Alberta farmer turns bad weather into a clean power play
By Christopher Pollon
Fifth generation farmer Eric Steeves has a vision to convert the greatest scourge of Alberta dry-land agriculture into a windfall.
"Farmers here are running out of options," he said of the uncertainty of farming in the drought-stricken Palliser Triangle, which straddles large parts of southern Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
Our worst enemies are too much sun and too much wind, so we're turning them to our advantage," he told Canada's National Observer.
Steeves and a farmer-led landowner consortium attended contentious public hearings in April and June in Vulcan County, seeking to rezone 850 acres bordering the Travers water reservoir from farmland to rural industrial use - a first step to making their Palliser Grid hybrid renewable energy project a reality.
Despite vocal opposition to the project at the public hearings the land rezoning was approved by Vulcan County council on June 17.
The project is designed to power a yet-to-be announced Al data centre in the county where developers will need to build a dedicated power facility to meet its electricity needs. And that's where Palliser Grid comes in.
The farmer-led project is touted as a power model for the Alberta government's goal of attracting $1 billion in investment from Al data centers before the end of the decade.
Palliser Grid would combine wind and solar generation, battery storage, pumped hydro and short-term use of natural gas into an all-in-one "hybrid" renewable energy project.
A typical 24/7 data center operation in Canada is connected to the grid and requires "five nines", or 99.999 percent certainty of energy supply, and that often means natural gas generation as a backup.
Palliser Grid is a sort of rural Hail Mary pass by local farmers, not least because the region is notoriously dry, and water, like energy, is a commodity that Al data centres consume on a massive scale.
This reporting is produced with support from I-SEA’s Climate Solutions project and is not behind National Observer’s subscriber paywall. Readers are asked to create a FREE National Observer account to access the full article.