Solar Direct Canada
4 Morgan Drive L7J 2L7 Acton, ON, Canada

There are a lot of excuses why people come up with why solar won't work and a common one is that it takes up valuable farm land. This projects throws that argument out the window. Don't have enough sun or land? No problem. The city-state of Singapore doesn't have enough land for solar panels so it is building a solar farm 4000kms away in the un-farmable, uninhabited desert of Australia. It will take a 3,800km undersea cable to link the two but solar is so cheap now that it's the best solution. If Singapore can do it then all of Europe could do it too. There is no shortage of sun and land in the Sahara and its only 1000kms across the Mediterranean.

Renewable energy costs continue to go down while fossil fuel costs go up. A recent international report showed that all forms of renewable energy are now consistently cheaper than coal, gas, nuclear and oil. And they were cheaper without any kind of government subsidy! Did you know that Canada subsidies the oil and gas industry to the tune of 3.3 billion per year? What is holding renewable energy back? Not technology, not economics but as usual, politics. And lets not r...oll out the old, "the sun doesn't shine at night and the wind doesn't always blow' argument. Canada gets only 0.5% of its energy from solar, so storage is not a problem for a long time. Storage is not an issue until we have ten times as much. Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Australia, India and several other countries get more than 5% from solar without batteries. We could too and it would lower the average cost of energy for consumers. See more

It's official, solar energy is cheaper than natural gas, even in Alberta where natural gas is almost free. Today the Alberta government contracted with a solar supplier to supply 94MW of power at 4.8 cents per kWh. You can't get energy much cheaper than that, not nuclear, not coal, not even buying surplus hydro-electricity from Quebec! What is Ontario's excuse? The solutions to climate change are at our finger tips, we just have to convince the government to get out of the way. No one is saying that 100% of our power can come from solar energy today, but we can do a lot better than the 1% that we currently generate. If we wanted to, Ontario could easily generate 25% of its power from solar in very little time and at no cost to the government or consumer. Actually it would be a lot cheaper for both.

What Can Go Wrong? We like to think that the solar industry is full of honest, hardworking professionals who want to install the best system possible for their customers. Unfortunately there are always a couple bad apples or in some cases installers that just lacked experience. These photos show some of the deficiencies that were found in a local installation. This system owner was losing about $6,000 per year. ... At SolarDirectCanada we do a lot of work retrofitting older underperforming systems. Some of these system have been underperforming for years. Most of these deficiencies would be covered under warranty but in every case the company is no longer in business. Remediation in this case included; - Replacing cracked solar panels - Installing panel level optimization - Installing rodent guard - Replacing all roof wiring - Installing a monitoring package The remediation was not cheap but it will be paid for in a few years. The moral of the story of course is to have your system installed by a company like ours that has been in business for 28+ years and will stand behind their work.

Conservation Programs Cancelled Well Doug Ford has cancelled the Cap and Trade program like he threatened he would. I don’t think too many people understood enough to care other than it was supposed to bring down the price of gas or something like that. I don’t know about you but I haven’t seen any cheaper prices at the pumps yet. The GreenOn program was one of many good programs funded by the cap and trade program so it has been cancelled now too. The GreenOn program was... the program that helped home owners insulate their homes, replace inefficient appliances, windows and light bulbs. This is where those coupons came from that let you buy LED bulbs for less than a dollar at Canadian Tire. The GreenOn program was also to include solar by summer 2018 but that is not going to happen either. It is pretty well accepted that solar is the cheapest form of new energy available bar none but there is actually one source of energy that is even cheaper and that is conservation. Finding ways to not use energy is the cheaper than solar and that is where the Ontario GreenOn program came in. The other problem with cancelling cap and trade is that Doug will be starting a war with the federal government. The deal was that if the provinces did not implement their own cap and trade then the federal government would come in and do it for them. If the federal government does it then Ontario will have little say in how the money is spent or how the program is run. We do know that Doug is planning on spending a lot of our money to fight Ottawa on this. Say what you will about Trudeau but he doesn’t seem like someone who will be backing down easily on this one.