Now consider again Canada’s most ambitious climate policy initiative: Ontario’s Standard Offer Program for renewable energy, introduced in the fall of 2006. Like a fit, the program requires the Ontario Power Authority to purchase power from renewable sources at rates higher than the average market price — about 42 cents per kilowatt hour for solar power, and 11 cents per kilowatt hour for wind, biogas, and small-scale hydro — and guarantees those rates for twenty years. At its launch, opa expected to issue contracts for 1,000 megawatts of new clean energy over ten years. Instead, projects totalling over 350 megawatts were approved in the first six months, and by eighteen months the number had exploded to more than 1,300 megawatts.
Notwithstanding this unanticipated and unprecedented green power boom, opa recently introduced new limits on the size and location of certain types of projects, thus setting aside significant swaths of the province’s grid for power from new nuclear and natural gas plants. In July, less than two years into a program that massively underestimated the private sector’s enthusiasm for renewables, opa tabled a long-term plan that calls for renewable energy to comprise barely 20 percent of new electricity production being brought online by 2025. The remaining 80 percent would be evenly split between nukes, which have never been added to the grid on time and on budget in Ontario, and natural gas, whose production will likely be approaching its global peak by then.
It should come as no surprise, really, that opa’s commitment to renewables has wavered, even in the face of overwhelming support, because there was an overly fussy quality to Ontario’s Standard Offer right from its inception. Riddled with seemingly arbitrary time limits and caps on installation size, it seemed to represent only a symbolic commitment to green power, not the kind of wholesale reconfiguration of the energy economy compelled by climate change. Still, because the Standard Offer used Germany’s fit as its model, some green power advocates see it as a stronger foundation than the government subsidy approach favoured in jurisdictions like California. “It’s a timid first step,” says Paul Gipe, an expert in renewable energy and one of the Standard Offer’s main architects. “But it’s a first step, and we shouldn’t underrate its significance. This is the most progressive renewable energy policy in North America in two decades. The footnote, of course, is that we haven’t done anything in North America in two decades, so it’s pretty easy to step up.”
As I counted crumbling gdr guard towers on the train ride from Bitterfeld to Leipzig the evening after my tour of Solar Valley, my thoughts turned from Christian Puschmann’s boyish enthusiasm to the desperate edge I’d encountered during a recent visit to Windsor, Ontario. My host was a laid-off autoworker, a guy named Chris Holt. He was just a little older than Puschmann, I’d guess. He had two kids and a cozy house in the funky old part of town. Holt was one of only a few of his co-workers, he told me, who weren’t simply biding their time until the fix came in from enough levels of government to buy back some faded remnant of the city’s manufacturing glory. He was trying to build a green-minded grassroots revitalization movement in Windsor, but it had been slow going.
As Canada geared up for an election this past fall, pretty much the last thing Stephen Harper did before dissolving Parliament was hand Ford an $80-million subsidy to reopen an engine assembly plant in Windsor. The leader of the Opposition, meanwhile, chose to base his campaign on a carbon tax. Two different strategies that went nowhere fast — a fitting symbol, perhaps, of a political culture stuck in the slow lane in an outmoded vehicle. I know that if I were hoping to send Canada racing toward a sustainable twenty-first-century economy, I’d want one of those sleek new German-engineered engines. I’d start off with a feed-in tariff. And if anyone asked why, I’d introduce them to Christian Puschmann.
