Kristopher Stevens presents Brian Iler with Community Power award

OSEA founder presented with first Community Power Award

For six solid years, Brian Iler has sat on the board of directors of OSEA providing guidance and offering advice for the fledgling organization. For his extensive service, Brian has been presented with the first Community Power Award as a tribute to his invaluable contribution.

But Brian’s involvement in community power goes back even before OSEA opened its doors. As a founding member of the Toronto Renewable Energy Co-operative, Brian helped give birth to OSEA in 1999.  He and other members of TREC realized that after all the hurdles they had to overcome to erect the windmill on the Exhibition grounds in Toronto, they had learned some valuable lessons they could teach others trying to get their own renewable energy projects up and running.  So they established OSEA to do just that.

It only took a phone call from the Toronto Green Community asking if he wanted to get involved in a wind energy project. “I said ‘of course’,” remembers Brian. From his work as a director of Greenpeace Canada in the 1980’s, he had become well aware of the dangers of global warming.  Moreover, a community owned wind turbine fit in well with his portfolio.  As a lawyer with an extensive practice focused on alternative forms of business, he was intrigued with the idea of an energy co-op.

It was the late nineties and former Ontario premier Mike Harris was breaking up and selling off Ontario Hydro to the private sector. Brian saw TREC as an alternative both to the private and public sector – social ownership. He had already done extensive work with co-operatives helping to form food and housing co-ops throughout Toronto. He was just the person to advise on how to establish a wind energy co-op.

But getting that windmill up and running “was terrible” the most difficult project he has ever worked on.  Of course, no one had ever plunked an industrial wind turbine down in an urban setting before so a lot of ground had to be broken, and not just literally. TREC certainly got its share of NIMBYism. No one knew anything about wind energy then, he says. Moreover, a partnership between a small grassroots organization such as TREC with a large organization like Toronto Hydro “is not easy.”

Still, just two months after signing a letter of agreement with Toronto Hydro, shares in the TREC windmill were sold out and $800,000 was raised “just like that.”

Brian and other TREC members thought they would just have to talk to their friends to sell the shares but that is not how it worked out. At the time, Deb Doncaster was organizing community consultations for TREC and when presentations about TREC’s project were given at these meetings, people just took out the checkbooks, Brian recalls, still with astonishment. “That was amazing.”

The goal for OSEA was to replicate what had been achieved in Toronto and to provide the support needed. However, other similar initiatives came to a grinding halt because of the regulatory environment. “We recognized right away what was needed,” says Brian.  Work began on developing a feed-in tariff, which resulted in the launch of the province’s Renewable Energy Standard Offer Program in 2006. Still there were more hurdles. TREC is involved in another wind project, Lakewind, but despite raising seed capital and completing many of the necessary studies, “word came down that there was insufficient capacity on the grid because the Bruce  nuclear plant has it all. “

“Our sense was that this was likely just another excuse to stop our project,” says Brian. The purpose of OSEA then was to stop these barriers that were always being erected.

Despite the frustration, Brian is optimistic, more than ever about renewable energy. “ It is nice to see what seems to be happening: the momentum from the World Wind Conference; the apparent willingness of the government to create conditions for a huge amount of renewable energy.  It is all very exciting and I am very optimistic. But I don’t think there is much alternative. We need renewable energy desperately,” he says.

Brian continues to believe in community power, which has been a focus of his volunteer work for the last decade: “If the government is not going to generate electricity as it has done in the past and is looking for other ways to finance generation, do we really want to hand this over to the private sector that will just jack up prices?  All power generation should be owned by communities or publicly as has been the case in Ontario until very recently.”

To that end, Brian, while no longer a director of OSEA, will continue to work on the Green Energy Act by sitting on its management committee and as a TREC director.  But it won’t be his only volunteer activity. As executive director of the Community Power Fund, of which Brian remains a director, Deb Doncaster can testify to: “Brian has endless passion and energy for volunteering his time to organizations that are democratic and community oriented. He is tireless. It is amazing how much he is able to contribute.”

As for Brian, he assures OSEA that “ No, I am not leaving. This is not goodbye.”