David Dodge2013-05-21T20:02:22-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=david-dodgeCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for David DodgeGood old fashioned elbow grease.Net-Zero Homes Are Getting Simpler and Cheapertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33131902013-05-21T16:04:49-04:002013-05-21T17:23:44-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/How William Shatner Changed the World is a must-watch for any Trekkie or technology geek. In it, William Shatner hosts and narrates two hours of exploring the real-life advancements that were inspired by Star Trek.
In case after case Shatner explores the rapid pace of technological development. Things like the cell phone or communicator that were mere fantasy in the '60s became reality only a few short decades later.
When it comes to net-zero homes it too is an idea that seems more science fiction than anything, especially in the cold climes of Edmonton, Alberta. A home that produces as much energy as it consumes -- well that's just crazy.
It took a group of 45 people more than two years to build the first net-zero home in Edmonton. Simon Knight is the CEO of C3, a social enterprise that works on reducing greenhouse gas emissions in Alberta and was there.
"The first prototype we built in Edmonton, when you went into the mechanical room it was similar to walking on the Starship Enterprise -- it was very complex," says Simon Knight who now is a director with the Net-Zero Energy Home Coalition.
Built back in 2007 the Riverdale net-zero home was a 5,000 square foot duplex. It also had a complex space heating system that depended on an over-built solar thermal set-up with a lot of extra engineering bells and whistles.
Peter Amerongen of Habitat Studio and Workshop built that first net-zero home in 2007 and he built Bob Heath's net-zero home in south Edmonton in 2011, his third net-zero build.
The main difference? Simplicity. The mechanical room in Bob Heath's net-zero home has an electric hot water heater and a heat recovery ventilation system hanging on the wall and not much else. This is hardly the Starship Enterprise.
"One of the reasons this house has such a simple mechanical system is because it is getting over 50 per cent of its energy just from the sun coming through those south-facing windows," says Amerongen. "So once you reduce your total heating load it's small enough we can get all of the energy we need from those solar panels."
By taking advantage of passive solar energy and using a thermally massive floor Amerongen erased half of the heating bill right off the bat -- all for the cost of some high quality windows and a polished concrete floor.
And while the systems and techniques have become simpler and lower cost there are rules of thumb that apply to every net-zero build.
You have to drastically reduce the energy use of the house. You do that with high levels of insulation in the roof and walls and by making the building as airtight as possible.
Then you must pay "Careful attention to thermal bridging so we make sure there are no parts of the house, not even the basement floor slab that are in contact with the ground or exterior air -- so there is a complete blanket of insulation around it," says Amerongen.
And when you have done all that the home you top it off with a solar photovoltaic system. In Bob Heath's case he only needs a 7.5 kilowatt solar system to provide all of the energy his home requires.
It turns out Heath, who lives alone in this 1,900 square foot two-storey home is a super energy conserver because he has exported 4,000 kWh of electricity to the grid for the last two years running.
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So when is a house net-zero ready?
"You've got to get to an EnerGuide rating above 86 before you can call your house net zero energy ready, 89 or 90 would be better, but at that point the remaining energy that you need tit's possible to get that energy from the sun with some kind of solar collection system - solar electric or solar hot water," says net-zero pioneer Amerongen.
On Bob Heath's net-zero home they left space for a solar thermal system, but they didn't install it because solar electric made more sense at this point in time.
In the evolution of the net-zero home custom builders like Habitat Studios have come a long way and are making excellent net-zero homes. But it's larger builders like Landmark Homes who are poised to make every new home they build net-zero ready by 2015.
"That's when you start talking about industry transformation," says Knight who adds builders are already looking at building net-zero communities. "You are actually talking about the kind of transition you have been working towards for a very long time."
These particular builders are way out in front of building codes and government. If you build a house to the minimum standard of the building code you get an EnerGuide 70 home. It is expected that national building code released later this year will mandate all new construction to be Energuide 80.
Amerongen sees a real urgency to get on with producing net-zero homes because of the massive carbon footprint our housing stock has. Even if we build all new homes as net-zero energy homes it will take generations to replace the old inefficient houses.
Houses are a durable good. Even a poorly constructed, energy inefficient house lasts a long time.
Reza Nasseri of Landmark Homes is pretty optimistic. He envisions half of North America's homes being built to net-zero standards within 20 years.
We're not dealing with Moore's Law but the pace of innovation in the net-zero home world just in the past six years has been breathtaking. As more builders and customers embrace the idea of a slightly more expensive home for far lower operating costs the net-zero idea will only pick up more and more steam.
By making net-zero homes simpler and more affordable trailblazers like Amerongen and Landmark Homes have started something that I hope will only get bigger and bigger.]]>Lawrence Grassi Blazes a Low-Key but Effective Energy Conservation Trailtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32675522013-05-13T13:20:51-04:002013-05-13T14:35:30-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/Lawrence Grassi was a trailblazer. An immigrant from Italy he was a respected mountaineer and guide who built and maintained many of the original trails throughout the mountains around Canmore, Alberta.
