The Ontario Power Authority, which designed and is in charge of administering the province’s feed-in-tariff program, announced micro and small/medium sized FIT contracts earlier this year totalling 112 megawatts. Today, it issued the big one: the awarding of 184 contracts for projects larger than 500 kilowatts. In total, and assuming all projects get developed, this works out to 2,421 MW of green-energy capacity.

Ground-mounted solar represented 76 of the projects and amount to more than 600 megawatts. Northland Power, a company normally associated with building natural gas plants, has 13 solar projects totalling 130 MW. Onshore wind projects number 47 and waterpower projects number 46. The Ontario government called this the “single-largest green energy initiative of its kind in Canada,” while environmental and pro-green industry groups called the contract approvals historic. No doubt, criticism will follow from the usual suspects who continue to crap on any green-energy programs.

Significantly, 264 MW worth of projects have been identified as “community power”: projects developed, owned and operated by Ontario landowners and groups comprised of First Nations and energy co-ops — in other words, not by corporations.

The province said this latest round of projects will create 20,000 direct and indirect jobs, though I’ve always found it a mystery how they come to those numbers and take them with a grain of salt. It also estimated it will result in $9 billion in private investment, a figure that’s boosted by local content requirements.

The big surprise: a contract was issued for a 300 megawatt offshore wind project in Lake Ontario, near Kingston’s Wolfe Island. It’s sure to be a controverial project, but it represents the first time *in the world* that a power-purchase contract has been granted to an offshore wind project in the Great Lakes. It’s also the largest single approved project under this entire FIT round. Click here for a breakdown of the 184 projects.

The company behind the Wolfe Island Shoals Windfarm is a company called Windstream Energy. Don’t know much about them, but they’ve got their work cut out. They would have had to put up more than $3 million in security deposits to participate in the FIT, so I’m assuming they’ve got lots of wind data and have done the necessary studies (bird, bat, etc…) to move the project forward. But even so, they’re going to face the wrath of an angry Wolfe Island residents association, which is having a hard enough time accepting the onshore turbines there. “If they’re directly in front of Wolfe Island it’s going to be a firestorm,” said one industry observer. Got that right.

More to come later…

UPDATE: What does $91 million get you? The EcoEnergy program has to date saved Canadians more that 3 terawatt-hours (3 billion kilowatt-hours) of energy, according to the Canadian Energy Efficiency Alliance. That works out to $339 million in electricity costs every years. To now cut this program is mindboggling, and idiotic.

It continues to amaze me how hostile Canada’s current federal government is to programs aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Word tonight is that the Harper government is winding down its EcoEnergy home retrofit program. But, as is often the case, it didn’t give homeowners advance warning. The program technically runs until March 31, 2011, but if you haven’t already done or booked a pre-retrofit energy audit you’re out of luck — only those who have already booked this first audit can continue to benefit from the federal program, which pays out up to $5,000 in incentives for people who do home energy retrofits (matching incentives from the provinces may still be in effect).

This means if you’re considering solar thermal, ground-source heat pumps, a new high-efficiency furnace, a high-efficiency air conditioner, or measures to make your home more air-tight, you’ve pretty much missed the boat. It would have been nice to see some numbers from the government to justify this move.  We know that 85,000 people have already had audits that eventually led to $91 million in incentives being paid out. How much energy savings resulted? How much of a reduction in greenhouse gases did we see? How many jobs did it create? I would love to see these numbers, given that most energy experts will tell you that incentives for home energy retrofits represent one of the lowest-cost ways of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. If the Harper government is discontinuing a climate program considered cheap compared to other alternatives, then it’s crystal clear that this government couldn’t care less about meeting its international obligations or even meeting its own greenhouse-gas reduction targets.

Let’s keep in mind it has also killed future funding for its EcoEnergy for Renewables program, taking away federal incentives for developers of wind, solar, geothermal and other renewable projects. It has also failed to promote, let alone acknowledge the potential of geothermal power projects in Canada. It helped undermine climate talks in Copenhagen. It cut funding for climate research. It is one of the only major developed countries to refuse membership in the newly created International Agency for Renewable Energy. You can see where this list is going…

On January 7 I wrote a post about Burnaby, B.C.-based solar manufacturer Day4 Energy and its sale of 5.1 megawatts of solar modules to Ontario’s Hybridyne Power Systems Canada, which designs and constructs utility-scale solar parks and — according to my post – ”is 47.5 per cent owned by Atlantic Wind and Solar Inc.” I also wrote that “Atlantic and Hybridyne plan to use the panels for a 2 MW energy park in Newcastle, about an hour east of Toronto, and Atlantic will use the rest for a variety of rooftop solar installations, part of its plan to take advantage of Ontario’s new feed-in tariff program.”

