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Green and green
?He doth protest too much, perhaps. In our story on page 9, we report that a certain Mr. Politi came to Council on Monday with a very ambitious project: to put a whole mess of solar panels in place of the greenhouses on the old White Rose property on Concession 4. They would, he claims, generate enough wattage to power the entire township. The hydro companies, he said, were excited about the project, and delighted that the site was less than a kilometre from the power distribution station near Roseville.
Just one small problem: in order to eliminate shadowing on a very hilly site, and in order to strengthen the soil to solidly anchor the panels, he would have to bring in a bit of fill to even out the land - 2.8 million cubic metres of fill, give or take. A considerable pile of fill, indeed.
There ensued some disagreement around the table about how many trucks that would mean rumbling up the Fourth. The mayor and CAO seemed to think your average dump truck carries about 10 cubic metres, meaning the project would require 280,000 return trips. Mr. Ballinger thought the figure was closer to 25 cubic metres, which is a healthy discrepancy. Mr. Politi didn’t know, but thought the job would take eight months or so; hard to know where he got that estimate, if he’s not sure how much dirt goes in a truck. But we quibble, because whatever the capacity, it translates to a huge amount of soil, and a large army of trucks on a road probably not designed, as the mayor pointed out, to carry them.
All of this, however, is beside the point, since the mayor also told Mr. Politi that her council was not about to approve even a single truckload of fill until the province clarifies the regulatory environment surrounding it. No doubt traumatized by Scugog’s sad experience with the operation on Lakeridge Road, Council doesn’t want to touch such operations with a ten foot shovel until some senior government takes legal and financial responsibility. But just out of curiosity, they mused, how much money was Mr. Politi anticipating making for this fill?
“We are not a pit operation,” Mr. Politi assured Council, about a dozen times by our count, “and have no interest in this business. Our needs are simply to prepare the grounds for our solar project.” When pressed, however, he thought he might be getting about $6 a cubic metre - a cool 17 million bucks, if you do the math. Not bad, for someone who’s not in that business.
Now of course there are some alternatives to bringing in the fill. Mr. Politi could level the land by removing soil rather than adding it (although that doesn’t solve the truck problem, and could further weaken the sandy soil, and he wouldn’t get the $6), or he could just even the panels by varying the heights of their support shafts. Since he seems determined to make the project happen, that may be his ultimate route. And since we’re all in favour of green energy (we still lament the loss of that family of windmills a few years back), we wish him well.
Too bad about the 17 million, though.
