New company looking to place small-scale solar on abandoned oil/gas sites

By Cole Parkinson
Vauxhall Advance
cparkinson@tabertimes.com

A new company has approached the Municipal District of Taber about developing renewable energy on abandoned oil and gas sites throughout the municipality. Goldenhill Capital Group (GCG) was in M.D. council chambers during their regular meeting on June 28 to update council on their ideas.

“GCG Power is a Lethbridge-based company and was established back in 2011. We focus on developing a local economy,” explained Rocky Gao of GCG.

Gas also explained that GCG also focuses on import/export, real estate development, along with renewable energy development. Over the last few years, the group has been particularly looking at abandoned oil/gas sites and with the M.D. dealing with that issue, GCG is hopefully they can be a solution.

“Since 2019, we have started to focus on the repurposing Orphan Well sites, so that’s when we engaged with Keith (Hirsche of RenuWell) and Canadian Solar. Along the project development, we have two partners that we are working with – at least for the first phase. One is Yingli Solar, another is Homilies Electronics Inc. and also we are potentially working with U.S. Pension Funds from Denver,” continued Gao.

GCG is looking at nine total sites, three are Orphan Well Association operated and six are CNRL operated. The M.D. owns five of the nine sites and would need council approval.

“Canadian Solar was initially proposing some of these sites post-case work on the two pilot projects,” added Brian Peers, director of Municipal Lands and Leases. “Since that time, Canadian Solar has backed off of their ambitious goals for this area because of some of the difficulties and challenges they are having with distribution and connections on the distribution and with AltaLink. Rocky’s company has come to fill that gap and to see if they can move forward with those developments.”

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