The Proposed BC Feed-In Tariff: BCSEA’s Response

The BCSEA welcomes the provincial government’s proposed Feed-In Tariff (FIT) for renewable electricity, and accepts the need for it to be a limited version of FITs adopted elsewhere in the world, since BC is close to producing 100% of its electricity from renewable sources.

If a fully-fledged FIT created the same level of uptake for renewables in BC that it is creating elsewhere, it may generate more power than BC needs, causing the surplus to be sold for export at a lower price than was paid for it, even to a possible high tariff green California power market. In an earlier published article, we called this “The BC Paradox”.

However, we also believe that BC should reduce its consumption of fossil fuels, and this would tend to increase electricity demand. We therefore recommend an approach to the FIT that is expanded beyond the current proposed regulation, so as to stimulate BC’s renewable energy industry at what we believe to be a critical time in its development. We have 10 recommendations regarding the proposed FIT.

1. We recommend 20-year not 5-year contracts, to lower the FIT price needed to provide the return on investment needed to attract investors.
2. We recommend that the annual cost be recovered through utility rates, not taxes.
3. We recommend increasing the proposed FIT premium budget from $25 million to at least $50 million.
4. We recommend that the project intake process reflect technology differentiation, rather than ‘first come, first served’, and that the project intake be designed to cover a phased ten year period.
5. We recommend that community-owned projects be offered a FIT bonus.
6. We recommend that the proposed 5 MW limit be raised for geothermal, ocean and bioenergy, so as not to exclude technologies which benefit from larger scale.
7. We recommend that the FIT process embrace openness and transparency.
8. We recommend that solar PV energy be included with a solar tariff for Super-Efficient Buildings and Solar Electric Vehicles.
9. We recommend that a Feed-in Tariff for Renewable Heat be included as a supplement for cogeneration from biomass and biogas for district heat, and as a stand-alone for geothermal district heat, solar thermal heat, direct heat from biomass, and super-efficient heat pumps.
10. We recommend some specifications on the use of biomass energy.

The BCSEA supports the objectives laid out in the FIT Consultation Paper. We endorse the need to support emerging renewable energy technologies in BC, to reduce BC’s greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs), to encourage economic development and green job creation, to replace the use of diesel in First Nations and off-grid communities, and to reduce waste.

We trust that the statement “Preference would be given to technologies with the potential to provide an overall net economic benefit to the province” (Section 3.2) does not mean that economic benefit is the ruling objective, to the disadvantage of the other five objectives.

We welcome the government’s commitment to tackle climate change and promote clean renewable energy, and we welcome the role that a FIT can play in BC to achieve these goals.

We welcome the role that a FIT can play in launching geothermal, ocean, and bioenergy in BC, and in supporting the use of wind and solar energy in non-integrated situations, and we recommend that serious attention be paid to the specific needs of ocean and geothermal energy outside the parameters of the FIT.

Within this context of support, we seek ten changes or additions to the proposed FIT.

Please see BCSEA's full submission below.