In an sweeping announcement today, the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) announced the award of over 2100MW of renewable projects as part of the implementation the Green Energy Act. The announced projects consist of 650MW of solar PV and 1520MW of wind projects and provide further evidence of the strong policy leadership that has established the province as a global center for renewable power.
Included in the announcement was an award of 177MW (154.5MWac) of distributed solar power projects to Recurrent Energy. The award is an exciting milestone for us and firmly establishes Recurrent Energy as the largest solar power project developer in Ontario under the Feed-in Tariff (FiT) program.
Recurrent Energy will finance, build, own and operate the photovoltaic (PV) solar power systems, using equipment and services meeting the 60 percent domestic content requirements of the Feed-in Tariff program. The OPA will buy 100 percent of the power and renewable energy credits (RECs) from the projects.
The announcement is a validation of our decision to buy UPC Solar's pipeline of projects in Ontario a little over a year ago. Since then, we've poured resources into Ontario to advance the projects, working closely with the OPA and the provincial government along the way to ensure the projects were consistent with their goal of stimulating investment and jobs in the province.
The 19 project sites are located in the Counties of Simcoe, Lanark, Middlesex, Oxford, and the United Counties of Leeds and Grenville. The projects are expected to be completed in 2011 and early 2012. We expect the projects to create of over 2,500 jobs in the province including local manufacturing, engineering, construction, electrical, project development and related services.
The scale of the announcement is a reflection of how far our company and the industry have come in the last couple of years. It's 3x the size of our recently announced SCE award and 30 times the size of our Sunset Reservoir project now under construction. Overall, our pipeline of projects now exceeds 1-gigawatt across the US, Ontario, and Europe.
We're thrilled to play a part in the OPA's plans and look forward to bringing these projects to commercial operation in the coming years.
I hope U.S. utility regulators and energy policy makers are paying attention.
Solar generated electricity requires the feed-in-tarrifs and generous RECs for it to contribute significantly.
Just look at Germany and now Ontario. And see what happened to Spain when the subsidy structure was diminished.
Anyway, a big high five for the accomplishment.
Posted by: Joe Garma | 12 April 2010 at 05:13 PM