The next green energy boom: roofs
By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, April 15, 2010 - 5 Comments
Rooftop solar panels are making power, and big profits
Denis Balibouse/Reuters
Searching for the latest land rush? Look up. But not too far up. In Ontario, rooftops have become a boom town all their own. Green energy policies announced last year by the Ontario government have turned rooftop solar power installations into can’t-miss money-makers. And that’s caused a mad rush to secure the rights to roofs across the province.
Ontario promises to pay up to 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh) for electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. This price, called a feed-in tariff, is guaranteed for 20 years. While residents currently pay as little as 4.4 cents per kWh for their power, the cost of these large solar subsidies will eventually work their way into future rates, pushing them up. Still, there’s been little in the way of opposition.
“This is an incredible opportunity,” says Justin Woodward, director of solar development at Greta Energy Inc, one of many firms now roaming the province looking to lease roof space. “But it is getting more and more crowded.” With the best locations quickly depleting, Woodward has been looking to smaller centres for virgin roofs. Greta typically offers 40 cents per square foot in annual lease payments for the right to put up panels. “This was just empty space for building owners. Now it can be generating income,” Woodward says. It’s such a sweet deal, everyone wants a piece of the action. Loblaw Co. Ltd., the food retailing giant, plans to turn 136 of its stores into rooftop generators. And one Toronto home builder provides rooftop hookups on its new houses, with the prospect of $1,200 in annual lease payments for homeowners who sign solar power deals.
The only question now is how long the rooftop land rush will last. In Europe, solar power feed-in tariffs are under fire for being overly generous. Spain is looking to drop its future rates 30 to 40 per cent. And Germany just implemented a 10 per cent cut but is considering further reductions as well. For this boom, there may well be a dark cloud on the horizon.
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10 ways to help save the planet
By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 8, 2009 at 12:05 PM - 35 Comments
From fake trees to showering with friends—these ideas might even save you money
1. Sell solar power back into the gridSolar panels are costly, so only the most committed environmentalists have thus far been willing to install them on the roofs of their homes and businesses. But new government programs that permit small renewable-energy producers to sell excess energy back into the power grid are making it easier for anyone to jump on the solar bandwagon. Last week, the Ontario Power Authority launched Canada’s first feed-in tariff program, which will offer a buy-back rate of up to 80.2 cents per kilowatt for solar power—more than seven times the rate paid for other forms of green power, like wind.
Want in? A grid-connected system at home, including installation, will cost about $10 per watt of output. If you installed a 2,000-watt system (at a cost of $20,000), then depending on your energy consumption you could bring in roughly $1,850 in revenue each year, recouping your investment in just over 10 years. And considering solar panels can last 30 years or longer, that’s a fairly sunny long-range forecast.—Jen Cutts
2. Fake trees
Trees, we all know, are carbon catchers. Problem is, they don’t catch enough of the stuff, and the process is slow. So scientists have built a better mousetrap, so to speak. According to a new report out of the U.K., the most effective way to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) levels is to construct hundreds of thousands of artificial, greenhouse-gas-scrubbing trees.
Prototypes already exist—they’re made up of a type of mesh suspended between a two-pronged fork, and look like gigantic fly swatters. As air blows through the structure, CO2 binds to an absorbent compound, a process that removes the carbon 1,000 times faster then normal plants.
There are problems: the trees are expensive—more than $20,000 each—and “planting” 100,000 of them would offset only 60 per cent of the CO2 produced by a country the size of the U.K. With enough government funding, though, fake forests could start popping up around the world within the next few years.—Tom Henheffer Continue… -
Uneven progress on renewable energy
By John Geddes - Friday, March 13, 2009 at 5:46 PM - 11 Comments
The biggest story you probably didn’t pay much attention to this week was Ontario’s plan to let homeowners, farmers, companies—anybody really—sell renewable energy onto the provincial power grid. This development makes me wonder why the federal government isn’t getting behind the international push to carve out a much bigger place for renewables in the energy marketplace.
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Is the recession good for the environment? (and why Margaret Wente is wrong)
By Alex Shimo - Thursday, December 18, 2008 at 5:30 PM - 32 Comments
Could an economic recession actually be good for climate change? Such a thought strikes…
Could an economic recession actually be good for climate change? Such a thought strikes fear into every moderate green’s heart, because if environmentalism is actually antithetical to the capitalist project, if it is incompatible with economic growth and our post-industrial, urbanized society, we might as well fry now and pay later. Reversing centuries of development, infrastructure, jobs, careers, education, the NHL and all the other twenty-first century essentials and luxuries is not going to happen any time soon.
Yet, the incompatibility of these two movements – environmentalism and growth – is often written about like it just one of sad little truths you have to live with. On Thursday of this week, Margaret Wente, wrote in The Globe and Mail:
“Even global warming has moved down the anxiety scale, but that’s okay, because the recession will slow down global warming more than all the carbon-trading schemes put together.”
Wente makes one of those breezy, glib comments that has a modicum of truth, but doesn’t get to the real heart of the issue. Continue…
