Solar Power

The local newspaper carried a story on Friday about the new solar panels at City Hall. It was a feel-good story with councillor Koziol saying how the installation of the panels shows leadership and how it will attract green investment to North Bay. Everything green is good. Green money is very good, especially when the taxpayers foot the bill for this green conscience-assuaging project. The Mayor chipped in, paraphrasing Allan Armstrong, commending the project as being one giant step for North Bay, one small step in combating global warming, and that he looked forward to other renewable energy projects.

The solar panels – you may monitor the results on the City’s webpage - are visible from the Environmental Services offices. The ES manager said that the project, providing we get lots of sunshine and the creeks don’t rise, will have a payback of $5,000 a year at 35w per day. Therefore, we should get our money back in about 15 years. The solar panels are a feel-good project, saving, according to the chair of engineering and environmental works, the amount of pollution an average passenger car emits over 20 days.

Now if the good Councillor and Mayor were truly concerned about the environment they would borrow another $50,000 from North Bay Hydro (that’s us) and put it to better use. While the lowly taxpayer can see their investment from the street, over on the dark side of City Hall sit the engineers, their only view being the alternating traffic lights on Worthington Street. One can only hope that every time those traffic lights change colour, the engineers get a little pang of remorse over not getting their hands on that $50,000 of soul-satisfying solar money.

You must understand that if we were terribly concerned about that one average passenger car and the amount of pollution it emits every 20 days, we would be thinking about the pollution we (the City) is causing every day with our stop lights on Trout Lake Road and McKeown Avenue (to name only a couple of examples). Our engineers, restricted by a lack of funds (surely not foresight) have installed timed traffic signals on the above two arterial roads at intersections where very often no cars wait to cross. Day and night, 365 days a year, the lights change whether there is cross-traffic or not.

A person driving that one average passenger car on any one of the 20 days in a year could calculate that sitting at stoplights when there is no cross traffic on these busy roads, is burning more fuel and emitting more pollution than the Environmental Manager would like to admit. But that one average car, quoted by the Councillor, is not alone. Each day, every day for 365 days a year, several hundreds of cars stop, wait and start unnecessarily at the non-sensored intersections in North Bay. These average passenger cars are joined by an even greater number of half-ton trucks and SUVs that could easily match the solar panel savings in about 12 days. Then there are the fifty or sixty transport trucks, and equal number of dump trucks and several city buses that stop at these signals. A few make it through the signals unscathed.

The drivers who sit and watch the lights must wonder at the mentality of the engineers who designed the traffic light system to bring them to a brake-grinding stop in the middle of the night when not another soul is to be seen at the intersection. If the drivers chanced to think that the money spent on the solar panel might have upgraded the traffic lights and saved some serious pollution, they would see red, not green. However, they ought not blame the engineers, but city councils, past and present. Even bicyclists, who emit only small bursts of methane when they stop and start at these lights, must shake their heads in disbelief.

Perhaps on the next rainy day when the panels are resting, the Environmental Manger could take an hour off from watching the solar panel activity on the web, and in the company of a traffic engineer, venture out to Trout Lake Road and observe the absurdity of traffic lights that stop hundreds of vehicles every hour for no reason. He might then join voices with the engineers to get council’s attention to this much-needed upgrade to the system.

But alas, our illustrious leaders are more intent on optics than practicality. Having lanes of smooth-flowing traffic that reduces pollution is not nearly as headline-grabbing as their solar panels. Even though Ontario Power cannot handle anymore of these feel-good projects, we have to keep taking the small steps to reduce pollution and produce green energy. Are we really interested in saving the environment or just in creating economic opportunities? Mayhap we should consider what a prospective business entrepreneur would think of moving to a city that touts Green as he or she sits at an empty intersection looking at a red light. After all, we all know it is a matter of optics. And solar panels.