Short of stature and eschewing alpine guide stereotypes for suspenders and hobnail boots Grassi was one of the key personalities in Canmore's early history. And the school that bears his name, Lawrence Grassi middle school, has blazed a trail much in its namesake's fashion. Nothing too fancy, but a lot of hard work and common sense can go a long way.
Lawrence Grassi middle school is 70 per cent more efficient than a comparable building. The difference in utility bills between it and the 1920s era school it replaced is $120,000 a year. And oh yeah, they did it all on budget.
Home to 391 students between the grades of five and eight (and expanding to Grade 4 next year) Grassi is your typical Canadian mid-size school. There is a wood shop, a teacher's lounge, portables and the building was commissioned in 2008.
Ken Riordan is the facilities manager for this and five other schools in the Canadian Rockies School Division. His school division also built Banff Community High School, the very first LEED certified school in Canada. He knows how to build an efficient building on a budget.
So how did they do it?
"The systems we put in here are meat and potatoes, it wasn't a Cadillac," says Riordan.
The walls are R-24 and the ceiling is insulated to R-40. The triple paned windows let in plenty of light but the killer app is the concrete slab floor.
The thermally massive slab floor allows for both passive heating and cooling and evens out the temperature swings over the course of the day. There are also pipes that go through the slab for both heating and cooling and once the slab is charged up it retains either heat or cold for a long period of time.
The building also has high-efficiency condensing gas boilers and there is a rooftop heat recovery ventilator that preheats the fresh cold incoming air with the stale warm air on its way out.
And it wasn't just in the construction process and systems where they found efficiencies, they found them after the building was operational as well. They discovered they were over lit. "We went from having 204 bulbs down to 113 bulbs, reducing our wattage use considerably," says Riordan.
Every dollar saved is an extra dollar that the school board can invest in teachers, programs and students.
"It's unreal. You don't realize how much you spend day to day on the bills over a year but when you starting thinking about two, three, four years the amount of money that's generated over such a long period of time you're looking at half a million dollars," says principal Brian Wityshyn.
"That money that's saved that can actually go back into the classrooms."
On Budget
You don't hear it often said about public infrastructure projects, but this school district was right on budget.
"The budget for the school was $11.2 million... and we came in at $11.2 million," says Riordan.
One of the ways they did it was by sourcing materials from as close by as possible.
"At the time we built this building steel was very expensive, it was through the roof. And wood was a cheaper alternative so we went with wood throughout the building to help bring our costs down," says Riordan.
Not only are the exposed wood beams and pillars gorgeous architectural features, but they came from just over the border in British Columbia. The cement came from a plant ten minutes away.
The building looks like it will end up with LEED Gold status and one of the things that process prioritizes is minimizing waste, both in any demolition and during construction.
They ended up diverting 86 per cent of all materials, both construction and demolition, from going to the landfill. And by partnering with a local church group the school district was able to ship four container loads, things like door knobs, door handles, wiring, breaker panels, desks, chairs, blackboards and tack boards down to help build schools Guatemala.
Trailblazing
It's this accumulation of common sense that makes Lawrence Grassi school such an example for what regular buildings, builders and project managers can accomplish.
"The world needs Grassis... We need trail makers, men and women who will seek new paths, make the rough places smooth, bridge the chasms that now prevent human progress, point the way to high levels and loftier achievements."
That's a quote from Member of Parliament J.S. Woodsworth from 1938 about Lawrence Grassi. I couldn't agree more, the world does need more Grassi's (guides or schools). Using far less energy isn't some kind of utopian dream, regular work-a-day folks are now bridging those chasms and it's getting easier and easier to follow in trails they're breaking.
]]>Waste-to-Energy: How Nanaimo, B.C. Turns Garbage Into Powertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.32234412013-05-06T16:39:57-04:002013-05-06T17:10:51-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
"Waste itself is a human concept; everything in nature is eventually used."
Head to a forest and see if you can spot any waste. Fungi are breaking down the dead trees, the leaf litter on the forest floor retains moisture and protects the soil from the sun. Even the droppings from the deer and the rabbits are broken down and used by the eco-system around it.
As a species, we're cottoning on the fact that what we consider waste is often a valuable resource. We've featured Edmonton's waste management system, and Vancouver's sewage district heating system on Green Energy Futures before, but even mid-size cities like Nanaimo now feature thriving businesses, partnerships and projects that are turning various streams of waste into compost, electricity and carbon credits.
Chris Midgley is the manager of energy and sustainability for the Regional District of Nanaimo. Located on the east coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia the district features the cities Nanaimo, Parksville, Qualicum Beach and Lantzville with around 145,000 people calling it home.
"It's part of a general philosophy around waste where you treat it not as a waste product, but as a resource. Try to recover as much as you can. As a regional district we're responsible for managing all these different streams of waste, so (we) try to find opportunities to generate energy or other benefits from those materials," says Midgley.
