If you've seen the
big windmill on the CNE grounds near the Gardiner Expressway, you're familiar with the work of the
Toronto Renewable Energy Cooperative (TREC). The not-for-profit cooperative set up
Windshare, the for-profit company that now owns and manages North America's first urban wind turbine.
Now TREC has announced a new initiative,
SolarShare, one of six projects it currently has in development. SolarShare follows the same business model as Windshare did -- as TREC Executive Director Judy Lipp puts it, her organization's mandate is to "enable Ontarians to become not just consumers of green energy, but to invest in it." It does so by acting as an incubator for renewable energy cooperative companies that finance the building of a project and then derive revenue from it.
TREC has seen business grow since its launch in 1998, but has especially felt a boost since the announcement of the provincial government's
Feed-In Tariff program two years ago. As a measure that growth, Lipp points out that the cooperative has gone from 1.5 staff members to 10 employees in the past two years.
Lipp expects the first of SolarShare's projects to be up and running by the end of 2010. Currently, TREC is scouting a suitable location for a Toronto solar farm (a hoped-for site at the CNE recently fell through due to details of provincial regulations). Once a suitable location is identified, she says, raising capital and beginning building should take less than a few months.
Author: Edward Keenan
Source: Judy Lipp, Executive Director, Toronto Renewable Energy Cooperative
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