AURORA, Ont. – Aurora Cable Internet (ACI) has announced plans to build a wind-powered generator that will create electricity to power its headend plant in the town north of Toronto.
Three high-efficiency wind turbines will capture wind energy on-site. The towers will be almost invisible from the street and the equipment will be quiet and cause “zero pollution,” the company says. The new equipment will be fully operational in October and November, with the possibility of adding solar power to the wind turbines.
The new equipment will “greatly reduce” the plant’s dependence on Ontario’s electricity grid. The equipment will generate enough electricity to power approximately 50 homes and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 100 tonnes per year, ACI says.
It will also allow the company to continue operating during power outages. “We are very pleased to pass on to our cable TV and Internet customers an even higher level of reliability and service without the use of diesel generators to provide backup power,” says Peter Scott, Technical Manager of ACI. “With our new system, we will be able to provide service to our customers even when the electrical grid is down during the rotating blackouts we all hear about or the brown-outs we have experienced this summer or even a long outage like we had in 2003.”
ACI is also “pleased and excited” that it will help the environment, says ACI General Manager Linda Morrison. “We have been thinking about this type of thing for years, but a good technological solution with a reasonable payback was not available until now.”
Aurora Cable Internet is using a local company, Hybridyne Power Systems Inc. of Newmarket, to construct the facility. “ACI’s overall energy usage from the grid will be greatly reduced, and they will have the capacity to engineer their electricity use to the non-peak overnight periods only,” says Thomas Cleland, president and CEO of Hybridyne. “It is our hope that this forward-thinking initiative taken by Aurora Cable Internet doesn’t go unnoticed by their peers in the wireless and cable industry, and certainly the rest of the industrial commercial sector as a whole.”
