While Ottawa Sleeps, Ontario Takes Great Leap Forward on Climate

Ontario's Premier Dalton McGuinty and Energy Minister George Smitherman have introduced the Green Energy and Green Economy Act of 2009, a clean energy bill that would unleash $5 billion in spending over several decades and create 50,000 new jobs in three years.

It has been called bold, forward-thinking, transformational, a North American first and a potential turning point in Ontario's entire economic history. Its passage is almost certain.

The act "could propel the province past California as the most innovative North American leader in the renewable energy field," said Earth Day founder Denis Hayes.

What a stark contrast to Ottawa. In January, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government killed off the nation's main program for developing renewable energy in the federal budget. The move has been called a miserable failure and an environmental travesty.

Ontario's bill targets three main areas: renewable power generation, energy efficiency with a focus on buildings and smart grid development. Its key feature is an advanced "feed-in tariff."

The tariff, modeled after successful policies in Germany, Spain and Denmark, would set the price Ontario is willing to pay for specific energy sources -- wind, solar, hydro, biomass and biogas. Developers would sign contracts with the government, knowing in advance what they would earn: rates would be guaranteed for decades.

The system would create price certainty and reduce project risk for every developer and manufacturer in the Ontario renewable energy supply chain.

It won't be the province's first go at it. In late 2006, Ontario introduced North America's first feed-in tariff program, known as the Standard Offer Contract Program. The tariff resulted in more than 1,500 megawatts of contracts but only 75 megawatts of capacity were built, largely out of transmission constraints. The program was iced in May 2008.

If anything, those numbers show the enormous market potential of clean energy in Ontario. The new bill would better tap that capacity, however, by creating a smart grid to make it easier for renewables to plug into the system.

Additionally, the bill would slash much of the red tape that has obstructed clean energy growth. It would guarantee clean energy developers the "right to connect" to the grid and assure their applications are processed within six months. And in a blow to NIMBYism -- the "not-in-my-backyard" syndrome that has created roadblocks for new renewable energy -- the bill would exempt clean energy projects from all municipal permit requirements.

New public buildings would be forced to be built to the Silver standard under the LEED rating system. Private buildings would have to undergo assessments for energy efficiency before sale.

Notably (and pleasantly) absent is investment in carbon capture and storage technology (CCS), which was the cornerstone of the energy section of Canada's federal budget. In that case, CCS was a smokescreen to slip dirty oil sands development past the public, and at the expense of new clean energy.

Ontario, on the other hand, has committed to phase out coal by 2014, and it's getting close. The province got nearly a quarter of its energy from coal five years ago. Today, that number is just seven percent.

The new bill is Ontario's greenest leap forward yet, though question marks remain. For one, new nuclear is in the mix.

Nearly all of the province's existing nuclear power plants will be coming to the end of their working lives in the coming decades. Ontario's plan is to refurbish or rebuild them, with the goal of retaining its current nuclear capacity of 14,000 megawatts, or about half of its total electricity. Greenpeace opposes that decision: