An announcement last week by the provincial government to invest in natural gas access is striking the right chord for Wellesley Township.
Chief administrative officer Rik Louwagie says access to natural gas is lacking right now.
“We don’t have many areas in the township that are covered by natural gas at this time,” Louwagie said.
The Ontario government has committed to putting $100 million into a new natural gas grant program. The program will begin accepting applications this spring.
According to the township’s director of planning, Geoff VanderBaaren, Wellesley Village, St. Clements, Linwood, Hawkesville and Heidelberg have access to natural gas.
Lowagie says one of the barriers to expanding the services to the rural areas is the cost of the infrastructure.
“Union Gas has been very slow to expand the infrastructure. Rural customers especially are wanting it. We have a large Mennonite population that runs off generators here and they would really like to have access to natural gas on their farms to reduce the cost of operating those generators. But the cost of the infrastructure to go to those rural areas is just too high. So hopefully this new program that the Ontario government has brought out may alleviate some of that,” Louwagie said.
He says the lack of natural gas access is one of the stumbling blocks that keeps businesses from opening in the township. Better access could help level the playing field if they had the same resources available as other centres do. The geographic location can be another issue.
“However we do have a lot of people that do want to establish a business in the township and accessible natural gas would certainly be one more reason to bring them here, or one more reason why they would choose to stay here or locate here rather than somewhere else,” Louwagie said.
He says they’ve discussed increasing the access with Union Gas before but it came down to an issue of costs. There have been plans to expand the pipeline before but the funding wasn’t in place to make it happen.
Once more details are available he believes the township will apply to the program, and then discuss with Union Gas because the program involves a municipality partnering with a provider to apply for the funding.
Louwagie heard about the announcement while at the Rural Ontario Municipal Association conference.
“It was one of the first things I wrote down when I was at the conference actually. As soon as I heard this announcement I knew it would be something we would look into,” Louwagie said.
Once they have further discussions with Union Gas he plans to present the natural gas grant program to council.
