Council receives update on solar project stats

By Nikki Jamieson
Sunny South News

Updates must be completed before the Town of Coalhurst can review its solar system outputs.

During their regular March 5 meeting, Coalhurst council received an answer to an inquiry regarding the Town’s solar project.

The councillor inquiry sought clarification on whether the Town had  collected any statistics regarding energy generated by the Town’s solar project, and how the actual output  compared to the projected power production.

The solar project became operation in October 2022, with the Town holding a cord-cutting ceremony for the project in 2023. As the solar project had now been in operation of over a year, coun. Scott Akkerman, who made the inquiry, wrote that it would be good to review the numbers.

In response, administration said that the Town’s solar power system at the sanitary lift station was monitored by a bi-directional metre, and from the electrical billing for the site, it appears that the correct expected savings from the 64kWp system for 2023 was $9,367.76. 

However, they cautioned that the energy produced in MWh/year seems to be lower than the originally proposed system should produce. This could be caused by more power being consumed in the building, and the Town may require more than one year to assess the system output. To confirm this, administration would need to access the data logger information in the solar system, in order to see the recorded output. 

The Town of Coalhurst is currently in the middle of upgrading the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system to correspond with the addition of the stormwater management facility/wetland building. Once the system update are completed, the Town can look at accessing data log information from the solar system through SCADA, allowing them to track the system’s output.   

Akkerman called the response “great”.

“I was just kind of curious about how we were looking after (the) operation, so I appreciate the information from administration,” said Akkerman.

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