Quebec town hopes solar power can keep the lights on at community centre

Cantlie's multi-use community centre might just be the most popular building in town. It's been a hit with residents since opening just seven years ago. You would expect a library in a community centre, but how about a gym, a popular cafe, and even a commercial kitchen where people can make meals. What isn't as popular in Cantlie are the regular power outages. Trees get heavy, they fall on the lines, the lights go out. And so the multi-use centre becomes a refuge in the cold. Get water, take a shower, to be able to do your meals. So it's important that we have always electricity. To do that, the mayor wants to turn this centre's roof into a giant solar farm and even to add batteries for storage. The project that we want to do is solar panels on the roof to help us to reduce our expenses of electricity. It's around $5,000 per month. So Cantlie would gain some resilience and save some money. That's what happened when this Gatineau businessman invested heavily in solar just over a year ago. Each year will save a lot of money for sure and probably the panels will be good for at least 25 years. If Cantlie's plan to generate and store electricity here comes to fruition, it would be one of the very first public projects in all of Quebec to do so. Maybe the most interesting thing, though, is that it hasn't happened already. That's because Natural Resources Canada tracks sunlight and photovoltaic energy potential across Canada. Anarkand says the Oudoué is near the top of the list of the sunniest places in Quebec. Mainly because of the economics behind them. The CEO of one of the province's biggest solar equipment suppliers says it's only the low price of hydroelectricity in Quebec that has slowed the uptake of solar. So in the last three years, we've seen a huge momentum of companies, especially here in the Gatineau region, to move forward with this kind of system. If we can help to do something that could be reproduced in another municipality, we'll be very happy to be a model. If all goes according to plan, Cantlie's multi-use centre will be solar-powered and ready to weather the next storm by next summer. Stu Mills, CBC News, Cantlie.