Sidebar 2: OFA wants solar on buildings, not farmland

Thursday, April 2, 2009

The Ontario Federation of Agriculture (OFA) is clear about where electricity-producing photovoltaic solar panels should go. They should be on top of urban buildings where the population using power is concentrated, not on prime farmland.

"I think the big concern with solar would be that you take the land out of production," says OFA senior policy researcher Peter Jeffrey.

OFA researcher Ted Cowan, who is based in North York, argues that it would be very difficult to recover land which had been baked under solar panels for 20 to 40 years. "Below the panel, you get a tremendous buildup of heat," he says. "It will dry out that area and it is going to get a different kind of weed growing there."

He says that there won't be enough sun to grow hay either, at least not enough to pasture significant numbers of sheep. "Pasture is a frequent proposal," he says, adding, "It is our belief you cannot do anything useful (with the land)."

Aerial photos taken of German installations, he says, show "significant brown patches" around the solar panels, although you can't see what's under them. "In areas where you would expect the most verdant of European crop or pasture land, you see this repeated blemish in large areas and that's only after a few years," Cowan says.

"There are areas in Ontario where you could have solar without compromising agriculture," he says, pointing to sunny areas in the northwest of the province and other sites such as "the north-facing walls of quarries."

Cowan says that the OFA has spoken both to the Energy and Infrastructure Ministry and the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs. "We made it very clear we are in favour of green energy. We are one of the proponents of the Green Energy Act. We also made it clear not everything about the green energy idea is perfect and this is one of the flaws we'd like to see corrected." BF