Since 2010 the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, has been investing in renewable energy technologies. The TDSB is the largest and one of the most diverse school boards in Canada serving about 235,000 students in 579 schools throughout Toronto as well as ~100,000 ‘life-long learners’ in their Adult and Continuing Education programs.
Katharine Hayhoe mentions in a recent edition of her newsletter that she heard about the progress that the TDSB has made since that first solar installation from a reliable source, namely her father Doug Hayhoe who is a retired science educator who was the science coordinator for the TDSB for many years.
TDSB has installed solar on 358 buildings, with nearly 148,000 panels and about 38 megawatts of capacity across the district (enough to power about 6,300 homes). Hayhoe’s old high school, Kipling Collegiate Institute, generated 243,946 kWh of clean electricity last year. Taken together the panels across all the district’s installations offset about 8,000 tonnes of CO2 each year. Students (and members of the public) can look up how much energy individual schools are generating, calculate the carbon impact and even produce a customized poster for their school.
Is there potential where you live for the school district to put solar panels on school rooftops? Who might you talk to if you wanted to explore the viability of such a program for your school district?