Ontario Gets 407 Megawatts of Solar Power Contracts, Originally Expected 88 Megawatts
by Michael Graham Richard, Gatineau, Canada on 04.25.08
As we reported before, many solar power farms are planned in the province of Ontario, Canada. Major players include SunEdison of Baltimore and Skypower of Toronto, who just broke ground on a solar project, and OptiSolar, a California manufacturer of thin-film silicon solar cells (the composite image above is of their Sarnia project).
The Toronto Star reports that the province now has contracts for 407 megawatts, while it initially predicted that it would get 88. We suppose that's enough to call their program a success! But it's not surprising considering that they are paying 42 cents (!) per kilowatt hour for electricity produced via solar power farms.
As reporter Tyler Hamilton points out, there's no guarantee that all the contracted for solar farms will all be built, but since the "largest solar installation in Canada to date is only 100 kilowatts, the ground-breaking on these large parks is nothing short of impressive."
Hamilton plans to get some aerial photos of the solar power farms once they're built. We'll keep an eye on this developing story.
It's still a bit sad that cloudy places like Germany (and now Ontario) are getting so many solar panels while very sunny countries (that are poorer) get less, because the panels would produce more clean power over there. But at least any demand is sending the signal to the solar industry to build more capacity and keep R&D efforts going full throttle to slash costs, so it's still a net positive in the end, even if it's not as good as it could be.
::Sun rises on Ontario solar farm industry, ::42 solar parks totalling 407 MW under contract in Ontario
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but you need 21 gigawatts to spark the flux-capacitor
"but you need 21 gigawatts to spark the flux-capacitor"
According to Google, it's 1.21 gigawatts ;)
It's a shame to put this PV installation on what appears to be lush farmland instead of distributing it on existing infrastructure such as roofs.
It may be a shame it's going on what appears to farmland,but you gotta start somewhere!
In time, efficiency of solar will increase and they won't need as much surface area/kW so I'd imagine this would be less of an issue in the future. For now though, this is an encouraging start. Someone has to kick-start the process. Distributing such a large installation on rooftops is probably full of logistical, bureaucratic and liability issues at this time. It's very encouraging though. It's good to know at least a few lightbulbs will work when we run out of oil!
I'm almost shocked that the government is doing something positive for a change.
Doing this in Ontario seems somewhat inefficient. We are building pv systems where the subsedies are highest not where we would get the best power generation. This is similar to Europe where the largest ammount of pv installations is in Germany (not great sun) rather than in spain & Italy where the best sun is. The further north (in northern hemmisphere) you go the less power is available. These should be in southern USA, not Ontario.
"It's a shame to put this PV installation on what appears to be lush farmland instead of distributing it on existing infrastructure such as roofs."
If it's $0.42 per kw hr now, can you imagine what it'd be if they had to pay people to mount the solar panels on existing infrastructure? I imagine the rent would be pretty steep, which would drive costs up.