“The community most impacted by this installation has reached out in overwhelming numbers to demonstrate they remain uncomfortable with what is being proposed and where it is being proposed,” he said. “If West Carleton was its own municipality, this project would not get an MSR for this location.”
“I am worried about the erosion of our farmland,” said ARAC member Catherine Kitts (Orléans-South Navan), one of at least two with large numbers of rural constituents who opposed the BESS in committee but supported it in the full council vote. “The residents of West Carleton have real fear, and I empathize with them. This is among the first applications of this type and certainly won’t be the last.”
But “if we’re not able to offer solutions, we may be cut out of the process altogether. The Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) failed us here. We need leadership from the province. It has left residents feeling unheard and powerless.”
Brown said he didn’t see the decision an “urban versus rural issue,” but still opposed the project. “The goalposts were moved midstream. We need to move forward, which is what we’re doing today. I’m voting to deny the MSR, because I’m not satisfied with the changes by the province that led us here today. I believe strong community backing is important.”
The motion stressed that an MSR is “not a planning approval, and if approved would not commit Council to any future land use decisions with respect to the facility,” CTV writes.
In a statement, Gatineau, Quebec-based Evolugen, the subsidiary of Brookfield Asset Management that proposed the project, called the MSR approval “a significant milestone for the project” and acknowledged the “thoughtful engagement and consideration demonstrated by council and staff throughout this process.”
Evolugen already had a contract from Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator to build the project on a 4.5-hectare site, about 30 kilometres west of downtown Ottawa, conditional on an MSR from the city. After the vote, the company pledged to “continue working closely with city staff, local residents, the public at large, and other stakeholders to ensure transparency and collaboration as the project moves forward.”
‘Raising Pitchforks’
At the 10-hour ARAC meeting last Thursday, councillors heard 68 public delegations before denying official backing for the project, CBC reported. But while the ARAC vote “was unanimous at face value,” some committee members were “very conflicted”, a committee observer told The Mix, with one councillor comparing the introduction of battery storage to the arrival of the motor car in a horse and buggy community.
“I believe that BESS is a good technology, and this, on its merits, may actually be a good project,” said Councillor Matthew Luloff (Orléans East-Cumberland), according to a segment of an unofficial meeting transcript viewed by The Energy Mix. While Luloff said his committee vote was meant to respect Kelly’s wishes, as a vehemently opponent of the project in his ward, “I reserve the right to make my own decision at Council, where this matter will come forward again for further discussion.”
Luloff added: “I will be taking the lessons I learned here today at that vote. Let this also be a lesson on consultation, it is not a box to be checked but a fundamental part of decision-making. Community education is incredibly important, and we must continue to do better… in how we inform.”
After the ARAC vote, Angela Keller-Herzog, executive director of Community Action for Environmental Sustainability (CAFES), said the community adjacent to the Marchurst site “needs to come together” in order to negotiate with Evolugen for local benefits from the project. But at the moment, “avowed opponents… distrust information offered up by the project proponent company,” she wrote in an email. “The anti-BESS group is talking about ‘raising pitchforks’ and the local Facebook group ejects anyone who has positive things to say about the project.”
[Disclosure: CAFES is a partner of the Green Resilience Project, a joint community listening effort hosted by Energy Mix Productions and the Basic Income Canada Network.]
Don’t Be Disruptive
The Energy Mix could not verify the content of the private West Carleton BESS Facebook group. Courtney Argue, a leading project opponent who lives about 400 metres from the site, said “it really depends” how visitors are treated when they join the group.
“People get deleted if they are being disruptive or we have a suspicion that they have ties to Evolugen or their potential or confirmed partners,” she told The Mix in an email. “You try your best. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong.”
As for the comment about pitchforks, “we hold our pitchforks in our hearts when it comes to protecting our land, wildlife, and way of life,” Argue wrote. “Rural folk are not violent folk. We handle things together. We show up in the masses at town halls, we help neighbours. In this fight, we cannot leave any stone unturned.”
While the group is meeting neighbours who support sustainable energy solutions—Argue said she’d “love to add solar to our farm to help sustain our operations”—she maintained that most of the people she’s heard from oppose the BESS project. Keller-Herzog said the local community newspaper, West Carleton Online, which has covered the issue extensively over the last two years, recently estimated that “the community was pretty evenly split but that the anti-BESS voices consistently tried to present a picture as everybody against.”
In spite of the furor and the “significant coverage” it has received, “there is probably a majority of busy working families that are not tuned in to the local news and have no engagement on the issue,” she said.
“The real problem? Our community lacks a calm and credible space to talk things through,” Keller-Herzog wrote in a mid-May opinion piece for West Carleton Online. “Many thoughtful West Carleton residents, who might offer balance or ask good questions, have simply gone silent, understandably reluctant to wade into a conversation that has become conflictive and dominated by a few loud voices.”
Prior to Wednesday’s vote, she said Evolugen “now appears hesitant to engage further, perhaps understandably, given how strident the misinformation has become.” Yet there are “other BESS conversations that affirm of course residents and businesses in Ottawa want the lights to stay on, want the grid to be stable, want power to be affordable, want the jobs, investment, taxes paid and local community benefits from a safe, non-polluting energy infrastructure solution.”
In an email Tuesday morning, Evolugen’s Canadian head of development, Geoff Wright, told The Mix the company is “eager to move to the next phase of the development approvals process and submit our application for a fair and robust technical evaluation by city and provincial staff. We believe that review by independent, qualified experts will provide the comfort that residents are looking for, while taking into account the benefits that this infrastructure provides for the city, region and province.
