The Canadian Government ecoENERGY for Renewable Heat program offers very generous incentives to commercial Solar Thermal projects. Some provinces will match the incentive from the Federal Program leading to a potential rebate of $3200 PER Collector. The article below will explain this.

The ecoENERGY for Renewable heat Program aims to provide incentives to commercial solar hot water projects. Its aim is to reduce the cost of the projects so the Return on Investment makes sense for commercial projects.

The program now pays a PER COLLECTOR incentive and is available for ALL Canadian provinces. Hence the bigger the project the more commercially viable it becomes.

Double Incentives in Ontario, Saskatchewan and British Columbia
For example a 250 Room Hotel would use approximately 50 Latitude51 Solar Evacuated Collectors to provide approximately 50% of their yearly hot water needs.

The ecoENERGY Incentive will rebate over $1040 PER collector to the Project.

If the project is in Ontario or Saskatchewan then an additional $1040 PER Collector will be rebated. Some projects in British Columbia will also qualify for the double incentive.

Hence, the project will receive $2080 Per Collector Installed. Latitude51 Solar can supply these collectors for under $1000 each, so not only are all the collector costs for the project eliminated, but in this case it will rebate an additional $50,000 to offset against the install and design costs.

With this project, ROI in the region of 15% to +20% would be expected.

Remote Communities
If you qualify as a remote community then the rebates increase in these provinces to $3200 PER COLLECTOR. There are many Mine sites, Gold Mine, Work Camps and other communities that would also qualify for the Remote Community Solar Thermal Incentives.



The ecoENERGY Program
As can be expected there is a large document covering the actual program on the ecoENERGY website but in general almost any commercial project can apply, either new build projects or retrofit projects. It also applies to larger residential constructions such as condo buildings and apartments.

The incentive limits the amount of the incentive to CAN$400,000 per project application. However a single company can apply multiple times for different parts of the same project up to a limit of $2,000,000.
However this translates to over 2000 Latitude51 Solar Collectors which would be a colossal Solar Thermal Project.

This program runs until the end of March 2011, so there is some pressure to get applications in for projects before then.

Latitude51 Solar would like to hear from developers who have have potential commercial solar hot water projects. We can either supply collectors direct on a supply only basis or provide a fully designed and engineered system.