The flagship
The flagship program in Nanaimo's case is curbside organic pickup. Put your organic waste and food scraps in the green bin, put it on the curb and it gets picked up and composted.
A 2004 study found that 34 per cent of the waste that gets picked up in the Nanaimo Regional District could be diverted through this kind of program. By diverting this waste, not only will the city get far more life out of its current landfill, but it's turning that stream of waste into a useful product -- compost.
Compost, especially the high-quality compost you're able to create when the organic material is separated from other kinds of waste at the source, is a valuable product. The compost that is made from the source material provided by the people of Nanaimo currently retails for $34.95 a cubic yard through a private company.
Currently, the Regional District of Nanaimo collects about 2,000 tonnes of organic waste per year. On a spring afternoon I followed a garbage truck on its rounds ending at the waste transfer facility, and it's quite an operation. Truck after truck full of gross, sodden food waste is dropped off (imagine a never-ending Gallagher-esque mélange of food hitting the floor here) and carted away to the nearby composting facility.
And while it's not the most appetizing scene, it does offer environmental benefits. By keeping the organics out of the landfill, you're able to drastically reduce the amount of leachate that the landfill produces; leachate being the gross, contaminated water that collects as water passes through the landfill and collects in a low spot.
When those 2,000 tonnes of waste a year don't end up in the landfill and don't break down anaerobically (in the absence of oxygen) you avoid the release of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas. This makes curbside organic collection the Nanaimo district's secret weapon in reaching carbon neutrality, a target all municipalities in British Columbia must meet.
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Landfill gas
Speaking of organic material breaking down anaerobically and creating methane (a frequent topic of conversation around the Green Energy Futures office let me tell you), that's what's happening in the district's landfill right now. For decades it was a regular landfill, and as a result, they've got quite the resource to tap.
Their 1.3-megawatt landfill gas recovery project was commissioned in 2009 and it ensures that the majority of the methane that the old landfill produces is collected and burned for electricity. The annual greenhouse gas emissions savings are more than 21,000 tonnes.
There are landfill gas recovery projects around the country and it's a great way to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions and make some money by selling electricity into the grid.
Biogas cogeneration
In November of 2012 Nanaimo announced the completion of its sewage-fed cogeneration project that again pulls the double-whammy of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and generating clean electricity. It's a biogas cogeneration project that, when fully operational, tops out at 330 kilowatts.
They collect the biogas, or methane, from sewage waste that is broken down in one of three digesters in -- you guessed it -- an anaerobic environment. Then it's burned in a boiler for electricity and heat. While the district was collecting biogas before and burning it for heat they were only able to use about 40 per cent of the biogas they collected with the rest having to be burned off.
"This is a cogen facility, so cogeneration of electricity, but also heat. So the heat that's being produced at this site is actually being directed back towards the buildings where it's heating the buildings and providing comfort to the workers here, but also going into the process heat for the treatment of the sewage itself, so heating the waste that's in the digesters," says Midgley.
Heating that waste is a necessary and energy intensive step in the biogas process that is now handled for free via a resourceful use of waste.
The value in weeds
The value in waste is all around us. As gardening season gets started we should keep in mind this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson:
"What is a weed? A plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered."
It takes just a slight tilt of the head to change the way you see the world and discovering the virtues of the things we dislike can lead to valuable new businesses and innovations.
It's encouraging to see smaller cities and districts figure out the business and clean energy opportunities in their garbage.]]>The Sunny T'Sou-ke First Nation Loves Solar Powertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31792422013-04-29T16:07:04-04:002013-04-29T17:15:48-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
Respect the bear and the bear will respect you says Chief Gordon Planes. He's the leader of this small reserve of about 250 people located about 45 minutes southwest of Victora.
It's with this approach to the world that the T'Sou-ke developed a community plan that led them to build the largest solar photovoltaic project in B.C. and cut their energy use by 75 per cent.
"Our vision is to get back to where our people were dependent on the elements that the creator gave us, and that is the wind, the sun and the tides. We were able to use those energies in the past with a light footprint and I think it's good for us to go full circle and come back to that because I think if anything we all need to do that," says Planes.
The T'Sou-ke First Nation embarked on a two-year process to build a new community vision. After dozens of sessions and more than a year of process the T'Sou-ke agreed to focus on four things:
Energy self-sufficiency;
Food self sufficiency;
A renaissance of culture and language and
Economic self-sufficiency
With this vision in place the T'Sou-ke tackled the challenge of energy self-sufficiency with gusto. A few years ago they installed 75-kilowatts of solar PV on several buildings. At the time it was the largest solar PV system in the province.
Solar energy is sexy (especially when compared to things like insulation) and this project attracted money and attention. After the solar PV project there was a solar hot water project for 40 homes and then the kicker -- a community energy conservation and efficiency program that cut energy use by 75 per cent.
