The Premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty, and the Minister of Energy, Donna Cansfield, jointly announced that the Canadian province of Ontario will offer standard contracts to anyone in the province who wants to generate electricity with renewable energy.
The contracts will allow operators of wind turbines, solar panels, small hydro plants and biomass plants to connect to the provincial electricity system. The operators of such installations will be paid a fixed price over a period of 20 years. There are no limits or caps on the programme and the tariffs will differ between technologies. The project size is limited to 10MW to encourage distributed and local generation, thus providing new sources of rural revenue. The programme also provides for simplified interconnection with the grid. The tariff for wind energy will be fixed at 0.11 Can$/kWh.
