Originally published on Sustainnovate.
The Ontario Power Authority has just extended its solar feed-in tariff program and selected another 99 MW of solar power projects to receive payments from it. This comes from 330 new contracts.
In case you’re not familiar with feed-in tariffs, they are when renewable energy power producers are guaranteed a specific rate for the electricity they produce and send back into the grid for a specific period of time (e.g., 15 years or 20 years). This lets the homeowners and businesses lock in an attractive, low-risk return on their investments.
76 of the new projects, totaling 33 MW of capacity, are for non-rooftop projects, while 254 (totaling the other 66 MW) are rooftop projects. Two biomass projects totaling 1MW were also selected and bring the total extension up to 100 MW. All of the projects, as a requirement of the program, are somewhere from 10 kW in capacity to 500 kW, not a watt bigger or smaller.
“Among the solar projects receiving the FiT, 121 (31MW) will involve First Nation and Métis community participation. Another 60 of the projects (18MW) have community participation and 151 projects (50MW), have municipal or public sector participation,” PV-Tech writes.
Altogether, the projects being awarded these new contracts should produce enough electricity for ~13,000 homes.
Colin Andersen, CEO of OPA said: “The FiT programme continues to generate strong interest among power generators as well as communities across the province. The FIT contracts we are about to offer represent significant investment in Ontario and in our electricity system. They show that the transformation of our electricity system to be cleaner and more sustainable is well on its way.”
Photo Credit: John Vetterli / iWoman / CC BY-SA
Reprinted with permission.
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