Community Power and Renewable Energy Co-operatives.
What is Community Power?
Community Power is locally owned green power generation. A very visible example of Community Power is the Exhibition Place Turbine at Toronto’s Canadian National Exhibition grounds – the first community owned wind power project in Ontario. The project is a joint venture of the WindShare Co-operative and Toronto Hydro.
Community Power supports sustainable energy. It is located in and responsible to the local community. This results in a more distributed and egalitarian system of electricity generation and transmission. Projects may be owned and operated by co-operatives, farmers, or municipalities.
Community Power is generated from environmentally friendly sources such as wind, solar, methane recapture and run-of-river hydro.
10 Benefits of Community Power
Increased speed of renewable energy growth - Engaging more people both as investors and project participants increases the speed of renewable energy capacity growth. The success of wind energy in Denmark and Germany is largely due to community ownership.
Stimulates economic development - Creates new skilled jobs and long-term investment throughout Ontario.
Strengthens rural communities - Generates new income for farmers and rural landowners.
Promotes ethical investing - Increases the profile for the concept of ethical investing and provides additional alternatives for such
Increases local acceptance of renewable energy - Democratic ownership, community involvement and member education encourages awareness and acceptance.
Conserves energy - Increased member education and awareness often leads to greater thoughts and efforts towards reduced consumption.
Saves money - Generating energy closer to where it is used reduces transmission and distribution costs.
New generation capacity more easily added - can be added incrementally without needing to build new transmission lines.
Improves grid reliability - Smaller scale, localized generation helps avoid massive ‘Blackouts’ of August 2003.
More efficient land use - As land becomes more scarce, siting of generation facilities is best accommodated on or in existing structures
It is recommended that all community groups involved with renewable energy join the Ontario Sustainable Energy Association:
http://www.ontario-sea.org/
Q: How does one develop a renewable energy cooperative?
The short answer is that it gets incorporated like any other co-operative: OnCo-op has guides that are quite helpful - see http://www.ontario.coop/pages/index.php?main_id=104
For it to be a renewable energy co-operative, under the Green Energy Act, the following statement must appear in its articles of incorporation:
The business of the co-operative is restricted to,
(a) generating, within the meaning of the Electricity Act, 1998, electricity produced from one or more sources that are renewable energy
sources for the purposes of that Act; and
(b) selling, as a generator within the meaning of that Act, electricity it produces from one or more renewable energy sources.
This information is courtesy of:
Brian Iler
ILER CAMPBELL LLP
BARRISTERS AND SOLICITORS
Suite 700, 890 Yonge Street
Toronto, Ontario M4W 3P4
Work: (416)598-0103, ext. 114
Fax: (416)598-3484
Cell: (416)835-4384
www.ilercampbell.com <http://www.ilercampbell.com/>
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