Energy Probe is Canada’s pioneer in the field of alternative energy. In 1978, its guide to renewable energy technologies, The Renewable Energy Handbook, became a bestseller, and in 1980 it completed Ecology House in downtown Toronto, Canada’s first working demonstration of the practicality of a building that employed solar energy and water and energy conservation.
For alternative energy technologies to be sustainable, they must be economically viable. For this reason, Energy Probe has always opposed subsidies to all energy forms, including the renewable and non-renewable technologies, such as cogeneration. Energy Probe rightly determined in the mid-1980s that cogeneration would be immediately viable when allowed to compete (as soon happened in the UK with the power system’s privatization in 1990) and that the renewables would remain uncompetitive for decades to come. Subsidizing renewables, Energy Probe believes, tends to delay the day that they become viable.
Below are links to our recent stories on alternative energy sources: