When a half-century-old apartment block in a northwestern Toronto neighbourhood needed its balconies renovated, its owners decided to take the opportunity to try to bring down the building’s electricity use. Instead of regular balcony guards, they installed solar panels.
“It reduces the energy bill and the electricity consumption of the building,” said Stephen Job, vice-president of Tenblock, a climate-conscious developer that works on energy-conscious construction and retrofit projects and was contracted by the building’s owner for the retrofit.
Using solar energy is better for the environment because it produces fewer emissions, he says, but it’s also good for the business “because the building saves a little bit of money over the long term.”
About 80 per cent of the world’s solar panels are manufactured in China, by far the leader in the renewable energy technology. Most of Canada’s solar panels come from Vietnam, another major manufacturer, followed by Malaysia and China.
But Tenblock didn’t have to look overseas for their panels — they found the technology manufactured just a 15-minute drive away.
Mitrex makes its solar equipment in nearby Etobicoke, specializing in building-integrated photovoltaics (BIPV), or solar panels that do double duty as part of a building’s façade. Their solar panels can act as cladding, walls, roofs, windows — and balcony guards.
It’s one of the last companies making any of its own solar equipment in Canada, despite the fact that solar energy is booming. Between 2019 and 2024, solar energy capacity nearly doubled in Canada.
And building a solar manufacturing base is no easy task, according to Mitrex’s CEO Danial Hadizadeh.
“You can’t just expect the oranges to come off the trees. You have to prepare the land, plant the seed, wait for the trees to grow,” he said.
“If you want a solar future or any form of renewable future for Canada, it’s going to take five to 10 years.”
Looking abroad for panels
Job says having the panels they used manufactured nearby was helpful because people involved with the building renovation could visit Mitrex, meet the engineers and understand how it all worked. They could also get the panels built and delivered faster, and eliminate carbon emissions associated with overseas shipping.
“It’s not something that goes into a queue and a factory somewhere halfway around the world,” he said.
But other solar companies in Canada don’t have that option; they cannot find local manufacturers of panels at the scale and price they need and have to import panels and other parts from abroad.
Katherine Zhou is the co-founder of PV Technical Services in Brant, Ont., which has developed roof shingles that produce solar energy.
She says while it may be hard for Canada to compete with the mass-production of panels happening elsewhere, there’s still a lot of business in designing the technology and setting up solar panel systems.
“We are not the manufacturing centre, but we are the R&D centre, design centre and the service centre,” she said.
Her company imports panels from abroad but finishes the assembly process in Canada, using technology it has patented around mounting and maintaining the roof shingle systems.
Zhou’s take seems to be backed up by statistics on the solar industry from European Union countries and the U.S., showing only about 20 to 25 per cent of jobs in solar are in the manufacturing of the panels; most jobs are in installing and maintaining them. But building out a larger manufacturing sector in those countries could also change that employment makeup.
Solar panels are less expensive to manufacture in Asia, so most of them come from China and Southeast Asia, said Dan Balaban, CEO of Greengate Power, which operates Canada’s largest solar plant in Alberta.
The Travers Solar Project located southeast of Calgary is made up of about 1.3 million solar panels and cost $700 million to build. It’s the type of large-scale project that could really drive up demand for solar panels, but Balaban said he’s not seeing government policies “that are focused on trying to realize our solar potential.”
“Could we bring it into Canada? Absolutely, but that would require us to have a significant increase of demand of solar domestically,” or south of border in the U.S., he said, because for local manufacturing of solar panels to take off, there needs to be a large market.
Building local production
Mitrex’s Hadizadeh also says the demand for solar is crucial, and Canada’s market is relatively small. But his company has built its business by focusing on large buildings like universities, apartments and stadiums because he says the owners tend to have “very long-term mindsets.”
“So if they spend, let’s say, $100 million to build a university building, they’re going to spend $500 million to maintain it for the next 30 years. That’s where we shine,” with solar panels that produce electricity and bring down a building’s energy costs over the long term, he said.
But Hadizadeh said that while there are various incentives for property owners to use solar energy, there aren’t incentives to get them to buy Canadian.
“I mean, anyone can just go to China and import solar panels,” he said.
“There are no tariffs to protect them. Imagine if they did that to automobiles, if they open the borders to Chinese cars to come to Canada and the U.S. How many months does it take for Ford and GM to close the doors?”
If Canada wants to build its solar manufacturing base, Hadizadeh says it needs to help Canadian solar companies out in their early years, with targeted incentives for their products. He also has a cladding company, and has been able to invest money from that business into Mitrex. This helps his solar panel venture to continue growing, even in leaner years, but it’s a financial cushion that other younger companies don’t always have.
That’s where government policies could help. He says an incentive of a few cents for every panel could help companies weather those early years, and focus on growing their business rather than struggling to stay afloat.
“They will create hundreds of thousands of jobs on their own, without any further assistance.”
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