A company planning a massive new solar farm for rural Tantramar must first find a buyer for the electricity it plans to produce.
Executives from BNRG Renewables were in Sackville this month to fill in Tantramar councillors about the 150-megawatt solar farm they've proposed for a 400-hectare site in the farming community of Cookville, about 15 kilometres north of Sackville.
“Selling the power is hurdle number one,” said Kenny Wheeler, the project manager for Cookville Solar, a partnership between BNRG and the North Shore Mi'kmaq Tribal Council.
“The returns have to meet a threshold that supports our involvement."
N.B. Power is one possible customer, but the electricity could also be sold to neighbouring jurisdictions through the region’s open access transmission tariff system.
Brad Coady, the N.B. Power chief commercial officer, said the utility has had a number of meetings with Cookville Solar, “as well as other proponents across New Brunswick in the renewable energy field.”
BNRG Renewables CEO David Maguire and senior project manager Kenny Wheeler said Cookville Solar is working on contracts to sell the power it will produce.
N.B. Power put out a call for 400 megawatts of renewable energy projects in May 2025, and awarded a 200-megawatt deal to Brighton Mountain Wind, a subsidiary of J.D. Irving Ltd., in December.
The utility said at the time that it was still considering 14 other proposals for large-scale renewable projects.
Cookville Solar is one of the proponents under consideration, and the utility is “hopeful that there's a way to make [the project] happen,” Coady said.
“But the only way we can make it happen at N.B. Power is if we can have a cost-effective business case that's accepted by the Energy and Utilities Board."
Wheeler said that while there’s currently no contract to sell the power, the company is “negotiating those contracts and working through that.”
‘Need in the market’
BNRG started developing the Cookville Solar project in 2023, according to Wheeler.
“We saw a need in the market, and we had an existing relationship with North Shore [Mi'kmaq Tribal Council], so it sort of fit,” he said.
The company started looking for land and transmission capacity in the province, and then commissioned a study to determine capacity of the Cookville site, which borders an N.B. Power high voltage line.
An overhead sketch of the project development area (in red) as part of the environmental impact assessment for the Cookville Solar Project.
Local infrastructure for the project would cost about $300 million, and more than 250 jobs would be generated during construction, Wheeler told Tantramar council. He also said the energy produced could power 12,500 homes.
The project does not include a battery storage component.
Wheeler said the conditions of the region’s wholesale electricity market and the relatively high cost of battery storage means there’s no economic case for Cookville Solar to incorporate storage into its solar energy project.
Environmental assessment underway
After finding a suitable market for the power, the next hurdle faced by Cookville Solar would be the design of the site around protected wetlands to ensure it can still meet the necessary scale to be financially viable.
Wheeler said the company is currently working on answering close to 100 questions as part of a provincial environmental impact assessment process. The company has also met with both Kopit Lodge and Mi'gmawe'l T'plutaqann Inc., the two rights-defending groups representing New Brunswick’s Mi’kmaq First Nations.
The company hopes to start operating in the spring of 2029 and to start construction at the end of 2027.
