CANADA: A company owned by Texas tycoon T. Boone Pickens said it was evaluating its options after losing its claim it had been unfairly treated under Ontario’s wind procurement process.
Ontario FIT
A big reason Canada has residual credibility in the climate change talks is because shutting down Ontario coal plants was the biggest single CO2 reduction in all of North America.
Ontario’s landmark Green Energy and Green Economy Act’s enactment in 2009 by Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government represented one of the most significant energy policy overhauls in Canadian history.
Based on population, Ontario would be the 5th largest state if it were part of the U.S., but its installed solar capacity, 1,500 MW would rank it 3rd.
Former Ontario Premier, Dalton McGuinty, received the Sierra Club Distinguished Service Award at a ceremony in San Francisco. . . Mr. McGuinty is responsible for closing Ontario’s coal-fired power plants, passing the Green Energy Act, and creating the Greenbelt around Toronto.
Ontario’s Independent Electricity System Operator has proposed new tariffs for its microFIT program in 2016. The regulator makes a case that although Ontario’s costs are higher than other jurisdictions, the overall costs for solar PV have declined. Consequently, they have proposed lower tariffs for solar PV while leaving other microFIT tariffs unchanged.
In his masters thesis for the Université de Montréal, Jacques Fontaine tackles how the province of Ontario leapt to the … Read more
A total of 330 feed-in tariff contracts totalling 99MW will be offered to solar power systems in the province next year, with another 1MW offered to two bio energy contracts also, to take the extension to 100MW.
The MicroFIT prices today are inadequate to overcome the added cost and restrictions imposed by program rules. But rather than increase the price to encourage deployment, it is the rules, and costs that should be reviewed. Fix these, and you will see deployment rise to reasonable levels, and costs decrease. In the long run, this will allow lower prices for solar for ratepayers.
Most of these contract offers are for solar photovoltaic (PV) projects, similar to what we have seen in previous application periods. The total list includes 490 solar PV projects, eight bio-energy projects, one wind energy project and one waterpower project. Of these, 257 projects (60 MW) are with Aboriginal participation, 161 projects (42 MW) with municipal or public sector entity participation and 81 projects (21.5 MW) with community participation. More than 95 percent of the successful applications had received municipal council support resolutions.
