The Alberta government is putting up $36 million over two years for a rebate program to encourage rooftop solar panels on homes and businesses.
Environment Minister Shannon Phillips says more details are to come and the rebates are to be available as early as this summer. Phillips says the use of solar panels has doubled since 2015 and the goal is to have new panels on 10,000 Alberta rooftops within three years.
"Albertans are keen on solar. Today's announcement ... will keep the momentum going," Phillips said Monday. "Energy efficiency matters to Albertans, and the province is way overdue."
The program is expected to create 900 jobs in the next few years, and reduce solar installation costs by up to 30 per cent for homes and 25 per cent for businesses.
Phillips says the solar panels would reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to taking 100,000 vehicles off the road. The program is part of Alberta's larger climate change plan that includes a broad-based carbon levy on home heating bills and gas at the pumps.
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Let's compare provincial
Let's compare provincial incentives and subsidies for fossil fuels.
-$500 million in royalty credits for petrochemical projects
-$200 million (from AIMCO and the Heritage Fund) to bail out Calfrac
-$45 million from AIMCO to bail out Perpetual Energy
-Billions in subsidies announced in January for two incentive programs, one for high-cost, high-risk unconventional resources, the other for miscible/immisible flooding of marginal plays (which chemcials, solvents, polymers or precious fresh water), along with numerous other existing royalty and tax credit, allowance and exemption programs
-Lowest royalty rates in the history of the province implemented under the NDP, taking billions in revenue from Albertans, the owners of the resources
-Exemption of industry from Bill 20 fuel taxes (aka the carbon levy), along with the implementation of a carbon cost deduction scheme in the Modernized Royalty Review under the Revenue Minus Costs formula and Capital Cost Index-amounting to a multi-billion dollar subsidy on GHG emissions for industry
-$34.5 billion dollars (at minimum) to the NW Upgrader project
-$4.6 billion (at minimum) committed to TransCanada, in a take-or-pay contract, for tolls on Energy East-these tolls are an obligation, even if no bitumen is shipped
-Inaction, in fact, total wilful ignorance, on mitigating between $30 to $300 billion in provincial liabilities for inactive and abandoned wells sites and facilities
-Millions paid by the province on behalf of insolvent companies that have defaulted on lease payments
-Hundreds of millions committed to phasing out coal fired electrical plants, to replace inexpensive electrical generation with highly subsidized natural gas, extracted with costly and harmful hydraulic fracturing operations
A paltry $36 million, over two years, for rebates on solar installations is shameful in light of oil and gas giveaways. The job creation, utilization and installation figures released by the NDP, likely will not materialize. This is just another announcement, devoid of all details or policy, to inveigle progressive, uninformed voters, that Alberta is using garnished fuel taxes for clean energy, instead of maintaining their sickly, corrupt petro-province policies of using billions, upon billions, in taxpayers dollars, to prop up an unsustainable and damaging industry.
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