September 13th, 2007
NDP praises new rooftop solar heating system
By Sean Fitzgerald // 1 Comment
When the residents of a social housing building on Queen Street East use hot water these days, they won’t be hurting the environment as much as they did before. And this makes the NDP pretty happy.
WoodGreen Community Services, the organization that operates the site at 1070 Queen St E., joined their partners in Mondial Energy to unveil a new installation yesterday: Ontario’s largest, most powerful solar thermal heating system. Glazed flat plate solar collectors (108 in all) stand at attention on the building’s rooftop, generating 34 percent of the energy that it takes to heat hot water each year.
“We’ll be offsetting a significant amount of natural gas -- over 30,000 cubic metres of gas a year,” said Alex Winch, president of Mondial Energy, a Toronto-based renewable energy company. Winch predicts that this new system will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 60 tonnes per year.
Local area MPP and NDP Environment Critic Peter Tabuns related the installation to the province’s energy struggles.
“We know that all technologies are there in our hands today to start turning things around on climate change,” said Tabuns, MPP for Toronto-Danforth, the riding that contains the affordable housing site. “We are not lacking the financial tools, the knowledge of the financial tools, or the technological methods to dramatically cut fossil fuel use, to avoid going into nuclear power, and to build a society on this planet that is sustainable,” he said. He then made a reference to the Liberals’ sub-par energy record: “What we miss is a political commitment to doing that.”
Tabuns said he knows that this kind of commitment would involve a fair bit of conflict.
“There are a lot of people out there who like to sell gas, who like to sell oil, who like to drill for it, and pipe it,” he continued. “But we here in Ontario can benefit tremendously from putting our people to work – by building this kind of technology and its cousins and its brothers and sisters in different forms throughout this province.”
Tabuns, who helped create the WoodGreen site when he was a city councillor, used the installation as a realistic example of renewable energy.
“It demonstrates that the non-nuclear, non-coal alternatives are entirely practical,” he said. “Dwight Duncan and Dalton McGuinty don’t have confidence in [these alternatives], but they’re real, they’re commercially viable, and they’re the future.”
photo by Sean Fitzgerald:
Left to right: Toronto-Danforth MPP Peter Tabuns, Mondial Energy President Alex Winch and WoodGreen Community Services President Brian Smith speak to reporters on the rooftop of WoodGreen's social housing site at 1070 Queen St. East.
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I must say that I find it a tad hypocritical that the NDP is gushing over this excellent example of local, small scale sustainable energy economics when their own platform and political ideology call for a centralized, state-run power distribution system. In the NDP's ideal world, small, innovative energy companies such as Mondial Energy (the company involved here) would actually not exist, because the provincial government would have a monopoly over power generation and distribution.
What we really need is not another government monopoly building big, centralized power projects (renewable or otherwise) but local, independent energy co-operatives such as the one mentioned in this article that aren't reliant on a huge network, but that still leave room for the little guy to innovate and simply have the government then pay a fair rate for any surplus electricity.
Comment by Rob
September 13, 2007 | 11:55 pm