When life hands a city brownfields, a Guelph non-profit wants them to make lemonade.

Or rather, they want to investigate whether the land could be used to create community-owned solar energy projects.

Emerge Guelph Sustainability, a non-profit that promotes energy efficiency, water conservation and sustainable practices in the city, is working with researchers at the University of Guelph to consider what those kinds of projects could look like on two specific sites in Guelph: the former landfill lands on the east end and the International Malleable Iron Company (IMICO) site in The Ward neighbourhood.

“We took a page out of that adage, when life gives you a lemon, let’s make lemonade. And needless to say that something like a landfill is a real problem for us,”  Evan Ferrari, executive director of Emerge Guelph, told CBC K-W’s The Morning Edition host Craig Norris.

“We’ve all been part of the problem and we see it as a real solution, as one of the solutions that we can work … in order to fight climate change. So we want to put solar on it and we want it to be a community-owned project where people that can otherwise not be able to put solar on their roof or solar on their apartment building to be able to take part in a project like this.”

Ferrari is working alongside Derya Tarhan, an assistant professor at the school of environmental design and rural development at the University of Guelph, on phase one of what they expect to be a multi-year initiative.

Tarhan has researched community-owned renewable energy projects for more than a decade and says in other projects around the world, there’s been great local economic benefits.

“It provides people an opportunity to invest in renewable energy and get some returns on it as well,” he said.

“But also compared to outside large corporate-owned projects, community-owned projects have been shown to generate more local economic multipliers, hire more locally and the dollar spent stays locally within Guelph.”

Tarhan added when people are part of a project like this, it can also shift their perceptions and behaviour around energy habits.

“So people are no longer simply users or customers, consumers of energy, but they also become producers. And there’s a lot of benefits that come with that,” he said.

Building on brownfields can be complicated

The Ontario government’s website defines brownfields as vacant or underutilized lands “where past industrial or commercial activities may have left contamination” including chemical pollution. Examples of brownfields include factories, dry cleaners or gas stations.

These sites can be complicated because the ground requires a lot of remediation to remove the contamination and make it suitable for other uses.

The IMICO site is a 5.2-hectare property located at 200 Beverley Street. The area was used as a foundry starting in 1912. In 1992, the site was sold and the main foundry building was used to store waste materials. In 1993, the province ordered the owner to cleanup the site. The property was sold, then was transferred to the city after nonpayment of taxes. 

In 1999, the city removed all the buildings, debris and waste, along with:

• 9,387 tonnes of contaminated soils.
• 36 tonnes of leachate toxic soils.
• 925 tonnes of contaminated concrete.

Today, the site is overgrown with grasses and brush, surrounded by fencing and people are not permitted on the property. 

The 85-hectare landfill site in the east end closed in 2003 but has partially been converted into a park, with a playground, soccer and football fields, a splash pad, bicycle pump track and a disc golf course.

But the vast majority of the property, 45 hectares, contains approximately four million tonnes of solid, non-hazardous waste that is currently covered by grass and flowers. But all of that is behind fences and people are not permitted to access it.

Ferrari says the former landfill and the IMICO sites are potentially ideal for a solar project like this because “they are large pieces of land within the municipality that are close to the consuming public of electricity, in a nutshell, and rarely can you find land of that sort.”

City has not signed on yet

Ferrari and Tarhan have presented the idea to city council on Jan. 27, 2026, and say they felt it was received well, particularly the part about how it could be the community that builds it, rather than the city fronting money for the project.

The city has not yet signed on to the project, though. CBC News reached out to the City of Guelph but did not hear back by deadline.

They estimate at today’s costs, the project could be $35 million, but Ferrari says that is expected to change and could even go lower because the technology around wind and solar energy is becoming more affordable.

Ferrari says there are other similar models of community-owned solar projects across the country and the idea would be that people could invest $1,000 or more to own a part of the project.

“That’s still a lot of money from people, but we want people to be able to be part of the solution,” he said.

Ferrari says if the idea proves worthy, they hope to be able to move forward in the next few years.

“This is where we need to roll up our sleeves and really look at the challenges and the opportunities,” he said. “We know there are a lot of challenges. This isn’t an easy project by any means.”