Premier of Ontario Dalton McGuinty announced last week the largest green energy initiative of its kind in Canadian history.
Under the province’s Green Energy Act’ feed-in tariff scheme, 184 new contracts for large clean energy projects have been approved, in addition to 510 medium-sized projects already in the pipeline. The contracts could generate more than 2,500 megawatts of electricity, enough to power 600,000 homes.
The Premier made the announcement in Cornwall, located in eastern Ontario; an area where 60 green projects with a combine generation capacity of 900 megawatts have been approved. This includes three 10-megawatt ground-mounted solar farms: Northland Power (10 MW) in Cornwall; Effisolar (10 MW) in the Township of South-Glengarry and Penn Energy (10 MW) in the Township of South-Glengarry.
Requirements of these projects will mean thousands of new jobs in the cleantech sector and about AUD$9.5 billion in private sector investment. The added injection of renewable energy into Ontario’s grid will come at a cost to the average end-consumer of around five dollars a month added to electricity bills.
Ontario’s Green Energy Act is part of the government’s Open Ontario Plan that provides a stable price for clean energy producers so they will invest in the province. The Green Energy Act is expected to create up to 50,000 Ontario jobs.
Since 2003, approximately 1,300 megawatts of renewable electricity has been added to Ontario’s energy mix. Ontario is Canada’s leader in wind power and solar photovoltaic (solar panel) capacity and the province also boasts Canada’s largest wind and solar farms.
