Pricing and Rules are Up in the Air Yesterday, the OPA announced that the official review of Ontario’s FIT and microFIT programs is finally underway. The results of the review may have broad-reaching implications for the solar PV, wind, biomass, micro hydro industries and the overall Cleantech sector. As part of the review process, the OPA has scheduled a teleconference for tomorrow morning, 2 November 2011, at 10 am EDT. The...

Toronto Horse Palace - Time to Hitch Up the Wagons The Ontario Feed-In-Tariff Supply Chain Forum, bringing together key executives from virtually all industry interest groups on April 19-20, is barely a month away. There will be lots to discuss.   Last week one of the leading solar industry analysts, Travis Bradford, observed that “Ontario has used every procedural trick in the book to slow down the (PV project approval)...

Ontario Power Authority Headquarters On Tuesday the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) expanded the Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) Program to allow formal participation of Commercial Aggregators. In so doing, the OPA has added another FIT rate class. More importantly, this move makes the microFIT program and its benefits more accessible to Ontario homeowners. When asked for comment on the change, Bernie Li, VP Finance and Co-Founder of PURE Energies,...

We received our first glimpse last week on the impact of the 20% rate reduction in Ontario’s Solar PV microFIT (<10 kW) program. The speakers at last week’s Ontario Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) Supply Chain Forum provided extensive new information on the FIT program status. Among other insights, Jim MacDougall from the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) presented a chart that provided a month-by-month tally of incoming applications for the...

Light Bulb Change by Committee With just over a year left until the Ontario Solar Feed-In-Tariff (FIT) program expires, there were two significant announcements yesterday that have significant implications for how the program operates.  While that news was breaking, however, there has been no update on how many of the approximately 11,000 pending solar ground-mount applications affected by the recent tariff cut had re-applied by the...