Kelly Opposes South March Energy Storage

Well, that’s a clever diversion of responsibility for how he will vote on this issue onto other people. Has Councillor Kelly done any resaerch into the issue himself? Does he have any personal wisdom to share on the subject?

No – he’s letting his constituents do the work to investigate the proposal, ask questions of the applicant, do the research and develop opinions on whether it would work for their community. He’s then talking to some of the residents of Ward 5 and allowing them to decide how he should vote even though there isn’t a consensus on the issue.

Nowhere does he give his own opinion or even any analysis of the pros and cons of the proposal. I wonder how people feel about doing the work for him that he’s being paid very handsomely to do for them. He should be listening to his constituents but also needs to have an informed opinion which doesn’t seem to be the case.

Sorry Voter, you are not up to speed on this one. This has been going on for months. Believe me, he has an informed opinion – everyone has been knocking down his door to “educate him”. The company, the environmentalists, the residents – he is certainly well versed in this. And you should see what is going on behind the scenes. So the company, Evolugen, is owned by Brookfield (which was Canada’s 5th largest company before Mark Carney moved it (and its billions in taxes) to the US a few months ago. The Liberals in Kanata, including the Councillor, Cathy Curry are all for this and are pushing very hard for it. Councillor Kelly send a very sharp email to Cathy Curry stating that she was spreading disinformation. I have a copy of that if you want to see it. It was posted on the West Carleton BESS FB Page. There is an extremely well funded environmental group called CAFE that is supporting this – they also provide report cards on politicians and how well they meet CAFE’s environmental criteria – apparently this is important to some? So a company that has never done this before is building one of the biggest Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) in Canada just upwind of Aylmer and North Kanata. West Carleton High school (1,100 students) is 5km away or about 15 minutes away for any toxic gases to arrive should there be a fire. Other schools are around 7km away so around 25 minutes away. North Kanata and the high-tech park will have 30 minutes to evacuate should there be a fire. Queensway-Carleton hospital will have around an hour. Plus the number long-term care homes and another dozen or so schools, plus hundreds of businesses. This of course would happen only if there were a fire. The site will not be staffed but will operated remotely by an office in Gatineau. It will also be operating the much smaller Facility they are building near the Trail Road dump. If there is a problem at either sites during rush hours, it will likely take them 90 minutes or so to get there. There have been around 100 fires of Lithium-Ion plants like the one they built at Trail Road. The company is now saying they will use the safer Lithium-Iron-Phosphate (LFP) battery of which there have only been a few major fires (China – killed 2 firefighters) and Australia were the biggest), but the company has no experience with this technology and the local company doing the work is competent, but has never done anything like this before. I have dealt with huge corporations before and they will Bait and Switch, especially with big money at stake like this. So they get approval for a location based on an LFP plant and switch it to a higher density and more profitable Lithium-Ion plant. Nothing can stop them. In January there was a catastrophic fire in California (MOSS BESS – it’s 4th fire actually with the most modern firefighting systems) which caused evacuations and road closures 17km away. Thankfully it was by the sea or it would have been much worse. This is what the County Supervisor said: “this technology is ahead of the government’s ability to regulate it. And the industry’s ability to control it.” “Battery storage is essential for the future. And that’s the direction we’re going,” Church noted. “But as I said last night and I’ve tried to emphasize — we just can’t put that above safety. That’s got to be the priority at this point.” His assessment of the fire is that it was a “Three Mile Island” event for this emerging technology. Here is a link to the fire.

Ron and Sisco,

I agree that a councillor should follow his constituents’ lead on issues. I also believe that they should do their own research and enquiries so that they have a firm grip on the facts before voting. The information I had to go on was the newsletter above where he instructed others to do their due diligence but made no reference to having done the same himself. My second and third sentences in my comment above questioned that.

My final sentence says he needs to listen but should also have formed an opinion based on his own research. He should be presenting the facts to people as Sisco says but, in the newsletter cited above, he appears to have expected others to do that. One of the jobs of a politician is to, using the information you have, balance both camps’ arguments and come to a conclusion. It didn’t appear Kelly was doing that.