"I often say we did our whole project backwards. We started with the photovoltaics, which are quite expensive...And then we suddenly realized once we had done all that, that that the key to the whole project is saving energy as opposed to producing it. So if you can save energy it costs a tenth of a price to save as it does to produce," says Andrew Moore. Moore is a resident of the town of Sooke and a former architect from London, England who helped the T'Sou-ke develop and implement the plan.
Solar panels are a lot easier to sell than insulation, air sealing and air source heat pumps, but it really is the energy conservation that does the heavy lifting.
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And engaging with solar now is a smart play. Shell Oil's most recent energy scenario predicts that solar will comprise 37.7 per cent of the world's energy supply by 2100.
"I think what we're trying to achieve is something that is not just for us, it's for all those future generations and I think that's the key, 100 years ahead is what we always what we strive to look ahead for," says Planes.
With significant community buy-in the T'Sou-ke started a very successful public and student education program. The students "get it more than the adults" and they are more than happy to encourage the adults to help save energy. Pulling up to the band office in your car you are greeted by small signs that say things like "Idling is fuelish."
In the band hall there are large posters with trees on them carrying dozens of paper leaves detailing all the ways kids and adults alike have committed to saving energy. Things like "unplug my chargers," "I will turn off the light," and "I will ride my bike to my friend's house instead of being driven."
The road to net-zero for the T'Sou-ke office buildings was paved with lessons learned from the energy efficiency pyramid. And while the technology is important " the major shift that's happened is that a real change in awareness and behaviour of the community members," says Moore.
The program also had social benefits. Nine people from the T'Sou-ke community became certified solar installers as part of the project.
If busloads of students and visiting researchers from universities are any indication folks are paying attention to what the T'Sou-ke are doing.
The T'Sou-ke are committed to the idea of education in this project so they invited all of the First Nations of B.C. to come to a gathering to celebrate their energy self sufficiency project, along with politicians from neighbouring municipalities.
The surrounding City of Colwood was so impressed they partnered with the T'Sou-ke and other jurisdictions to start the Solar Colwood Project to retrofit 1,000 more homes in the surrounding municipality to get them as close to net zero as possible.
To some the idea of spending years coming up with a community vision might try their patience. But the T'Sou-ke took their time, came up with a bold community vision and executed it with very high levels of community support. Their vision is so compelling they have students, universities and other governments looking over their shoulder and making the trek to their small reserve to see what all the fuss is about.
The T'Sou-ke are OK with all of the attention. They have even started offering add-ons like salmon feasts to the people and groups touring their near net-zero reserve. Respect the bear and there's enough salmon for everyone.]]>Affordable, Sustainable Homes Are Coming to a Factory Near Youtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31323212013-04-22T17:53:30-04:002013-04-22T17:38:17-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/net-zero home seemed exotic, futuristic and, oh yes, expensive. Well, they don't have to be.
By 2015, the Landmark Group of Builders says all of its new homes will be net-zero ready. Already Landmark homes have an EnerGuide rating of 82 to 84 and if things go as planned Landmark will make its average home EnerGuide 88 to 89 by 2015. A home rated this high is so airtight and energy efficient that it requires only a small amount of energy production to make it net-zero.
A few weeks ago I toured the Landmark Building Solutions facility in Edmonton. That's really a fancy name for house factory -- it's a spotless, robot-filled showpiece to energy conservation and I was more than impressed with the company's attention to detail and high building standards.
CEO Reza Nasseri is an engineer with a penchant for pushing the limits. He got the inspiration for developing this way of building homes while touring Germany 20 years ago. Since then Nasseri has built one of the most modern, automated home manufacturing plants in North America and in the process he has reduced the cost and energy intensity of building a home.
Landmark is not shy about calling their homes Alberta's highest rated sustainably built homes, but that's not their secret to building and selling 778 homes in Alberta last year.
Built indoors
Landmark has also achieved construction efficiencies and energy savings by building the major components of his homes in a manufacturing plant instead of on-site.
Landmark's plant is located in south Edmonton and it produces two homes a day with a host of robotic equipment, skilled workers and pleasant, predictable weather. By building in a plant they don't have to heat the job site in winter for tradespeople. The cost to heat that half-done house in the winter can be between $5,000 to $7,000 per house. By building the major components in their factory the time needed to to build a building comes way down as does the cost to heat it, from $1,000 to $1,500.
As Nasseri explains the old way of building homes is akin to dropping several semi-trailers full of car parts in your driveway and then hiring a mechanic to put it together.
In the plant a worker grabs an arm-like machine that easily picks up heavy sheets of plywood and in seconds places them on the squared-up wall while the second worker tacks them in place. A robot then spends about five to ten minutes travelling up and down the wall trimming here and there and nailing as it goes, never missing a stud.
These are not the manufactured homes that are shipped in on the back of a tractor trailer. Landmark manufactures the parts of a home - the walls, stairs, roofs and windows and assembles them on-site.
"We have no design restrictions. We can build the most complex house because we don't build a house - we build components. A machine builds a wall and a wall is a wall whether it's a custom $10 million house or a moderate house," says Nasseri.
Being a somewhat handy guy and having built two 1,000-square foot cottages with an old fashioned hammer and nails, I was blown away by the attention to detail and standards employed in the plant.
Energy nirvana
The standard energy features of a Landmark home are enough to make any energy efficiency nerd drool.
Spray-foam insulation seals every little nook and cranny and is R 6.5 per inch to boot. The average wall is insulated to R-22 to R-24. A 96 per cent efficient furnace is standard. On-demand hot water heaters only heat water when it's needed. Triple-paned windows, programmable thermostats, compact fluorescent light bulbs, an energy efficient heat recovery ventilation system and even drain water heat recovery is in every home.
Of course there are also low-flow showerheads, low-flush toilets and a host of other minor, but important features as well.
A new solar division at Landmark is already adding the potential of energy production to their energy efficient homes -- the final ingredient needed to make a net-zero home.
Sustainable, really?
I am not sure if you noticed, but if we are to believe the hype these days everything is "sustainable" from bottled water to "clean coal."
Asked why Landmark puts such an emphasis on energy conservation and reducing carbon emissions, Nasseri says, "Because we believe very strongly in the future of our children and sustainability is probably the most important thing today in our lives ...Every house we build this way takes about 10 - 12 tonnes of carbon out of the picture."
Nasseri calls climate change "the evil we have to deal with" and that the costs of dealing with it can be measured in terms of dollars, livelihoods and lives.
Not your typical CEO.
Money for nothing, energy conservation for free?
So how much does it cost the buyer to get all of those fancy energy efficient features in their new home? "Well, lucky for you nothing. So far we have not been charging for that, but we have been able to bring the costs down," says Nasseri. "The majority of people are still concerned about the granite counters and hardwood floor -- which we give them of course."
Part of the genius with Landmark Homes is they don't sell you all of those super energy saving features, they just include them as standard equipment in their homes.
"When we do our research and see that a particular product (such as an on-demand hot water heater) fits we go directly to the developer and negotiate to bring the costs down," says Nasseri.
What does the future look like? Landmark is aiming to make net-zero ready homes the norm by 2015 and "Within 20 years I feel very strongly that the majority of homes in North America will be built that way."]]>Treating Biodiesel Like a Microbrewtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30856952013-04-15T17:52:29-04:002013-04-15T17:42:18-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
As you walk into the Cowichan Biodiesel Cooperative's processing facility in Duncan B.C., it really does look like a microbrewery. Tanks, pumps, hoses and other assorted machinery are all reminiscent of the brew master's trade. But unlike the yeasty, worty smell that you get at a brewery, the biodiesel processing facility has the faint hint of French fries.
And when you ask a long-time customer about why they spend the extra-money for their home-made diesel she's got a quick answer.
"I got involved because I wanted to get off fossil fuels," says Lynn Wytenbroek, a founding member.
And like any microbrewery or small, grassroots organization you need dedicated customers.
"But personally, I prefer to be on 100 per cent as much as possible. I've even driven out to Alberta with the trunk of the car full of biodiesel so I didn't have to fill up at a gas station."
When Wytenbroek says 100 per cent she means B100, the designation that refers to a fuel comprised of 100 per cent biodiesel. B20 by comparison, is a mixture of 20 per cent biodiesel and 80 per cent petro-diesel.
Biodiesel is a safe, clean, ready-to-use alternative transportation fuel that in this case is made with used vegetable oil. It can be put into almost any diesel engine and when used, produces far less pollution, specifically the nasty black smoke and particulates you see coming out of far too many vehicles. Compared to regular petro-diesel, biodiesel produces far less polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a known carcinogen.
Biodiesel also produces far less greenhouse gas emissions as well. A study from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, a lab of the U.S. Department of Energy, found in a life cycle study that buses using 100 per cent biodiesel (B100) produced 78 per cent less carbon dioxide emissions.
Scaling up: Of buses and cruise ships
While customers like Wytenbroek help you get off the ground, it's customers like Cruise Victoria Services (CVS) which help you scale up. CVS is a sightseeing and tour operation that's run out of Victoria, B.C. and they have a fleet of 19 buses.
They switched to B20, or 20 per cent biodiesel in 2007.
"For the first six months we didn't even tell our driving staff that they were running biofuel. Ultimately when we did announce it everybody was quite surprised because there was zero impact in terms of the overall operation with the exception of lower overall emissions," says Gary Gale, managing director with CVS.
They gradually ramped up to B100 and they are, as far as we know the only company in North America running a major fleet of buses on biodiesel fuel.
"Customers love it. The side of the bus has actually has B100 biodiesel right on the side of it and customers, mainly U.S. customers, are really thrilled by the fact that, you know, that somebody's taken measures that we have in order to adapt to the B100 system," says Gale.
