Sure, Madam Chairman.
I'd like to give a brief background on Canadian solar and Canadian Solar Solutions.
As stated earlier, I'm the president of Canadian Solar Solutions. This is a subsidiary we created about a year ago, in June of 2009. We are wholly owned by our parent company, Canadian Solar Inc., which is a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. It's an incorporated company in Ontario, founded in 2001. We have manufacturing and other employees worldwide, about 6,000. We're the eighth largest solar manufacturer in the world. We started this new subsidiary here in Ontario when the Green Energy Act developed by the provincial government was announced.
This is probably one of the most exciting and busy times for me in my career. I've been in solar for 22 years now, and the Ontario program has actually made Ontario the centre of the world in solar energy, believe it or not. We have currently plans under way to do another rare thing, to actually bring jobs from China back to Canada. We are going to be building a 200-megawatt module facility by the end of this year here in Ontario that will employ approximately 500 people. And then, on top of that, all of our customers, such as Upper Canada, are busy training and adding staff to handle all the installations and design of the systems that are going to show up on a lot of buildings, residential rooftops, and on large farms as well.
In this process we've interfaced with lots of companies. You can imagine that this kind of environment has created a lot of entrepreneurs. A lot of people have knocked on our doors and said: “We have a project. Would you be interested in it?” We pretty much have an open door policy. We don't turn anything away until we get more facts on it. Because of that, in November of last year we made 397 megawatts of applications for the feed-in tariff here in Ontario, which is the largest group of projects of any company. In April, 176 megawatts of those projects were approved, and currently we're in the process of doing environmental and archeological studies of these sites to get ready to deploy our product on them in 2011.
That's basically a background on why we're here in Ontario and why we really think this is a great opportunity for renewables.