Biogas in Ontario Needs a Little Push

December 11, 2010

People in the biogas industry are very concerned with our political future in Ontario. The opposition party is saying if they win the next election (October 6, 2011) they may scrap the Green Energy Act and the Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program, which has been a key driver in the creation of numerous new industries and [...]

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2010: The Third Quarter

November 3, 2010

The third quarter began with work for ReGenerate’s first two customers, the Peterborough Green Energy Co-operative and the Toronto Zoo. Both were very exciting to work with and have already led to deeper relationships and potential projects in the near future.
Other highlights included:

The publishing of the first General Resource Assessment (GRA) – [...]

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Taking the long term view

October 28, 2010

Three to four different conversations
I’ve recently spoke to a few people who’ve told me about how biogas is the long term solution.
There’s numerous factors at play here.
In the short term you’ve got public dissent towards wind, over 32,000 solar Feed-in Tariff applications (currently no longer accepting solar applications), some not-so-honest solar installers, and outcry from [...]

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Resilient Cities and the Importance of Visioning

September 16, 2010

The Transition movement continues to grow both in size and importance around Ontario (and the world). Transition Barrie will be celebrating its great unleashing next week at an area farm.  Transition Peterborough just announced the launch of a resilient business council and a trust, which will be used for micro-lending to a wide variety of [...]

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When Movements and New Industries Converge

August 19, 2010

Slow Money. Transition Towns. Social Enterprise. The Triple Bottom Line. All of these ideas have been around for varying amounts of time, and many more similar movements have sprung out of the big -isms in recent years.  The point is, they are growing in popularity. More people are concerned about the environment, and more are [...]

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2010 – The Second Quarter

July 18, 2010

The second quarter of 2010 was a time of great transition for me personally, as I left my full time job at RiskMetrics Group (now MSCI Inc.) to work on developing community-owned biogas plants across Ontario on a full time basis.
This was followed by the beginning of two new and [...]

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Energy Crops – What’s the best way to use them?

July 16, 2010

Earlier this week, I had an interesting conversation with a post-doc at University of Toronto who is currently completing a life cycle analysis of anaerobic digestion, and studying biomass supply scenarios (to use at Ontario’s coal plants, which are due to close in 2014).
He was sure that using energy crops for biogas was a bad [...]

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A 3rd option, for the rest of us.

June 18, 2010

When it comes down to it, farmers have had two choices if they’re interested in developing a biogas plant on their land: 1) Pay for it themselves using their own equity and borrowing power, or 2) Let a developer build it and receive lease payments.  A third option is available, and it adds economic value [...]

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Community Power Gets a Big Boost in Ontario

May 22, 2010

Ontario’s Community Energy Partnership Program is now accepting applications and providing lots of information for how to get money for community power projects around the province. The program is being run by the Community Power Fund in collaboration with Deloitte.
Some of the details
Community biogas projects are eligible to receive $75-200,000 in order to fund 90% [...]

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2010 – The First Quarter

May 16, 2010

The first quarter brought more exciting growth and progress to the community power sector overall, as well as to ReGenerate.
The most significant news was the Ontario Power Authority awarding the first FIT and microFIT contracts for a total of 2,612 megawatts (MW) of generating capacity, including 21.8 MW of on- and off-farm [...]

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