Clarification
This piece originally paraphrased researcher Daniel Riser-Espinoza as referring to 851 "bird deaths" at Alberta solar farms based on information from a webinar. Riser-Espinoza actually used the term "detections," which he has since clarified refers to any evidence of a bird death, including live injured birds and dead birds. This piece has been updated accordingly.
Dozens of Sturgeon County residents rallied late last month to oppose a proposed solar farm near Villeneuve.
About 100 people were at the Villeneuve Community Hall on April 29 for an information session on the proposed St. Albert Villeneuve Solar Battery Project organized by the St. Albert Villeneuve Opposition Solar (SAVOS) group.
CanWest Solar Development Corp. has proposed to build a 1,600 acre solar farm and battery storage site southwest of Villeneuve and east of the Century Estates subdivision. If built, the roughly $300 million project would power about 60,000 homes and offset the equivalent of 17 per cent of St. Albert’s 2023 greenhouse gas emissions.
CanWest president Don Scantland said the facility would be designed to allow for farming and power generation on the same land (agrivoltaics), with the panels covering about 35 per cent of the ground. The panels and screw piles could be removed after 40 years to restore all the land to farming.
Scantland said CanWest was also studying three other potential agrivoltaic projects in Sturgeon County.
SAVOS member Lisa Bendfeld, who lives next to the proposed solar farm, said residents had many concerns about it, including its effects on drainage, wildlife, and aesthetics.
“I fear (my children) may have no interest in living in the area if it looks industrial,” she said.
In addition to disrupting wildlife movements, Bendfeld said the project could harm birds through the lake effect, which hypothesizes that water birds can mistake solar farms for lakes and become injured/killed when they try to land on them.
“There’s huge safety concerns for anyone living near lithium batteries,” Bendfeld continued, arguing that Villeneuve did not have the necessary hydrants or firefighters needed to handle a fire at a battery storage site.
Jamie Victoor, who lives next to the proposed project, said he opposed it because it would take productive farmland out of operation. He questioned how the farm would meet the province’s requirement for solar farms to maintain 80 per cent of the agricultural productivity of any farmland they occupy.
“The equipment of nowadays is way too big to farm in between sections of the panels,” he said. “They’re not going to be able to maintain that level of productivity on the same amount of land.”
Villeneuve resident Colleen Soetaert, who lives 800 metres from a proposed power line route for this project, said this kind of development was a poor fit for the region.
“We are not an industrial community. We are a farm-centred community," she said.
Bendfeld questioned the project’s potential impact on property values and who would remove the panels should the farm’s operators go bankrupt. In Alberta, solar farm builders are required to post a bond up front to cover reclamation costs. She also raised concerns that glare from it could affect pilots at Villeneuve Airport.
“The view and countryside will be lost forever if we get this wrong,” she told the crowd. “We need to do everything possible to stop this 40-year industrial experiment.”
The Gazette took the concerns raised by SAVOS to researchers who have studied solar farms for comment.
Joshua Pearce is a professor at Western University who has studied agrivoltaics for years and founded the group Agrivoltaics Canada. While solar panels can reduce agricultural productivity, he said they can have neutral or positive effects if you pair the right design with the right crop.
“If I’m a farmer, I want (solar) on my land first!” he said, as you get more crops and cash as a result.
Pearce said his experiments found strawberry and lettuce yields rose 18 and 200-400 per cent, respectively, when grown under solar panels compared to the open air.
“Most plants we eat get too much sun,” he explained, and the panels create a cool, moist environment that boosts production, especially during extreme heat.
Pearce said German scientists have found a three per cent hike in production when they put solar panels alongside wheat. By placing the panels far enough apart, they were able to generate power without shading the crops while benefiting from the windbreaking effects of the panels. Such farms were already common in Asia, where they use rotatable panels that can swing out of the way of farm machinery.
When asked if we shouldn’t put solar on roofs and parking lots instead of farmland (a position voiced by some SAVOS members), Pearce said agrivoltaic farms were more economical, as they could produce food and energy at the same time. We also don’t have enough roofs or parking lots to power large industrial sites.
Scantland said his team would design the St. Albert/Villeneuve project to meet the province’s agricultural requirements.
Karl Kosciuch, Daniel Riser-Espinoza, and Lee Walston spoke on their research into the lake effect in a webinar for the Renewable Energy Wildlife Institute last April. They found little evidence that solar farms were causing mass bird deaths or that the lake effect was an issue for birds. Walston said his team was studying birds at solar farms across America and had yet to see any hit solar panels despite 60,000 hours of video monitoring. Riser-Espinoza said studies of 30 Alberta solar farms from 2021–2026 logged 851 injured or dead birds at them, of which four involved water birds. About 35 per cent of the other birds were gray partridges — an introduced species in Alberta.
“There really is not good support for a generalized lake effect,” Riser-Espinoza said.
Multiple studies in the U.K. and U.S. have found that solar farms increase local bird diversity, said Jorden Dye, director of the Pembina Institute’s Business Renewables Centre. That’s because the panels create shade, which draws in bugs and bug-eating birds. Cats, buildings, and climate change were far greater risks to birds than solar farms.
In an email, Scantland said Alberta Environment has reviewed the St. Albert/Villeneuve project and found it posed a low risk to wildlife.
Dye said fires were a real but incredibly rare risk on battery storage sites, with 0.3 per cent of the world’s battery storage sites having fires in 2024. That’s because modern sites are containerized and have fire suppression systems.
Via email, Scantland said his team was required to do a glare assessment of the project as part of its application to the Alberta Utilities Commission. He noted that modern solar panels have anti-reflective coatings that make them less reflective than water, glass buildings, or snow. The panels in this project can also tilt to reduce glare.
Dye noted that a 2021 study by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration found that the glare caused by solar farms was similar to that of a lake or parking lot and not particularly novel.
A June 2025 study in PNAS of some 8.8 million property transactions around 3,699 solar farms in the U.S. found that solar farms increased agricultural land values by about 19 per cent within two miles but reduced residential property values by about five per cent within three miles. The farms had effectively no effect on homes with more than five acres of land; the house value went down, but the land value went up. The farms produced about $22.2 billion in benefit per year by reducing greenhouse gas emissions and about $4.1 billion in costs from lower house values.
Pending approval, Scantland hopes to start construction of the St. Albert/Villeneuve project by 2029.
Details on the project can be found at canwestsolar.com.
Kevin Ma
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