Very inspiring.

Very inspiring.

Good on them!

Now if only more of us do the same!

payola

You can buy the panels (90% of the cost) on ebay for about $300K. so where did the $1.5 million come from?

The hot water systems can be homebrewed in a day with some cheap plastic pipe and and a sheet of tempered glass ($15 on craigslist).

While Golf cart batteries are dirt cheap at Costco, diesel is a far cheaper backup power alternative If you want a global warming solution use biodiesel from restaurant frying oil waste.

Seems to me somebody is stuffing pockets as is usual on these type of projects and what's worse it deters off the grid reserves from doing it for themselves.

At today's prices less the payola factor solar heat is a good idea after home insulation is optimized. Solar water heat is always a good idea.

Off grid reserves would be much better off with microhydro.

If corruption can be weeded out, microhydro, wind, and small solar projects make sense in these remote off the grid areas but they are a small part of BC's overall electric needs.

For the provinces power grid, wind is too unreliable and solar cannot come close to competing with US southwest desert solar.

Alberta and Saskatchewan with relatively much larger wind and solar resources than BC are recommending nuclear power for their future power needs. BC is still stuck in the dark ages promoting ridiculously ineffective, hugely environmentally destructive and hideously expensive run of the river and wind projects to serve distorted electricity growth estimates.

Pirate Power king Plutonic's Bute projects will provide us with about 4000 annual gigawatt/hours of low value sometime in late spring in some years power which will have to exported at a massive loss. Cost to taxpayers 16 billion dollars. At current export rates losses to the taxpayer will exceed 12 billion dollars.

Westinghouse in 2006 sold China four new generation nukes for 5.5 billion. If BCHydro had instead purchased these it could have replaced Burrard thermal generating 40000 annual gigawatt hours of dependable high value always on baseload power. This would almost double BCHydros capacity and provide plenty of power to move us into electric/hydrogen vehicles and electric heat almost eliminating our carbon fuel consumption.

That's 10 times the power at 35% the cost.

its community development more than renewable energy

One reason why the project costs more than just the cost of the solar panels is that the project has a lot more to do with First Nations community development. Lots of labour-intensive activities before, during and probably after the actual installation. Cost for the panel installation over next year may continue to mount.

Is it really worth it? Depends on what is the real reason for installing the solar panels.

While FN bands and non-FN communities in isolated regions really need alternatives to the usual diesel/gas generators, the T'Souke band location has good access to BC Hydro energy going out to Sooke, roads, and services.

So might have made more economic sense to improve the housing for the band - including insulation - than go for solar.

However, as apparent in the article, this project has less to do with serious renewable energy testing than for building FN community strengths. Hopefully, it will succeed on that score, but as an effort to reduce energy dependency, reduce GHGs, or to evaluate alternative energy sources, not sure it really works.

As for getting nukes - no. Sure, Gordon Shrum promised lots of nukes for BC back in 1968, but really, between mining the uranium and burying the waste, nobody in BC really wants to go that way.

Community development No nukes

Good to see that that the excess money went into band members hands. They might have a look at the labor intensive but capital cost light methods of solar panel ($1 a watt), water and space heat home brewed alternatives. Could be a great cottage industry for band members.

It's true most citizens are very cautious about nuclear power as shown by the rather stupid nonsense published in Red Tories links.

There has been a massive and extremely well funded campaign by big coal/oil against nuclear for many years and those funds are used to finance well meaning fools in the Green movement. Big Coal/Oil know full well that wind/solar/geothermal have no hope of replacing more than a small fraction of their product but nuclear could put them out of business in ten years.

Nuclear waste from older and current generation reactors can be burned as fuel in Generation 4 units leaving almost no waste product.

Climate scientists tell us we may have as little as ten years before we fall over a global warming precipice. Only nuclear power has any possibility of saving us in that time frame.

Even if we had to destroy a few square miles of the planet forever as a storage dump for nuclear waste better that than losing the entire planet. Note that the tars sands project has already destroyed hundreds of square miles of land forever. We could store the waste there and nobody would ever notice.

The nuke PR campaign

Solar power makes sense.

I had two very good Czech friends, husband and wife, who developed serious medical problems they attributed to Chernobyl. They both died early deaths.

From Helen Caldicott:

"The American Nuclear Society recently held a meeting in San Diego that drew scientists and industry professional from all around the world. The prevailing mantra was simple—surprise the opponent, plan ahead, coordinate, be pro-active not reactive, and engage and communicate with antinuclear groups. This extensive propaganda campaign is global. A formally chartered organization composed of the governments of Argentina, Brazil, Canada, the European Union, France, Japan, the Republic of Korea, the Republic of South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, called the Generation IV International Forum (GIF), is collaborating with the U.S. Nuclear Energy research Advisory Committee to elucidate the benefits, technical and institutional barriers, and research needs for the most promising nuclear energy system concepts.
Other countries engaged in the possible construction of nuclear power plants include China, which already has nine nuclear reactors and plans to build another thirty nuclear power plants. (Even if it builds its thirty plants, however, nuclear power will still provide only 5% of its energy mix, while the percentage of China’s electrical generation capacity by natural gas is expected to increase from 1% today to over 6% by 2030 according to the International Energy Agency.) New nuclear power capacity is under consideration or construction in India, Japan, Taiwan, Turkey, Belarus, Vietnam, Poland, and South Korea. Russia as well as Finland have several plants under construction.
Nuclear power is often referred to behind closed doors in the U.S. Department of Energy as “hard” energy whereas wind power, solar power, hydropower, and geothermal energy are referred to as “soft” energy pathways. Clearly the same psychosexual language used by the Pentagon generals to describe various aspects of nuclear weapons and nuclear war has been translocated into the nuclear power vocabulary of some very powerful and influential men in the electricity generating field. As a physician, I contend that unless the root cause of a problem can be ascertained there can be no cure. So too the pathology intrinsic in the nuclear power gang needs to be dissected and revealed to the cold light of day."