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December 1, 2009

Ontario Will Pay Farmers 14.5 cents per kWh for Their Wind Generation

by Paul Gipe, Contributing Writer

The Ontario Power Authority (OPA) has confirmed that it will pay Ontario farmers $0.145 CAD/kWh for their wind generation under the province's new feed-in tariff program launched October 1, 2009.

Thus, if a farmer owns more than 50 percent of the controlling interest in a wind turbine or a wind farm of multiple turbines, they will qualify for the full community wind adder.

The Canadian dollar is near parity with the U.S. dollar.

The confirmation was made by the OPA's Jonathan Cheszes in a presentation at the Community Power Conference November 15 in Toronto.

In his presentation, Cheszes summarized the criteria necessary to qualify for OPA's community and aboriginal adders. To qualify for the $0.01 CAD/kWh community adder, the first criterion is simply "one or more individuals resident in Ontario". When asked whether this definition included farmers, Cheszes responded in the affirmative.

Thus, if a farmer owns more than 50 percent of the controlling interest in a wind turbine or a wind farm of multiple turbines, they will qualify for the full community wind adder.

As of mid July, 2009, OPA had yet to define how to qualify for the community adder. Community power proponents, notably the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association, had focused primarily on the definition of cooperatives and joint ventures and the degrees of ownership qualifying for the adder.

Ontario's community wind adder is the most significant program targeted specifically at farmers and rural residents in North America since Minnesota's community wind bonus. Previously, Minnesota had provided an equivalent community wind bonus for turbines up to 2 MW in the late 1990s.

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Reader Comments (3)
 
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Anonymous
December 1, 2009
It seems foolish to pay more than twice as much as wind energy sells for in the US markets. This will encourage locating turbines on poor resource locations and it plunders the rate payers who are being forced to lavishly fund such inefficient projects.
Steven
Comment 1 of 3
No image available
December 2, 2009
The farmer would still have to evaluate a cost/benefit comparison, with the farmer outlaying the financing of the project. I think its a clever way for the utility to encourage new sources of energy supply. They may have figured that in the long run it is cheaper to do that than to build new generation plants.

And in 10 years when there are much more wind generation, the utility can reduce the rate if their wind energy supply is too high.
Comment 2 of 3
No image available
December 2, 2009
Excessively high feed-in tariffs, especially for wind and solar outside the US, have helped give utility monopolists the political fodder they have needed to justify control of their markets, currently limited to rigged regulatory bidding and dysfunctional deregulated markets. I want to go on record again that our company would be satisfied with feed-in tariffs for biomass set at the levelized cost of a new fossil fuel plant.
Comment 3 of 3
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