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“There´s a huge opportunity out there to put people back to work and to rebuild Ontario´s industrial base, its manufacturing base,” said Ontario New Democrat environment critic Peter Tabuns, who was one of the speakers at the gathering.
“250,000 people in Germany work in renewable power, while in Toledo, Ohio, 6,000 people work in the solar industry,  many of whom used to make windshields for cars.  In Pennsylvania, the government signed a $650 million alternative energy bill into force in July, he said, and the state expects renewable energy will employ 10,000 people.
Billions of dollars have been invested in producing electric car batteries in Michigan and $1 billion has been invested into electric car production in Australia.”

“Wind turbines, solar panels, biogas generation plants, or expanding deep-lake water cooling are just some of the green technologies Ontario should be taking more advantage of to jobs, said Tabuns.

Tabuns cited a recent study that said up to one million trades jobs could be d if every home in Canada was retrofitted to make it more energy efficient.

The former utive director of Greenpeace Canada said the conference was not so much a discussion about technology as one about how to get our society moving on a green jobs initiative and how to secure investment and government support _ both financial and legislative.

The reality is people are going to need jobs and we have to deal with climate change, said Tabuns, adding the most productive to take on those issues is investing in renewable power.

Tabuns pointed to Denmark´s $6 billion-a-year wind power industry which employs more than 20,000 people.

The government Premier Dalton McGuinty has said it hopes its Green Energy Act will 50,000 jobs and generate billions of dollars of economic growth in communities across Ontario within three years.

John Cartwright, president of the Toronto and York Region Labour Council who also spoke at the meeting, said greening the economy is not without its challenges.

“We´ve got a number of challenges and one is the influence and power of Big Oil,” Cartwright said in an interview.

He said the federal government listens too much to oil companies.

But Cartwright also said people´s attitudes must change.

“We´ve got to connect people and move them away from cynicism to saying we can and must adopt ways of living and ways of making things that are more in tune with the long-term environmental needs of this planet,” he said.

“Some of those old habits die hard.”

Read more: http://www.oilweek.com/news.asp?ID=24744#ixzz0WE6UC6Xm

http://www.oilweek.com

Ontario’s Energy Minister George Smitherman said in September that after submitting the paperwork to local officials, all renewable energy projects must now go through a new provincial approvals process. The new process aims to incorporate environmental assessments, municipal planning and other approvals and permits. The London Free Press reported Premier Dalton McGuinty as saying “earlier changes were needed to prevent not-in-my-backyard opponents from stopping green energy projects. The province, he said, needs them to wean itself off dirty coal for electricity.”

First Solar is open to the new process, but did state that they had also been content with the previous rules. Peter Carrie, VP of First Solar, acknowledged the company’s guinea pig status with the new procedure, stating, “It looks like we will be one of the first test flights through this process…There is some uncertainty about the new time lines,” though Carrie does hope to break ground in the next year.

First Solar acquired the original proponent, OptiSolar Farms Canada, which caused delays with the project and while more are expected, Carrie feels that it isn’t all bad. Carrie asserted that they are “retooling [their] environmental studies,” leading to more efficient solar panels than were formerly considered. The new panels will reduce the portion of the land that was originally slated to be used for panels by 60%.

courtesy: http://www.pv-tech.org/news

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Other provinces are sure to follow in the solar and wind power technologies.  P.E.I. curently has a wind power incentive and Canadian Wind Energy Assoc claims wind is the fastest growing source of electricity in the world. Alberta has the largest installed wind capacity of any province.

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Global, economic and social pressures are leading us to this future. 

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http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ariel-schwartz/sustainability/worlds-first-solar-powered-waterproof-cell-phone

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2009/09/11/technology/tech-us-summit-google.html

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P