George Smitherman went to the rooftops to pitch his plan to create green jobs in a new green energy manufacturing district, along with helping homeowners and businesses generate some of their own power.

“Today I am announcing a green policy that will lead toward a cluster of green companies in Toronto, that will lead to a cluster of green collar jobs,” said Smitherman, atop the York School’s Yonge Street campus, where for the past months the school has been experimenting using solar power to run their air conditioning.The school is working with Helios Energy, a Toronto company that installs solar power, to study on a panel-by-panel basis, exactly how much power a large rooftop array of solar panels will generate. Data so far indicates that the panels cover about five per cent of the air conditioning power needs for the four-storey school.

Smitherman said the small company, which employs seven people and is based in Toronto, is a beneficiary of provincial incentives from the province’s Green Energy Act that he instituted as the provincial Minister of Energy and Infrastructure.

And he said that pushing green technology harder in Toronto will mean more of those jobs in the city.

“The race is on around the world and indeed in the world for leading jurisdictions to step forward,” he said. “Toronto has all of the potential to be one of those jurisdictions.”

Smitherman highlighted three elements of his plan.

He said he would “refocus” Toronto Hydro on its plan to create new, renewable power generation to the tune of 500 megawatts, and conserve another 500 megawatts.

Smitherman acknowledged that Hydro is already engaged in this plan, but he said he would push it to the top of the agency’s priority list.

“The city has already done the paperwork – they’ve laid out an ambitious plan to achieve 500 megawatts of energy and 500 megawatts of conservation. That’s an extraordinarily ambitious plan,” he said. “It’s going to take a lot of effort to translate that into action.”

Smitherman said he wanted to position Toronto Hydro as a “one stop shopping” place for green energy initiatives.

“Right now it’s more complicated than it needs to be – I want to reposition that as a one stop shopping organization to allow you as a homeowner to turn that into a revenue generator,” he said.

Smitherman said he also plans to encourage homeowners and businesses to install their own clean energy generation by way of what is known as a feed-in tariff that allows small generators to feed into the power grid and be compensated for doing so.

All of that, he said, would feed into growing Toronto’s green manufacturing sector.

“I’m a mayor that would be building on the experiences I had as Ontario’s minister of infrastructure, to make sure that Toronto gets more than its fair share of the economic pie,” he said. “Fifty thousand jobs have been created and so far not enough have been created in the City of Toronto. I’m talking about a policy motivated by our desire for a cleaner environment, and at the heart of it motivated by the desire to get jobs for people of Toronto.”

- David Nickle

Posted in Mayoral race, News