The Power of Community

In 2014 the FIT for wind projects over 500 kW was cancelled and replaced with a competitive procurement process called the Large Renewable Procurement (LRP). The LRP is only open to bidders with deep pockets and extensive experience and therefore not inclusive of community proponents, even while community ownership has been proven to decrease local resistance. While the LRP does encourage Indigenous participation, there are no incentives for developers to work with co-ops. The community power sector needs a level playing field to participate in wind projects. A FIT for wind up to 20 MW can address the current imbalance introduced by the LRP.

to help increase economies of scale, to increase local distributed power supply and therefore local grid resiliency in the face of increasingly erratic weather patterns, and to benefit from new technology trends such as energy storage.

With actual technology costs falling rapidly, one of the largest cost barriers for community-owned renewable energy projects is now the cost of financing. Community co-ops, in most cases, cannot borrow at the same rates as large established companies. Provincial loan guarantees could quickly reduce the cost of raising funds for co-op projects while adding little financial risk for the province thanks to the depth of experience co-ops have developed over the last decade in project deployment. As Joe Romm, the former assistant secretary of U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, has written “Low or zero-interest loans and loan guarantees can leverage money 50-to-1” (since default rates are 2 percent or less)