Here's where the story gets a little serendipitous. As CVS ramped up their demand for biodiesel fuel the Cowichan Biodiesel Cooperative was able to tap into the waste vegetable oil from the 220 cruise ships that dock at Ogden Point in Victoria every year. The cruise ships come in on one side of the pier and the bus line is based in the same building.
"And that's a great sustainable closed-loop system, recycling the waste product from the cruise ships and turning it into a value-added biofuel that is then used to take those tourists around Victoria," Brian Roberts, the president of the Cowichan Biodiesel Cooperative.
Half of their feedstock now comes from those cruise ships with the other half coming from restaurants. Even regular folks can even come and drop off their used vegetable oil at a little drop-off station at the local landfill. It's not a lot, but it is a way for average people to contribute and learn about their transportation fuel options. The local county folks don't mind it either as it keeps the waste cooking oil out of the sewer system where it clogs pipes and costs them big money.
The price: Farmer's market vs. Superstore
We can't dance around it, the biodiesel from the Cowichan Biodiesel Cooperative costs more than your typical litre of petro-diesel. There is about a $0.40 to $0.50 cent premium -- petro-diesel was $1.29 and the biodiesel was $1.78. Much to the frustration of coop members, over $0.40 of this cost is tax which includes a provincial carbon tax on this carbon neutral fuel.
Biodiesel is a premium product that Roberts compares to organic foods. Biodiesel, like organic food produced by a nearby farmer is not only better for your health it's better for the local economy as well.
Customer Lynn Wytenbroek agrees: "My $1.78 per litre goes into this community. It stays in this community and that helps the local economy. That's very important; it's like buying local food, which I also do precisely for that reason."
The local angle even applies when it comes to suppliers. The coop has a sticker they give to restaurants that supply them with vegetable oil that identifies to locals that their used vegetable oil gets turned into biodiesel.
The Cowichan Bio-Diesel Co-operative is now in the process of installing a second biodiesel pump that will provide B100 and various mixtures of bio/petro-diesel fuel to the vehicles of its members which now includes project partner the Cowichan Valley Regional District.
Biodiesel will never replace petro-diesel by itself, but getting not just people to eat locally but cars as well means less of a dependence on a volatile, unhealthy commodity.]]>If Your Office Is Too Hot or Too Cold, You're Not Alonetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.30385492013-04-09T07:34:56-04:002013-04-09T08:12:11-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
It's too hot, and it's too cold.
These dichotomous complaints are symptoms of a wider problem. Not only do aging, poorly-designed office buildings do a terrible job at keeping the people within them comfortable, they are energy sieves that are expensive to operate and maintain.
Canada's aging office building stock is in a sorry state. They either need drastic overhauls to the mechanical and electrical systems and the building envelope or they need to be torn down.
Tearing down an office building and starting from scratch costs more money, uses more energy, emits more carbon and can take a lot of time that retrofitting and renovating an existing building.
Now an Edmonton architectural firm is helping building owners reimagine and renovate these horribly inefficient, tired, old buildings. The process is called Reimagine and the architects at Manasc Isaac are helping companies renew their old buildings as new, ultra-efficient and highly functional spaces that save energy and are a pleasure to work in.
"In places like Edmonton or Calgary we see huge opportunity for work like this type of work because a lot of our building booms happened in the '40s, '50s and '60s. You see a lot of large towers, a lot of office buildings that were built at that time and now they're 50 plus years old which means most of their building systems need to be renewed or renovated or reconfigured to make them effective for today," says Shafraaz Kaba, a partner with Manasc Isaac.
Servus Corporate Centre
Plop a tip-up concrete building originally designed for the climate of Oklahoma in the most northern city in North America, Edmonton, and it shouldn't come as a surprise that it will be an energy hog.
The building in question was originally a Dell call centre. When Dell left town Servus Credit Union acquired the building. In its original state not only was it an energy suck but it was also a cavernous human warehouse. While the call centre was a fairly new building it needed work to make it a more livable, friendly space for the 450 employees Servus planned to bring in from various buildings scattered all over town.
It started with the skin -- the cladding, insulation and the windows. The original concrete and brick façade was re-fitted with insulation that tripled the insulative value of the walls from R10 to R30. Over top of that insulation went a corrugated metal façade that incorporates blocks of green and blue. New high-performance windows also went in that increased the R-value from R-1 to R-7.5.
The building that started as an energy disaster ended up being certified as LEED Silver.
When buildings get energy efficiency retrofits sometimes simple math takes over and dark, forbidding caves get built to avoid energy inefficient windows. While having fewer windows means less heat loss and more savings natural light is a valuable commodity. Not only does it mean less money spent on artificial lighting, but it makes the people working in the building happier, healthier and more productive. With that in mind they cut a giant hole in the roof and installed a clerestory, a bank of horizontal windows high up that opened up the space and brought in a ton of natural light.
This openness and surplus of natural light turns the common area, the atrium, into the heart of the building. It's alive with people meeting, chatting, eating lunch and going about their business.
