On Easter Saturday, CAFES submitted its feedback to the City of Ottawa on the draft Rural
Economic Development Plan, posted for consultation on Engage Ottawa. Our message, in one
line: it’s great to see the City paying attention to rural issues, and great to see this Plan — but it
misses the single biggest source of new capital investment heading into rural Ottawa: energy.
The draft identifies agriculture, tourism, retail, and construction as rural Ottawa’s key industries.
It does not mention energy — not as a cost challenge for rural households juggling propane and
heating oil bills, not as a constraint on rural investment, and not as the emerging economic
opportunity it clearly is.
The numbers make the case:
- ~$1 billion in battery storage investment is already contracted for rural Ottawa through
two Evolugen/Brookfield projects (South March and Trail Road), both 50% owned by the
Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn First Nation. - $400,000 per year in community benefit payments — $8 million over 20 years — will
flow to Ottawa from those two projects alone. - $700,000–$800,000 per year in new property tax revenue is expected, on a few dozen
acres, with essentially zero demand on City services. - 210–260 MW of ground-mount solar is already in Ottawa’s IESO LT2 pipeline, including
projects by Portage Power — Hydro Ottawa’s own subsidiary. - $1.2 billion in grid investment is planned by Hydro Ottawa for 2026–2030.
Beyond the big projects, there’s an equally important story at the household and farm scale:
rooftop solar, heat pumps, batteries, EVs, farm biogas, and agri-voltaics. These keep energy
dollars circulating locally instead of flowing out to refineries and distant generators, and they
create work for local electricians and trades.
Why this matters beyond the dollars. For CAFES, the energy transition is the central lever for
cutting Ottawa’s GHG emissions — and rural Ottawa is where a lot of it will physically happen,
because that’s where the land, the rooftops, the farms, and the grid infrastructure are. It’s also
where energy resilience matters most: dairy farms, community centres, and households on long
rural feeders feel power outages hardest, and distributed energy resources are a direct answer
to that. Treating energy as a rural economic development opportunity isn’t separate from climate
action — it is climate action, paired with local prosperity.
CAFES recommended five changes to the Plan:
- Recognise energy as a key rural industry alongside agriculture and tourism.
- Create a Rural Ottawa Energy Officer position.
- Adopt a proactive posture on energy project siting (LT2 requires municipal support
resolutions — Ottawa has real leverage here). - Broaden the Plan’s lens to include rural affordability and household prosperity, not just
business development. - Actively facilitate community-owned renewables, agri-voltaics, and farm biogas.
A billion dollars of clean energy investment doesn’t arrive in rural Ottawa every day. The Rural
Economic Development Plan should name it, plan for it, and make sure rural residents and
businesses see the benefits.
Thanks to Aaron Kelly, CAFES Energy Strategist, who led the preparation of this submission.
The full submission is available here.