January 31, 2015 – The Canadian Solar Industries Association (CanSIA) says its new “Roadmap 2020: Powering Canada’s Future with Solar Electricity” lays out a plan that identifies barriers to success, outlines opportunities and makes recommendations to ensure Canada’s solar electricity sector is cost-competitive with other forms of electricity by 2020.

The plan focuses on five key areas:

• Develop a supportive and stable policy and regulatory environment that recognize the total value of solar electricity, including externalities.
• Simplify and streamline permitting and processes for grid interconnection and metering of solar electricity systems.
• Reduce soft costs to levels consistent with global best practices.
• Educate the Canadian population on the true benefits and costs of solar electricity, and empower them to take action to support and adopt solar.
• Develop new and enhance existing relationships with technologies, applications and stakeholders to create synergies that enables greater solar electricity use in Canada.

“Solar electricity is the smart choice to power Canada’s future,” said CanSIA president and CEO John Gorman. “We’ve seen public support for renewable energy increase significantly over the last few years, a sign Canadians don’t want to just consume electricity but produce it. They want to be ‘prosumers’.”

DOWNLOAD Roadmap 2020 below.