Town of Raymond told solar wouldn’t work was first to get to net-zero electricity

Source: David Dodge | · GREEN ENERGY FUTURES · | February 13, 2024

The town of Raymond, Alberta was told that solar wouldn’t work on the buildings in their town in southern Alberta but that didn’t stop them from going solar.

Raymond is a town of 4,200 people located an hour south of Lethbridge and about an hour north of the U.S. border. This is farming country where the sun shines more than any other place in Canada.

The town was interested in solar to help reduce their utility bills, so they hired a consultant to prepare a report.

“Unfortunately, that report at that time turned out to be negative. So, it didn’t look like our buildings were well suited for solar panels and it wasn’t an ideal situation – so we kind of moved on,” says Greg Robinson the director of Community and Corporate Development in Raymond.

Then they noticed their friendly rivals in Cardston (just an hour west) were installing solar.

Keeping up with the Cardstons

“Surely if Cardston can do it, and they’re in a similar geographic area as we are, we can do the same thing,” says Robinson.

The town hired the same consultants Cardston was using and they went to the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre for advice and financial support.

“We were able to quickly mobilize to do an approved project for four buildings here in Raymond,” says Robinson.

Standing between the Raymond Arena and aquatic centre Robinson says they installed solar on the area, aquatic centre, fire hall and the clubhouse at the municipally owned golf course.

Then “We hit a snag on some of our facilities in the sense that we were falling under the microgen provincial rules,” says Robinson.

The microgeneration regulation specifies that you cannot install more solar capacity than your building can consume on a net annual basis.