On Wednesday, the Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) in Ontario announced that it will award long-term contracts to 241 MW of renewable energy projects, including 232 MW of solar projects, under its FIT 4 program.
Projects 10-500 kW in capacity are eligible for the program, which IESO describes as a feed-in tariff. And while the program does offer long-term contracts with standardized program rules, prices and contracts, it contains elements of a competitive solicitation in that applications gain improve their chances of being selected by reducing the price.
Ontario has three programs for renewable energy procurement: The Large Renewables Procurement (LRP), an auction system for projects above 500 kW, the MicroFIT, which resembles a European feed-in tariff and is restricted to projects below 10 kW, and the FIT, which is appears to be a hybrid of the two.
IESO notes that most of the 907 solar projects awarded will be located on the roofs of commercial, industrial, municipal and institutional buildings. The average project size awarded is 256 kW.
The 936 renewable energy projects awarded also included a small number of bioenergy, wind and waterpower projects. Of these 936, more than 10% had aboriginal participation, 44% had municipal or public sector participation and 20% had community participation. All three are goals of the FIT program, and projects with such participation received priority.
Of the 1,702 applications received for the program, 1,197 passed the completeness and eligibility review, and the large majority of these were awarded contracts.
Ontario is already experiencing conflicts between high levels of wind and distributed solar PV which were installed under previous versions of the provinces feed-in tariff program and pre-existing nuclear generation. This has resulted in negative wholesale electricity prices and moderate levels of curtailment for both renewable and nuclear generation, as revealed in a recent IESO report on grid reliability.
However, this has not caused the province to stop procuring more PV. Ontarios FIT 5 procurement is expected to being by November 1, and IESO says that it will issue draft FIT 5 documents in coming weeks.
Popular content
This content is protected by copyright and may not be reused. If you want to cooperate with us and would like to reuse some of our content, please contact: editors@pv-magazine.com.
Share
By submitting this form you agree to pv magazine using your data for the purposes of publishing your comment.
Your personal data will only be disclosed or otherwise transmitted to third parties for the purposes of spam filtering or if this is necessary for technical maintenance of the website. Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.
You may revoke this consent at any time with effect for the future, in which case your personal data will be deleted immediately. Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled.
Further information on data privacy can be found in our Data Protection Policy.