CANBIO Report Gaining momentum Team of “Bio-Champions” emerges in Ontario Government By Christopher Rees C anBio and other organisations within the Canadian Bioeconomy Network have long advocated for the reduction of barriers to bioeconomy project implementation resulting from outdated regulations, most of which are at the provincial level. It is therefore extremely gratifying to see the emergence of a team of bio-cham-pions in Ontario. Kathleen McFadden, ADM, Ontario Ministry of Natural Re-sources and Forestry outlined how the MNRF is taking a multi-ministry and multi-partner approach to improve the business and policy environment for the use of solid biomass fuels for heat. The Ontario Provincial Policy State-ment’s definition of renewable energy now includes heat and/or cooling, in ad-dition to generating electricity. A Guide-line for Control of Air Emissions from Large Wood-Fired Combustors with heat capacities of 3MW or greater has been posted. An interim Guideline for systems less than 3MW has been issued and work continues to refine the guideline. A bio-heat “Community of Practice” has been created to foster knowledge about bio-heat systems. The Province is working with others at the national level to support biomass heat, focussing on the adoption of ISO solid biomass standards for Canada.This was followed up by a meeting and Bio-mass Heat Facility Tour in the Kingston/ Napanee area at the end of October by twelve representatives from Ontario min-istries and a federal government agency, FedNor. The ministries included those responsible for environmental regula-tions, natural resources and forestry, ag-riculture and rural affairs, building codes, aboriginal affairs, economic development and education. The tour visited: The North Addington Education Cen-tre in Cloyne to see a school heated with wood pellets using a system installed by Viessmann Manufacturing. The bio-heat system is a 950kw boiler that will heat 86,000 square feet. Friendly Fires in Kingston which pro-vides sales and service of residential pel-let stoves, wood stoves and pellet boilers. Forman Farms in Seeley’s Bay with a greenhouse heated by wood/agri pellets produced by a pellet mill on the farm and where biomass crops are grown. The projects were very interesting but what was even more important was the exchange of views between the project proponents and the government repre-sentatives. The lead question in each case was “how could the Ontario government have helped your project more, and what can we do now?” The project owners were genuinely astonished at how positive the group was in moving forward with sugges-tions for policy and regulatory improve-ment. For instance, Forman Farms which had purchased a biomass chipper, wanted to know how the process of permitting could be sped up to allow them to chip “on site” at various locations. While a “mo-bile permit” for the machine was the an-swer, it would take up to a year to obtain. Representatives of the North Adding-ton Education Centre and Viessmann explained how difficult it had been to comply with all the environmental regu-lations for the project but now that it was complete it would provide hard data from monitoring the systems and then encour-age other projects to move forward. The owner of Friendly Fires was encour-aged by the policy that building permits now required CSA-approved wood stoves in Ontario. Overall, it was an eye-opening day on how to aggressively encourage more bio-economy projects in Ontario.• Canadian BIOMASS 7
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