The information about Atlantic Wind & Solar was taken right out of Day4 Energy’s press release, in which it said:

Since AWSL’s June 2009 acquisition of Hybridyne Power Systems Canada, the Company has been actively pursuing a number of exciting renewable energy projects that portend a successful 2010 with the achievement of several corporate milestones. The Hybridyne acquisition, followed by the revolutionary Green Energy Act introduced by Canada’s most populous province, Ontario, has led to a strong focus by Atlantic Wind and Solar Inc. on the exciting potential for growth in the rooftop solar business across Ontario, and has quickened the pace of its province-wide marketing efforts in that regard.

Day4′s confusion is understandable, given that Atlantic Wind has been indicating to everyone that the deal with Hybridyne was a done deal. (more…)

Kate Galbraith over at the NYT’s Green Inc. has an interesting post about community solar and how it’s beginning to take hold in certain U.S. communities, including St. George, Utah, Falmouth, Massachusetts, and Sacramento, California, where the local utility there runs a program called “Solar Shares” that allows people to buy into PV projects without having to buy the PV.  A similar initiative is in the works in Tucson, Arizona. Fact is, not everybody owns a home or has a home where the roof is ideal for installing PV. This excludes a large part of the population, like renters, from incentive programs that try to encourage residential uptake of solar PV.

In Ontario, a group called Countryside Energy Co-Op is among a number of community co-ops that have emerged to take advantage of the province’s new feed-in-tariff program. Countryside, a co-op serving southwestern Ontario, seeks out commercial building owners who are willing to lease out their rooftop space for a large PV project. It will then oversee construction of the project and ultimately own and collect feed-in-tariff revenues on behalf of members, which get an annual dividend over 20 years based on the number of shares they own. The program is ideal for “People with unsuitable locations (for example shading due to trees, buildings, etc. which significantly lowers electrical output and therefore revenue) but who want PV can become members of Countryside Energy and invest through Preference Shares, their capital contributing to develop Co-op PV projects on large buildings,” according to a recent press release from the co-op. “As the electricity generated will be connected to the grid, Co-op members will generate and use their own virtual electricity.”

Countryside has partnered with ARISE Technologies Corp., a PV manufacturer and installer based in Waterloo, Ontario. Other co-op style initiatives might just focus on a single projects for a community. For example, the Unitarian Universalist Congregration in Toronto has registered as a co-op and is selling shares within its community to fund a single project that will see PV installed on its church rooftop. The purchase of shares has been strong, showing that there is interest in this kind of model.

It’s nice to see. I can see similar initiatives popping up across the province around schools and community centres.

Check out this story of mine in MIT Technology Review about Sundrop Fuels, a Colorado startup that’s trying to commercialize a process that uses the sun to gasify biomass, instead of burning a portion of the biomass itself to drive the gasification process. The technology is based on research carried out at the University of Colorado, Boulder, with help from NREL. The company believes the syngas from its process can be produced affordably in high enough quanity and quality that it could be refined into gasoline for less than $2 a gallon. One obvious hitch is the fact that the best place to harness and concentrate solar heat is in the U.S. Southwest — not exactly the place you’d go to look for surplus biomass resources. BTW: Sundrop is operating largely in stealth mode, and counts Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as one of its venture backers.

On the topic of solar, Ontario’s feed-in-tariff program is gaining momentum. On Wednesday the province’s power authority announced the latest batch of projects to be approved under the program — these ones in the 10 kw to 500 kw range. A few surprises: Loblaw Group of Companies, the grocery giant, has applied to have 136 of its stores across Ontario rigged with solar PV systems. If all go ahead, it would amount to 21 megawatts just for this one grocery chain. Loblaw is starting with four pilot projects and will move forward from there depending on the results. Surprisingly, Northland Power Income Fund will be doing the installations. I say “surprising” because I typically associate this company with natural gas and CHP plants.

There also appears to be quite a few schools putting solar on their rooftops, most of the projects being handled by Ameresco. The other big player in this initial round is OZZ International Inc., which has been approved to move forward on several dozen projects across the province.

All this momentum continues to lure foreign manufacturers  and new business models to Ontario. Most recently SMA Solar Technology AG of Germany said it was establishing a 500-megawatt a year solar inverter production facility in the province that would serve the Canadian market. They join Korean’s Samsung, India’s Solar Semiconductor, Germany’s Bosch and potentially Denmark’s Vestas.