Ontario recently announced a new energy storage project that will supply enough low-emissions electricity to serve 80,000 average homes.
The Tilbury Battery Storage Project is a partnership of the Walpole Island First Nation and Boralex, an independent power producer. Construction for the project is expected to begin later this year and conclude in late 2025. The storage system will be able to store 80 megawatts of power, the provincial government announced in a release.
The facility will consist of 89 Tesla megapack batteries housed in storage containers and hooked up to nearby high-voltage power lines. In addition to the batteries, the project will include “inverters, medium voltage transformers, gravel internal access roads, buried collector and communication cabling, and a small transmission substation,” Boralex says. The project will benefit taxpayers “by reducing the need and cost associated with using gas-fired power plants during times of peak demand as well as helping to clean Ontario’s electricity system,” the company adds.
The CA$170-million project was awarded a contract [pdf] through the province’s first expedited long-term procurement (LT1) process to increase electricity supply in anticipation of rising future demand. The province says it will support more than 100 local jobs, while Boralex Vice President Adam Russo told CBC it will create 100 to 150 positions for skilled workers during construction. Once built, he told the Windsor Star, it will need only three or four people to operate.
The battery storage facility is being built on prime farmland in the town of Lakeshore, in southwestern Ontario. Constructing battery energy storage projects on prime farmland is not permitted in the town’s zoning bylaws, which classify such facilities as “utility yards.” But in February, the town mayor and council members approved a request for a zoning bylaw amendment to allow the project, noting that the town’s official plan permits electricity infrastructure for generation, transmission, and distribution “in all land use designations” so long as regulatory processes are followed.
The official plan for Essex County, where Lakeshore is located, says the county is “rich in natural resources,” and so “there is a need to permit other types of land use in the ‘Agricultural’ designation.”
Earlier this summer, Ontario banned ground-mounted solar panels on all prime farmland—and new energy projects of any type on specialty crop areas—as it prepared to launch a second procurement process for long-term electricity projects.
