Green Neighbours 21 is a…

Green Neighbours 21 is a community ‘green’ group based in Ward 21 in downtown Toronto.  We recently met to review Ontario’s LTEP.

The most important single thing that we would like to see in the long term plan, is the commitment to move to 100% renewable energy.

A commitment to 100% renewable energy means that we need to stop building new infrastructure or refurbishing infrastructure for any other kind of energy starting now.

•No new pipelines - natural gas or oil - because quickly reducing green house gas emissions is of paramount importance to prevent runaway climate change.

•No new fossil fuel infrastructure of any kind.

•Phase out nuclear energy because nuclear requires big centralized expensive infrastructure, and the high upfront cost commits Ontario long term to that energy source.  Money sunk in nuclear infrastructure is money not available to take advantage of rapid advances and falling prices in energy generation and storage technologies.  Nuclear energy is low carbon but it is not renewable and it has serious environmental risks including radioactive waste and possible accidents.

The LTEP should support a rapid move toward small distributed renewable energy generation and energy storage infrastructure within communities.  We want to see investment in energy storage infrastructure to deal with fluctuations in energy production versus demand.  We want to see commitment to 100% renewable, resilient, “nimble”, and distributed community-based energy systems. We want Ontario to remove barriers and to help citizens and communities become energy self-sufficient.

•Keep the FIT program for current community-owned renewable projects.

•Create a new FIT for community-held wind and geothermal (ground source heat-exchange) projects. •Provide loan guarantees for renewable energy co-ops and other community power organizations.

The LTEP needs to use regulations and incentives to improve conservation and energy efficiency across all energy sectors, such as incentives for home energy retrofits and low carbon transportation.

In closing, we would like to say thank Ontario for pricing carbon!  This is a huge step forward. We hope the price will be increased sufficiently rapidly to quickly tip the economic scales away from fossil fuels, and quickly lower Ontario’s carbon emissions.

Thank you for pricing carbon, and thank you for considering our input into Ontario’s LTEP.

[Original Comment ID: 207169]