Community Spirit
The fact that Servus is a credit union, a cooperatively owned bank, played a part in the retrofit as well. It's not just about the nuts and bolts of energy efficiency: "We wanted to ensure our employees had spaces that felt like community, their own little kitchens, their own little dining areas are throughout the building," says Gail Stepanik-Keber, brand and corporate social responsibility officer with Servus.
The central staircase, the grand stair as it's called, is a feature both Kaba and Stepanik-Keber love.
"I love coming to work out here in the morning... I like the fact that there is this atrium community space and I also love the fact that I can open the window, there is a little electronic button feature where you can open the window and they'll automatically close at 5 o'clock," says Stepanik-Keber.
Windows that open -- what a novel concept. Isn't it a bit bonkers that almost every office building that's ever been built doesn't have operable windows?
"Everything that's old is new again. Back 100 years ago cooling a building was only done by windows that opened and what we're beginning to do, even in high-rises that we design, is to have operable windows. It's an important part of giving people control of their space, giving people that passive energy saving opportunity," says Kaba.
The building management system ensures that the windows are never left open overnight and they even have humidity controls that close them when it's raining. Almost every room has occupancy sensors linked to the lights as well.
These energy efficiency measures have paid off. Compared to its old call centre days the building uses 70 per cent less natural gas and 43 per cent less electricity.
"I think companies are getting smarter about what buildings could look like. I think that there haven't been that many alternatives in the past. Now with LEED and sustainable practices I think there's more education to companies like ours when they do go to build," says Stepanik-Keber.
"For us it was a real development of our skill and development in that area, then it becomes strategic, it becomes a competency for us."
While it hasn't necessarily filtered all the way to their lending practices yet it is encouraging to see the largest credit union in Alberta, one with $12 billion in assets, showing leadership on this issue.
White noise replacement
One of the unintended consequences of reducing the heating load so drastically was that the air handling system now had to do far less work. While that means Servus gets a much smaller electricity and heating bill, the building also lost its ability to produce white noise.
In an old style building the noise of the pipes and vents and fans create white noise that covers up all of the babble and bedlam of a busy office.
With some of those systems silenced, they actually had to bring in white noise generators to recreate the effect of an inefficient office building so people could concentrate and not have to listen to Sally's cellphone call down the hall.
Like a proud papa
As we were wrapping up our interview Shafraaz was surveying the atrium from up high with a contended look on his face -- like a proud papa.
"It really shows what we're capable of doing given great clients like Servus and great builders. It comes down to a whole group of people everyone from the trade who installs these railings to the overall vision. It's a tribute to how Servus put their faith in us to deliver something that took an old building, reimagined it for their needs and made something far greater than the sum of its parts," says Kaba.
While these projects aren't necessarily all the rage right now, Kaba says clients are becoming more sophisticated and increasingly architects are able to make the financial case for investing more now for longer term gains.
If you're able to tie operating costs to capital costs, like you can in an owner-occupied building like Servus Corporate Centre these projects make a lot of sense. Especially with an institution that gives out mortgages and is used to taking a long-term view.
Whole building renewal isn't for everyone, but increasingly projects are proving it can work and it can save the owners a bundle of time, money and energy in the process.]]>How Your Thermostat Can Save Energy and Moneytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.29013502013-03-18T17:51:42-04:002013-05-18T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
As much as I would like to take credit for that quip, it comes from former U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. And as long as we're using the analogy I'd like to think of installing a programmable thermostat as fruit that's just hanging there at mouth level, needing just a minor turn of the head to lean in and take a bite.
While programmable thermostats have been around for quite awhile, the product category has seen a lot of upheaval and innovation in the past few years. Internet connectivity and mobile apps meant people could turn down the heat from across town and keep reliable data on their heating habits.
Nest test drive
Enter the Nest, a learning programmable thermostat designed by the original chief designer behind the iPod. When this maestro of industrial design turned his attention to a fairly ubiquitous (40 per cent of Canadians have programmable thermostats) but unsexy product, good things were bound to happen.
According to a study led by the Energy Analysis Department at Lawrence Berkely National Laboratory the majority of programmable thermostat users, 90 per cent in this survey, use their programmable thermostat manually. That same survey also found that 15 per cent of people had the wrong times set on their thermostats (making programming them effectively somewhat impossible) and 33 per cent of people had their thermostats on a long term hold, rendering it near useless.
Even though my home already had a programmable thermostat set properly, I bought a Nest learning programmable thermostat because it's so cool.
One of the first big issues the Nest and other next-generation programmable thermostats solves is keeping the right time which it does via its internet connection. That same connection also keeps it in the loop with things like local weather. Your thermostat might know if there is a heat wave coming before you do.
It also means you can connect to it on your favourite mobile device. Having the Nest app on my iPhone and iPad was a revelation. During the learning phase I was able to set the thermostat lower from the office on the days I forgot to set it back from home.
Although the Nest is a learning thermostat I found I could check its program and make adjustments anytime I wanted to using the easy to use remote interface.
