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Meet the innovator who is working to make small solar farms out of retired oil and gas well sites.
There’s nothing Keith Hirsche likes better than solving problems. And over his 45-plus year career, he’s come up with solutions for a wide range of people, from data crunchers in the oil industry, to government bureaucrats at every level, to the Taber Corn King, and more than a few skeptical PhD researchers.
Where It Began
Hirsche was raised on a farm in Taber, Alberta, a town known as the “corn capital of Canada,” where the famously sweet corn is harvested in late summer. It’s located just under an hour’s drive north of the Montana border and 272 km (169 miles) southeast of Calgary. Sought-after Taber corn can be found across the province in the fall, spilling out of the backs of farm pick-up trucks, sold by the dozen along the side of the highway, and overflowing the produce sections in grocery stores. His neighbour and family friend was James Molnar, known as the “Corn King” for the high quality, award-winning corn he produces on his small acreage.
Taber, in a way, would also become the through-line of Hirsche’s career path. The town’s reputation is built around corn, but its history is also entwined with that of oil, which was discovered there in 1937, bringing with it both blessings and plagues — and challenges in need of a creative solution.
An Unconventional Thinker
After high school, Hirsche delayed going to university, choosing to instead get field experience working as a data “geek” in the oil sands learning how to map bitumen deposits near Fort McMurray, Alberta. He had planned to become a geoscientist but later dropped out of the University of Calgary and took a job working for Texas Instruments Research in Dallas. He says that not finishing his degree may have helped him think a bit differently about problems. Where others were rigid in their opinions, he explains, “I’d be working at a company and somebody would tell me, ‘this is such a big problem and nobody knows how to fix this problem’ and so I’d say, ‘I wonder if we tried this.’”
Hirsche worked in Norway with a niche software company that helped companies improve oil recovery in difficult spots using data to digitally decode the oil deposit, but then his adult son got him interested in the possibilities of renewable energy. With a family connection in Norway, Hirsche started a business bringing used wind turbines from Denmark to Canada, even offering to set one up on his family farm to test it out. Then he pitched a novel idea to an oil company: use wind power to help recover more oil from a well declining in production.
But the timing wasn’t right. The Alberta government in the early 2000s was privatizing the electricity sector and getting a grid connection during the transition period proved insurmountable for Hirsche’s small wind powered start-up. “It seemed like whenever we got a step forward, the [Alberta] government would change policy to make it difficult to do renewables,” he says.
Hirsche then considered organic farming north of Calgary and, when that fell through, a carbon capture project. Building on his experience with the oil sands and enhanced oil recovery, he landed a role in Saskatchewan with one of the first large-scale carbon capture projects in Canada, the Weyburn-Midland Carbon Dioxide Project.
The Opportunity
Then, around 2015, solar energy reached a “tipping point” during an oil and gas downturn, says Hirsche, and he saw an opportunity to use solar instead of wind power on abandoned oil leases. This was the birth of RenuWell Energy Solutions Inc. Now he needed a site to test his solar solution, and so he found himself back home, applying for a development permit from the Municipal District of Taber.
In talking to his neighbour, the Corn King, Hirsche found out that Molnar had gotten some bad news: he couldn’t use a portion of his land because it was contaminated by an oil spill from the 1960s, before oil well clean-up regulations even existed. Hirsche wanted to help, and Molnar accepted the offer.
Keith Hirsche had come up with a scheme to help oil companies cut costs by using renewable energy on abandoned leases to power their operations. Now he’s looking to bring that idea home, testing a model that would work anywhere there’s unproductive land.
The Bigger Picture
Oil spills are not landowners’ only problem. Alberta has almost 300,000 oil wells that are either marginal, inactive, or decommissioned, leaving landowners stuck with land that is no longer productive due to abandoned oil and gas wells.
