Two men install a solar panel on a roof.

The Canadian conundrum surrounding renewable energy is that manufacturers in Canada have to order most of their parts from the U.S. and Europe. With all the energy used in shipping parts - and sometimes whole units - across oceans and down highways, should the 100-mile diet apply to energy too?

Scientists use a calculation called Energy Pay Back Time (EPBT) to rate the overall energy impact of a sustainable energy source - how long it takes a panel or turbine to produce as much energy as it took for it to be manufactured.

The average EPBT for a solar panel, according to Karl Knapp, is about two to three years. For a wind turbine, he says, it's about two to three months.

Knapp was one of the American scientists studying the EPBT of solar panels in the late 90s and early 2000s. Knapp says he and his team tried to take everything into consideration ñ right down to the energy used by pop machine in the plant where they built the solar panels. The one thing his report says they missed in their calculations, however, was the energy used to bring parts to the plant and transport the final product to the site where they are being used.

This might be the biggest factor in evaluating the efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines in Canada.

Dirtier shades of green

Énergie PGE is a Quebec company that designs and assembles the 35kW to 50kW turbines (mostly used on farms) from its home-base in Saint-Jean-Port-Poli, about 100 km east of Quebec City.

Énergie Ressource Développement uses mostly Canadian-made parts and assembles them in its Quebec plant.

While Énergie PGE makes its own blades on-site and use towers manufactured in Toronto and Missauga, Marc-André Normandin, the sales and marketing director at Énergie PGE, says the company gets air shipments of parts about once a month from Germany and Italy and has pieces rolling in on flat-bed trucks from the U.S. regularly.

Normandin says his company relies on imported parts because no one in Canada makes the components they need.

"We are only a few players in the mid-sized market," he says. "The industry focuses on the big (turbines)."

Ivan Reyes tells a similar story. He works at Centennial Solar, a Quebec company that has been manufacturing solar panels since 2004.

The company gets their solar cells from Germany because no one in Canada makes them. The solar cells are the 15-centimetre by 15-centimetre-square silicon bits that fit together to make the surface that captures energy from the sun.

"There isn't a high demand in Canada," Reyes explains. Centennial Solar is one of two Canadian manufacturers who make panels this particular size.

But, there is one Canadian company keeping it local.

Made in Canada

Énergie Ressource Développement (ERD) is an anomaly. Instead of placing rotating blades on a stand-up tower (think arms on a clock), wind gets caught in a horizontal turbine (think record on a turntable) and flows down through an L-shaped shaft.

The company also gets almost all of its parts in Quebec. The company only purchases the generators for their systems from abroad because they need to follow electrical codes specific to the country where they are installing the turbine, says Michel.

Regardless of how much energy is used in making solar panels and wind turbines, Rock Radovan says people will still invest in renewable energy.

People are still willing to take the "warts" of renewable energy over nuclear and coal energy production, says Radovan, the president of Sustainable Ottawa, a local volunteer association encouraging a more environmentally-friendly Ottawa.

"That trade-off depends on each individual person," says Radovan. Getting to make that decision "makes people feel less helpless," he says.

"It boils down to the same question: do you buy fluorescent bulbs, even though they have mercury?"

Frontpage photo courtesy of The Wild Center