Council in Centre Wellington is not saying "no" yet to battery energy storage systems on prime agricultural land within the township.

Aypa Power presented one of the storage systems for Elora back in October. On Monday, at a separate meeting, staff were presented with a second proposal for prime agricultural land in Belwood.

"To know us is to know that agricultural land is very important to us," Coun. Barb Evoy said.

Mayor Shawn Watters stated he sees the other side of the issue: a need to accommodate a rapidly growing population, though most of the conversation stemmed around protecting the farmland.

"This is part of the dilemma with power is that we're going to need power to help facilitate the growth we have- we're projected 1.5 million people- more people more everything that requires generated power," Watters said.

Janet Harrop, past president of the Wellington Federation of Agriculture was at Monday's meeting, and says the soil would struggle to recover from a battery energy storage system being placed on it.

"You have to tamp it down then you have to put concrete on then you're putting a 40-foot container on it, and then you're filling it with batteries, so it'll never return to the agricultural fertility and full-use that it was before," Harrop claimed.

Watters said council’s decision to leave these projects as a possibility is just a preliminary step in a long process.

"It's not guaranteed that this is going to happen," Watters stated.

"We haven't killed the possibility tonight. If we get selected it still has to go through a process at the county level in terms of prime ag and stuff like that. It keeps the process alive for now," he added.

After much chatter in Centre Wellington chambers surrounding the issue, council voted in favour of a municipal council support resolution for both Aypa Power and the secondary application from Alectra Energy Solutions. Both proposals will return to council at a future meeting.

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