Cecilia Murphy Building,
11 Coatsworth Cres. Commissioning

Alex Winch Speech Notes
Nov 25 2006

Thank you for taking time from your busy Saturday schedules to join us today for the commissioning of the largest private solar panel array in the City of Toronto.

My name is Alex Winch, and I am the President of Mondial Energy.

We have many important guests here today, but a few I would like to specifically acknowledge are:

• Maria Minna, MP for Beaches East York
• Dennis Bevington, MP, Western Arctic and NWT, Energy Critic, NDP
• Michael Prue, MPP for Beaches East York
• Sandra Bussin, Deputy Mayor of Toronto and Councillor, Beaches East York South
• May Mary McGowan, Executive Director Neighbourhood Link Support Services
• Andy Caradonna, Housing Board Chairman, NL Homes
• Jane Lennox-King, Board Chair of NLSS
• And the indomitable Gerrie Burnett, Housing Development Manager, NL Homes

Today, we celebrate the commissioning of a solar thermal system to heat the domestic water for showers and sinks here in the Cecilia Murphy Building, a social housing building run by the wonderful Non-Government Organization Senior Link / Neighbourhood Link. I am deeply grateful to Senior Link for giving Mondial the opportunity to build here.

With these panels, we expect to offset 20,000 cubic meters of gas annually and 40 tonnes of CO2 emissions. For the design and installation of this panel system, I am thankful to Mr. Joe Thwaites and his team at Taylor Munro Energy Systems of Vancouver and the installation crew of Solsmart here in Toronto. 

The solar technology we commission today, while new and innovative to many in Canada, is familiar to people around the world. 90% of Israeli households use the sun’s energy to heat their water.  In Barcelona Spain, all new and remodeled buildings must incorporate solar thermal technology.  This event today is proof that renewable energy can be commercially viable in the Canadian marketplace.

Mondial Energy, a company I founded two years ago, has paid for the solar panels on this roof with shareholders’ private money, and with a 25% grant from Natural Resources Canada. We have over 50 shareholders from Canada and Switzerland. We paid Taylor Munro to build this project, and we have agreed to sell the heat energy generated from the system back to the Cecilia Murphy building on a ten year, fixed price contract.

We welcome the opportunity to serve Senior Link, who are capital constrained yet always looking for ways to manage their expenses.

We are responsible for maintaining the panels. We meter the heat we deliver to the building, and bill on the basis of delivered heat.  The generated energy is remotely monitored using Fat Spaniel technology.  If anything fails, our meter stops and we have no deliverable. And no revenue. We have done this as a for-profit company. This is not a demonstration site of what’s technically possible.  

This is an example of what’s commercially viable, displacing fossil fuels with renewable energy.

By paying for the panels, we have broken the up-front cost barrier to renewable energy deployment in Canada.

By metering the deliverable, we have retained the technology risk, and broken the technology-risk barrier.

At Mondial, we believe we have broken the two biggest barriers to renewable energy deployment; up-front capital cost and technology risk.

We have signed several non-profit housing buildings in Toronto. In London, England two weeks ago, we announced that we are funding two global awards in Responsible Tourism to encourage the development of sustainable solutions in the tourism sector.

We are actively investigating additional technologies and applications, in several countries around the world. We have signed letters of intent for properties in San Francisco, Houston, Atlanta, and Reno. We have also signed Letters of Intent in Aruba and Jamaica. As far north as Iqualuit, as far west as Hawaii, and as far east as Europe and beyond to the Middle East, we are actively investigating investment opportunities.

We are driven by the objectives of:

• delivering energy to customers at their locations,
• wherever they are in the world,
• at prices that are competitive with local alternatives,
• at investment returns that can attract capital investment,
• without emissions.

It’s a dream for our times, and our children’s.

It’s a dream for our world.

It’s an achievable Mondial objective.

Thank you.