Powerful Buildings

 There are many ways a building can be powerful.

A building can be imposing.  It can be famous.  It can represent something bigger than itself.  It can be iconic.  Or it can be powerful in the literal sense.

My family's Muskoka property is powerful in the literal sense.  The first way it is powerful is that it has 75,000 square feet of solar panels on the roof.  Ontario Power Authority, now called IESO, approved this installation which became live in December 2014 under a 20 year contract whereby it sells power to the grid at 71.3 cents per KW hour.  That installation can power a significant portion of our building's power needs at the end of the 20 year contract.

The second way in which the building is powerful is in its supply from the grid.  We have a transformer that provides 3 Megawatts of power to the building.  That is enough juice to run the Bracebridge hospital.  The building used to be a large automotive manufacturing plant running a hundred machines and employing three hundred people.  That sort of use required a ton of power.

Most manufacturing has left the province so the power currently goes underutilized.  If a data center, a call center, a battery generation company, or another large user of power ever wanted to be a tenant in the building, it would be perfect for them.

There is a cost to the inability to use all the power.  Our efficiency factor with Lakeland Power is below the target, thus costing us more in electricity than we actually use.  All in all, though, knowing that we can power any type of tenancy without difficult does provide some comfort.

Powerful buildings can accommodate power hungry tenants.