so we mitigate it and will continue to mitigate it in Fort Frances, but the risks presented in Canada are substantially lower than in other environments.”
Coulbeck said the planned community outreach meetings will begin over the next few months in order, along with mailings and advertising to help spread awareness of the meetings and opportunities for community input. If the project is successful in its procurement process, Coulbeck said construction on the facility would begin by the Fall of 2023, with commercial operations scheduled for May 2025.
