North America’s largest solar plant is taking shape. Yep, in Canada.

This story was originally published by the Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

North America’s largest urban solar power park is set to take shape in Medicine Hat, Alberta., following the sale on Tuesday of a 325 megawatt (MW) project to the prairie city.  

The Saamis project, progressed to this point by Irish renewables developer DP Energy, is a planned photovoltaic development on an old industrial site in the northeast of Gas City—as Medicine Hat is known, due the area’s vast fossil gas reserves. 

The multistage project, if fully built out, would be able to meet the peak load demand for the city’s industrial and commercial facilities as well as its 65,000 residents, a city official said.

“This provides us with a strategic option to build a utility-scale renewables energy project that would—in the first phase—complement our current natural gas generation,” Travis Tuchscherer, Medicine Hat’s director of energy marketing and business analysis, told Canada’s National Observer.

Tuchscherer said a final decision would be made later this year on the lead-off phase of the PV project, expected to generate 75 MW at a cost of around $120 million. The total value of the sale to the city was not disclosed.

Medicine Hat—which has more days of sunlight in a year than any other Canadian city—is weighing the impact of Alberta’s ongoing electricity market restructuring and changes to provincial carbon legislation that could affect the project timeline, he said.

Damian Bettles, DP Energy’s North America head of development, said the Saamis project was a model for other small and mid-sized cities with “suitable land” and looking to add large-scale clean power production. 

Saamis was among the projects caught up in Alberta’s renewables moratorium last February, which established no-go zones for projects on prime agricultural land and “pristine viewscapes,” including a 27,000-square-mile area between the Rocky Mountains and the city of Calgary. 

“But ours was ultimately a well-sited project, so we got through once we dealt with the viewscapes, decommissioning and high-grade agricultural land stipulations” in later revised guidelines by the Alberta Utility Commission, Bettles said.

Alberta is Canada’s biggest solar power market, with 17 new projects totalling 402 MW of new capacity added to the grid in 2022—before the moratorium—that boosted provincial capacity to over almost 1,150 MW. 

Saamis will be built on a 1,600-acre plot of contaminated land near the Medicine Hat Complex, the country’s largest fertilizer plant. The acreage, damaged by a solid waste byproduct of nitrogen production, will be capped with clay before the solar panels are installed.

“Not only is it a productive use of a large area of contaminated land with limited development potential, it now also has the potential to contribute to the city’s energy transition to clean, renewable power,” Beetles told Canada’s National Observer. 

P Energy, based in Cork, Ireland, has five Canadian wind and solar projects, in Alberta, Ontario, and Nova Scotia, and a tidal power pilot in the Bay of Fundy, and renewable energy developments in its home country as well as the United Kingdom and Australia.

“There is great potential for solar in Canada,” Bettles said, pointing to clean energy procurement plans underway in BC, Ontario and Quebec. DP Energy is in talks to develop several utility-scale projects across the country, he said, without giving further details. 

Canada’s installed solar power capacity reached nearly 6,500 MW in 2022, with over 4,300 gigawatt-hours of electricity generated, enough to supply almost 500,000 homes.

Tuchscherer said Medicine Hat is exploring how to best incorporate future solar, wind, and battery storage plants into the city’s energy transition.

“Overall we are looking for proven technologies that can provide affordable power to our rate base and our own internal carbon compliance,” he said, adding the city would consider a battery energy storage plant to deal with the variability of solar power production as the Saamis project moved ahead.

Aside from growing interest in renewable energy from Medicine Hat’s “largest industrial consumers,” Tuchscherer said they are also studying the future energy needs for hyperscale data centres. 

“So while we don’t believe there is a direct play for data centres and the Saamis project, we are keeping all options open for clean power supply in the long-term for present and future customers.”