I feel fortunate to have had many opportunities in my life to volunteer to help make a difference in the world. From welcoming refugees, volunteer mediation, interfaith dialogue and even the simple act of giving blood.
Yet in the last year, I’ve found it difficult to find those opportunities as we celebrated International Volunteer Day on December 5th. This has been a year where the world is wracked with war and a looming climate crisis and it is easy to give up hope and feel volunteers can’t make a difference. Yet I was struck by the optimism in Canada’s International Volunteer Day Website.
If everyone volunteered, the world would be a better place. Imagine more than eight billion of us volunteering. Limitless possibilities for sustainable development – food and education for everyone, clean environment and good health, inclusive and peaceful societies, and more.
Last year today I posted a bleak article We need to do better than this. I couldn’t imagine the war in Ukraine would still be grinding on and we would add another one. Likewise that solar project on the Erindale GO station continues to not produce any electricity. When I’ve shone a light on problems like this in the past at least I’ve gotten a reaction from somebody. Even if the result is adding a password so problems can be hidden. In this case nothing!
I thought I could continue to throw up my hands or maybe I could volunteer and see if I could make a difference. I spent a few hours locating a number of their other projects and performing historical analysis and looking at the current situation. This is what we do day in a day out so why not volunteer my time to see if I can help make a change. This is at least something I could do and have become pretty good at.
Here is the their November 2023 report similar to what we provide to our customers. I’ve also added some details on historical performance because I wanted to keep it as simple as possible to understand. You can click on the names of the individual sites which point to their existing publicly viewable portals if you want to check for yourself.
Now before summarizing, I want to say that I really like and appreciate the service Metrolinx provides. I was delighted when they expanded GO service to Kitchener and introduced Presto. Much easier and faster than needing to take the Greyhound to downtown Toronto which I did weekly for a number of years. However, when it comes to owning and operating solar projects, I’m going to suggest Metrolinx needs some outside expertise. I spent a few hours preparing this report and hope they find it useful. I also commit to provide these monthly reports for the next few months and will perform daily monitoring so you are aware of problems like Inverter 5 failing at the Bloomington GO station on November 5th.
Now I’m sure there are some people who won’t appreciate my volunteering. However, I’ve learned if you are going to have an impact not everyone is going to agree with you. I did my best with this report but there is information that could make it better if Metrolinx was willing to share it. Of course if I really wanted to I could probably pay $5 and put in a Freedom of Information request because sometimes volunteering costs us money and we don’t get some nice swag to show that we’ve been volunteering.
What does the report show? Well truthfully I’ve seen worse but this is still pretty bad. Seems like Erindale has been down since 2021 and Ajax is basically since spring with similar issues and those two systems alone are Metrolinx’s big revenue generators. Even some of their new sites like Bloomington have problems starting almost immediately. Let’s just say your yearly losses should be around 1% as I pointed out in this article last September. At least when I contacted the Region of Waterloo, they ordered some parts and made some improvements. Didn’t get any swag but did feel I was making a difference.
Maybe you know somebody at Metrolinx who cares about the dollars being lost and can share this article with them. I’m also going use their Contact Me link to share this article and see if it reaches somebody who cares. If I’m going to volunteering to provide monthly reports and let them know about problems, I’m going to need to know where to send the information instead of always posting it to LinkedIn.
Feeling better about this year after that work and writing this article. Hoping, my volunteering makes a difference this year! How about you?