On Friday, June 16, Climate Positive Energy was pleased to partner with the Urban Climate Action Project, along with the SDGs @ U of T initiative and the City of Toronto to host an invite-only workshop focused on Solutions to Adopting More Low-Carbon and Renewable Energy within Toronto.
The day opened with remarks from Professor David Sinton, Academic Director of Climate Positive Energy, who emphasized the importance of collaboration between the university and industry partners in helping to address the climate challenge. Following a plenary on some of the barriers towards adopting low-carbon and renewable energy, participants gathered in groups to discuss solutions, roles, and responsibilities towards increasing the deployment of distributed energy resources to traditional utility solutions.
The discussion was guided by a document formed by researchers of Climate Positive Energy Initiative and SDG Initiative, including Angelica Chow (MSc Sustainability Management candidate) at the University of Toronto, and Laszlo Energy, in partnership with the City of Toronto and the Urban Climate Action Project (UCAP), who scanned the academic and grey literature as well as conducted preliminary energy industry interviews to compile a list of barriers and challenges to increasing the deployment of low-carbon and renewable energy distributed energy resources (DERs) within Toronto.
The intended output of this workshop is a stakeholder report detailing and synthesizing participants’ comments. The report will also include a set of recommendations or next steps that will be shared with workshop participants and the industries at large, as well as an international audience and members of the University Climate Coalition (UC3) and the Urban Climate Action Network (UCAN) in support of international collaboration to achieve net-zero targets.
Thank you to our partners and attendees for convening around this important topic, and for sparking a day of insightful discussions.