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 Peter and Mary Solotorow stand in front of their home on in Clarington, Ont. (VERONICA HENRI/Sun Media) |
CLARINGTON - It was all supposed to be so simple. But two years and $65,000 later, Peter and Mary Solotorow have found the road to green living barred by red tape.
"We just figured going green was the thing to do," Mary says over coffee and home-made butter tarts.
"But it's not going green. Not the way we thought."
Married for 48 years and with two children and two grandchildren to consider, the Solotorows decided in 2007 to invest a considerable amount of money in reducing their environmental impact.
"I wanted to go green so we wouldn't be destroying everything -- to use renewables instead," Peter, 76, says.
So the retired General Motors worker embarked on a comprehensive home make-over, putting in a $25,000 geothermal heating unit and a $40,000, 5.4-kilowatt rooftop solar energy array.
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Their overriding goal in this was to leave a little more of the planet's resources for their offspring.
But they were also well aware the government of Ontario was keen to promote wind and solar and other renewable energy sources and believed -- as Premier Dalton McGuinty stated just last week in lauding his government's Green Energy Act -- that getting in early could also generate some economic benefits.
But since the Solotorows first threw the switch on their solar panels in October 2007, they've received exactly 0 cents for the nearly 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity they've produced.
"I don't get nothing for it. It just disappears," Peter says.
"I'm thinking of just turning the whole thing off. Why produce it for them?"
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"Them" in the Solotorows' books are Hydro One and the Ontario Power Authority, whose bewildering bureaucracies the couple have simply never managed to unravel.
Some of that, they acknowledge, has been their responsibility. They realize they've had trouble filling out some of their forms -- not knowing whether they were an embedded generator or a load customer. And Mary notes that when Peter gets excited his voice does tend to rise a bit.
But despite the fact that they have come across helpful staff at both Hydro One and the OPA, no one has ever been able to explain why the surplus power they produce gets sucked into the grid and nothing ever comes back to them.
When they first went live with the system two years ago, it was under what's called net metering, Peter said.
Their meter would just run backward when the panels were producing and at night, when they consumed electricity, it counted what they used.
But after a year of seeing nothing for the surplus energy he generated, Peter decided he would apply for the province's renewable energy standard offer program, which pays 42 cents a kilowatt hour for solar energy.
Peter says he first asked about getting into the Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program (RESOP) in September 2008 but it took months of wrangling before he could get the meter measuring his generation Hydro One said was necessary.
It was finally installed in February of this year -- at about an $800 expense to him -- and was quickly followed by a second meter which records both consumption and production.
After a few months of getting no bills at all, Peter said he was then sent a bill in May that as far as he can tell, charged him for both the electricity he consumed and the electricity he produced.
That was eventually straightened out and he did get some money back but he was still upset about being dinged a delivery charge for the juice he was sending onto the grid -- a value he could never quite determine as it seemed to change with each monthly bill.
At the same time though, the Solotorows were trying to fill out their RESOP application, with little success.
Mary says each time they sent in the form, it would come back asking for something to be corrected or added.
"It takes four or five weeks each time," she said.
Frustrated with the slow pace of RESOP, they made some inquiries about the new Feed In Tariff program, and its microFIT counterpart intended to spur just the kind of small-scale, distributed generation they have been providing the Ontario power grid for more than a year.
The microFIT for facilities under 10 kilowatts such as theirs was set at 80 cents per kwh -- but when they asked the OPA about it, it was suggested to them they may not meet some of the eligibility requirements.
Since the RESOP program was due to close when the OPA started taking microFIT applications, the Solotorows didn't want to run the risk of being shut out of both and so have continued pursuing a contract under RESOP, so far unsuccessfully.
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It now appears the requirements the Solotorows may not have been able to meet with their panels are domestic content rules, announced Sept. 24 by the premier and Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman.
"New domestic content rules will ensure Ontario's highly skilled workers are front and centre of the green economy because we've got the people, the talent and the drive to make the green economy happen now," McGuinty said.
"We're going to lay claim to a significant amount of the work."
Projects that have less than 40% local content won't qualify. But the Solotorows, who bought their panels from a company in Barrie and then contracted someone else to do the installation, aren't exactly sure what their level of Ontario-made or supplied material would be, and can only guess if they meet the restrictions.
"We've got a lot of systems that we're working on and we've just stopped," one industry veteran, who didn't want his name used, said.
"We're halfway through systems and what are we going to do now? This is going to put us out of business."
He said his company has about eight projects on the go -- some worth $80,000 to $100,000 -- and all on hold. Two jobs he expected to create are also stalled, despite the fact he's a huge fan of the FIT plan in general and Smitherman's work on the energy file.
"All of a sudden this content stuff comes out of the woodwork," he said.
"The very thing they set out to create, they've hurt really bad."
Not everyone in the industry though is unhappy with the domestic requirements.
"The domestic requirement is bringing us (to Ontario). We think it's a great idea," Rob Bucher of Calgary-based Sustainable Energy Technologies Ltd., says.
"We're working with our manufacturing partner to move it where it can be best used and that obviously means the Ontario environment."
The firm makes a low-voltage inverter that can turn solar-generated DC power into AC that can be fed into the grid.
It's previously been looking at investing in Europe or California but Smitherman's Green Energy Act has changed that thinking and Bucher hopes to be announcing what could be hundreds of Ontario jobs in a month or so.
"We're looking for a home and we'd like it to be onshore," he said.
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Regardless of the prospects for the larger industry though, it's clear the government of Ontario is encouraging -- and banking on -- thousands of couples like the Solotorows to jump on the green energy bandwagon.
"The legislation is an opportunity for the people of Ontario to harness more of what mother nature has to offer every single day and to do it in a way that enhances their economic prospects," Smitherman said last week.
"We see opportunities for solar energy on rooftops in suburban and urban areas and that's why the solar industry around the world is going to see Ontario is a very serious player in providing these kinds of opportunities."
Whether the electricity generating system though, can handle all the different kinds of people who may want to seize those opportunities is another question.
"You better believe we think there's a challenge and that we have to be ready," OPA vice-president Ben Chin said, adding the agency has set up a call centre for information and tried to beef up capacity at the power distribution firms to deal with moms and pops who want to become mini-power plants.
"When somebody calls their local hydro company, what I want to make sure happens is they can refer them to us and we can take care of them, we can make sure they get the contract.
"If there's things they don't understand in the language, they can call us and we can talk them through it. That retail side of it of course is a challenge which is why we've been gearing up all year for it."
Meanwhile, the Solotorows remain happy with the performance of their solar panels but baffled and confused by the intricacies of the generating and distribution system.
"People are stopping by our house all the time and asking about our solar panels," Mary Solotorow says.
They don't encourage the passersby to make the same investment they did.
JONATHAN.JENKINS@SUNMEDIA.CA