It’s less than a week until Christmas and already the Malls in Toronto are packed, other drivers are becoming scary and prospective customers are asking us to please call back in January.

Our installers are finishing the remaining tasks on our projects and it appears there wont be any carry-over into 2012.

What will the next year of business be like for Down-To-Earth Solar?

The last 2 years both began with high expectations but foundered on the shoals of uncertainty and delays emanating from the regulatory side of things. It seems we are in an industry that is dependent for its well being on political interests, a factor I did not fully appreciate when I started the company. Ontario’s  Green Energy Act and its offspring the Feed-in-Tariff provide the incentives and the programme is an excellent one in principle. As they say, the devil is in the details and the details keep hanging up the programme because whenever a snag is encountered the preferred way to fix it is to stop granting conditional offers, thereby starving the industry while the means is found to make whatever changes are eventually deemed necessary.

Probably, the large and experienced foreign companies that have set up business in Ontario to exploit Ontario’s Green Energy Act can wait it out and keep their staff employed but a small company like ours need stability in order to keep in business. By way of example, we started a commissioned salesman in September. He has proved exceptionally able and is working with a number of clients who were great prospects for investing is Solar installations. Then at the end of October came an announcement from the Ontario Power Authority that not only was their 2-year review underway but applicants who applied as much as 60 days prior would not be granted contracts under the existing terms but under whatever the new terms are when agreed in January of February. Without new customers how does our salesman pay his mortgage? How do we pay the rent?

We are concerned that to avoid flack from ratepayer groups and the opposition Conservative party, the new feed-in-tariffs may be too low to provide any incentive to buyers. Input from optimistic industry groups are pegging the new rate for microFit projects  at $0.70 per kWh. I say if we get $0.70 and some regulatory stability, 2012 should be a good year for us.

Buyers can be greedy! With the current rate of $0.802 per kWh we were able to show a simple payback in one case of 7.5 years and to our amazement, the homeowner said that was not good enough!  Where else in today’s economy can you get 12% return on investment? To be fair, occasionally we do run into some very nice people whose primary concern is the environment rather than the money.

Let’s hope 2012 bring us lots of those customers.

The owners and staff at Down-To-Earth Solar wish all readers a Happy New Year.