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Author: Katharine Hayhoe

This story is part of The Energy Mix’s partnership with Small Change Fund.

Toronto District School Board

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) has installed rooftop solar panels on the high school that counts veteran climate scientist and communicator Katharine Hayhoe among its alumni.

“This week’s good news came to me through a particularly reliable source: my dad!” Hayhoe wrote last month in her Talking Climate newsletter. “He’s a science educator who served as the science coordinator for Canada’s biggest school board in Toronto (TDSB) for many years. There, in addition to championing science education, he also invested in climate education, including co-authoring the Grade 10 climate unit with me.”

There’s been a lot more action since Hayhoe’s dad retired, she writes, and he recently got an update from a former colleague, TDSB technology consultant Geoff Day, about the district’s rapidly expanding Solar Schools program. Since it began investing in rooftop solar in 2010, the board has installed solar on 358 buildings, with nearly 148,000 panels and about 38 megawatts of capacity in total.

Kipling Collegiate Institute—Hayhoe’s old high school—is one of them. Last year alone, its rooftop panels generated 243,946 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of clean electricity.

Altogether, the TDSB’s solar arrays offset about 8,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide each year—and they’re making this climate action visible, too. Students at participating schools can look up how much energy their own school generates, calculate its carbon impact, and customize a “We Are a Solar School” poster to share with their community.

Sometimes climate action looks like a shiny ,new technology, Hayhoe says. And sometimes, you discover it’s been quietly generating clean energy on the roof of your old high school all along.

We often talk about the clean energy transition as something we need to build. But stories like this are a nice reminder that, in many communities, it’s already under way.

Adapted verbatim and with permission from Katharine Hayhoe’s Talking Climate newsletter.