Developing Ontario's Community Power Potential with
Advanced Renewable Tariffs (Standard Offer Contracts)
What Was Needed
- Separate mechanism for small, locally initiated power projects
- Standardised contracts with fixed prices (for financing)
- Streamlined Interconnection (for eliminating obstacles)
Advanced Renewable Tariffs or Standard Offer Contracts
- 20 year contracts
- 10 MW project size limit
- Different prices for different technologies (wind, biomass, small hydro and PV)
- No program limit or cap (to prevent gaming)
- Open to all participants
- Program is not a pilot but is reviewed every two years
Streamlined Small Renewable Project Interconnection
- Contracts for all projects less than 10 MW
- Contracts open to everyone
- No allocation of contracts (to avoid hoarding)
- Project size determined by point of interconnection (to deter aggregators)
Why
- Long-term contracts eliminate large price volatility for consumers
- Long-term contracts enable financing
- Community renewables increase acceptance
- Local or distributed generation saves 9% in line losses
- Generation strongly correlated to demand
- Simplified procurement eliminates need for staff, time, and expense
- Local generation provides new source of rural revenue
- 10 MW project size is self limiting, no need for quotas
- Ontario needs new clean sources of generation and it needs it quickly
- Renewable Tariffs are the single-most effective policy mechanism for rapidly developing renewable energy.
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