Solar PV – Too Much of a Good Thing for Ontario

In October 2009 the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) began accepting applications for their newly announce Feed-in Tariff (FiT). Within 2 months they had received 2,400 applications, and released their first 700 contract offers. Now, nine months later, the OPA has received over 14,000 applications and is well on it’s way to reaching the 100,000 rooftops as set out in it’s initial news release. Another major objective of this program is job creation. We would expect the OPA to take up on this objective and hire more people to process the requests! Though prior to start of the program, they stated that requests would be processed within 30 days, they have now officially admitted that it’s taking 90 days to process a request.

But hold on a second. Seems the OPA feels this is just too much of a good thing.  On July 2nd they announced their intention to reduce the feed-in tariff rate for small ground based solar systems from 80.2 cents per kWh, down to 58.8 cents per kWh. Makes you wonder how they will ever get to their objective of solar PV on 100,000 rooftops???

Similar Posts:

• OPA Issues 700 MicroFit Contracts for Solar Rooftops
• OPA Announces Feed-in Tariff Start of October 1 2009
• Ontario Solar Feed-in Tariff 80.2 Cents

Filed under: solar