Over the years, Hirsche had tried to help oil companies cut costs by using renewable energy. In 2018, he recognized a growing problem of abandoned oil and gas wells. Hirsche jumped at the chance to help navigate a corn-maze of regulations with a solar endpoint in mind. He believed his model using solar panels to generate power and revenue would work just about anywhere, and was eager to prove it. “I can’t tell you how many times people said, ‘solar doesn't work,’” he says, “but if you’ve got a working project, it’s kind of hard to dispute that.”
The Idea in Action
In Molnar’s case, Hirsche received his permit from the municipality, and the local irrigation council set up a small utility to own the solar panels, which use the electricity locally to power irrigation systems covering 11,000 acres. The Corn King collected rent from the utility company, who took over paying local property taxes but didn't take over the liability for the clean-up. Any liability remained attached to the land. Under the model, a landowner can still separately seek settlements with the oil and gas companies for the land’s lost value.
Oil and gas companies have been avoiding their obligations and leaving more and more debt on the province,” Hirsche says, “and I didn’t want to contribute to that problem.
– Keith Hirsche
In its first year of operation, RenuWell generated 1.9 gigawatt hours of solar power — that’s equal to about half the power generated each year by the Hoover Dam – while eliminating the equivalent of 1,065 megatonnes of annual carbon dioxide emissions. The projects also created local employment, and Hirsche provided training for 13 workers through an organization called “Iron and Earth,” which includes Indigenous participants. And so far, the response has been good. RenuWell was recognized as “top project” in 2025 by Clean50, a Canadian awards program for “exceptional contributors to the clean economy.”
On the Ground
His first few projects helped landowners earn income while their land was not usable due to oily contamination and undergoing a rehabilitation process that might last for many years. To ensure safety, the sites must have an environmental assessment — achieving a basic level of remediation — before the solar panels are erected, Hirsche explains. And the land still has to eventually be returned to its original state.
“Oil and gas companies have been avoiding their obligations and leaving more and more debt on the province,” he says, “and I didn’t want to contribute to that problem.” The plan doesn’t let companies off-the-hook, but provides income during a lengthy reclamation process.
Some estimate the total cost to clean up oil and gas wells in the province at around C$100 billion, with the portion of the cost covered by an industry-funded Orphan Well Association (OWA) falling further behind every year. Wells are considered “orphaned” when there is no company legally or financially responsible for the clean-up, usually due to bankruptcy. Alberta’s leniency in collecting money each year from industry has failed to sufficiently cover OWA costs and taxpayers fear they may end up having to pay for that mess, in addition to future orphan wells expected to be added to the inventory as fossil fuels are phased out.
The solar panels provide income and may also add renewables into Alberta’s electricity mix, strengthening the power supply, distributed and used locally, taking pressure off the grid.
Scaling Up
Hirsche says the model can also be applied to abandoned wells on Crown-owned land, but some provincial regulatory hurdles remain. Alberta had a seven-month moratorium on adding any renewable energy that has since been lifted, but there are still some barriers, including a ban on renewables on the same Crown land where Hirsche would like to place solar panels. Alberta said it paused the province’s rapidly growing renewable sector to write new regulations and avoid the clean-up costs it was experiencing with the oil and gas industry. Hirsche hopes the ban will be lifted soon, and the government has promised to consider it.
It has been a “roller coaster,” Hirsche says, but “I had the opportunity to be part of a non-denominational ministerial group that was supporting survivors of residential schools through the TRC [Truth and Reconciliation Commission] and I see the resiliency of the Indigenous nations and all they’ve been through — the apocalypse they’ve lived through.” Hirsche sees the strength and the connection that many Indigenous people have to the land and says that “there’s always hope to change, there’s always potential to turn things around.”
With funding and grants now backed by both levels of government, it looks like the conversion of abandoned oil wells to green power sources may be getting closer to reality. After almost five decades of working in this area, Hirsche says instead of relaxing into his retirement, he’ll be launching his biggest venture yet. “If we put our focus on these forward-looking solutions instead of trying to protect the past,” he says, “we have hope.”
Want more renewable success stories? Read about how an Indigenous community in B.C. is converting abandoned oil wells to geothermal.