After three or four days the Nest picked up on our pattern and it created a program. The only problem is that our kids' schedules are sometimes unpredictable. No problem, I ran the app on my iPad and I was able to easily point and click and set the thermostat to turn the heat back up to 20C when the kids got out of school early.
Just a warning, if you have kids, there have been occasional temperature battles between my daughter and myself from across the city.
The packaging is simple and sleek and the installation process was smooth as well. There is an online Nest Compatibility Tool where you can check if you've got the right wires for the Nest to work. If that doesn't work you can even take a picture of your setup and send it to them and they'll help you with the setup.
My wife and kids definitely get this piece of hardware. The old programmable thermostat was comparable to trying to figure out how to get your early '90s VCR to stop flashing 12:00. This is a glowing jewel by comparison, it's gorgeous and it's also simple and intuitive to use.
While the Nest costs more than other, Internet-connected programmable thermostats, there are a couple of things that separate it from the pack. The auto-away feature means that even if we forget to turn it down or scramble the schedule if no one walks in front of the Nest for a longish stretch of time it will turn the temperature down.
Another nifty feature is that once it's been in operation for a while it will tell how you long it will take to reach a certain temperature. Turn it up to 22 degrees and the Nest will tell you that that will take exactly 18 minutes.
Mythbusting and hard numbers
So while we knew that using a programmable thermostat could save you energy we wanted to bring in an expert to get the details. That expert's name is Pam Goertzen and she's a program manager with C3 (Climate Change Central) in energy efficiency.
She busted a couple of myths right away
"Many people have heard that your furnace actually uses more fuel bringing it back up to room temperature if you turn it down too much."
Not true, says Goertzen. For every degree lower you set your thermostat it saves you more energy.
And while a programmable thermostat can help you save money by turning down the heat when you're asleep or away it won't modify your behaviour. The well-known Energy Star rating system stopped rating programmable thermostats because ultimately thermostats don't save energy like a new furnace or windows would. It's ultimately up to the user. But if it is used properly a programmable thermostat can pay for itself in as little as one month. A very modest program cited in this Statscan paper finds that a programmable thermostat can save you 6.5 per cent on your heating bill.
How else can you save on heating costs? Goertzen recommends sealing air leaks.
"If you add up all the small little leaks that you find in an average home it would be the size of a basketball. There is fairly significant air leakage in our homes and it just means doing some sealing around windows and doors, weather stripping that type of thing. It's inexpensive and relatively simple work that can result in about 30 per cent," says Goertzen.
Insulation is the next big potential energy saver in the home and after that it's the furnace itself. The standards in new homes now call for 90 per cent efficient furnaces. But buildings that are only 10 or 12 years old will likely have a 78 per cent efficient furnace. If your furnace is due for replacement you may be able to save 20 per cent or more on your heating costs.
We have been turning our furnace down to 15C at night and during the day for about 15 years now. The savings are awesome and we now have trouble sleeping in guest rooms that keep their heat set high all night!
Whether it's the Nest or something more basic it's a inexpensive, easy way to save money in the long run. Tell us your thermostat story in the comments.]]>Tapping (Mountains of) Trash for Landfill Gastag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28533722013-03-11T15:58:29-04:002013-05-11T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
While the landfill isn't accepting new waste that methane (which we know from our biogas episode is a valuable resource) can be collected and burned for electricity. It's called landfill gas recovery and in this case the methane powers a 4.8-megawatt power plant, generating enough electricity to power 4,600 homes.
Neil Burkhard was our very enthusiastic host as we toured Edmonton's waste management facility, a place that sports a very spiffy landfill diversion rate of 60 per cent. It was 21 years ago in 1992 when Edmonton started sucking landfill gas out of its landfill.
Today there are 60 active wells in the old landfill site and a star-like pattern radiates out from each well to collect the methane. These pipes are 20 metres under the surface and they all feed into a network of pipes that ring the perimeter of the landfill.
What's collected in those pipes is typically a mixture of methane, carbon dioxide and water vapour. It's collected by massive vacuum pumps, cleaned up and burned in three different 20 cylinder converted diesel engines.
They collect a lot of gas, enough to fill the equivalent of 8,000 hot air balloons per day. What doesn't get burned for electricity is flared. The operator who was showing me around mentioned that this is done for carbon credits. It was curious -- how is burning methane a positive for the environment?
It turns out that methane is 21 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. Venting it directly to the atmosphere is far worse than even just burning it off as the flaring process converts the methane into plain old CO2.
Landfills produce a lot of greenhouse gases, in 2010 they produced 27 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. Through landfill gas recovery techniques they were able to capture seven megatonnes of that bringing their total down to 20 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent. For scale the total emissions from Canada in 2010 were 692 megatonnes with the biggest single sector being transportation.
"In an energy hungry world and a world concerned about climate change it would make a lot of sense to take all of these landfills across our country and take that methane and turn that into a source of energy to meet that demand," says Burkard. He's a fount of information during our tour pointing out that Edmonton was the first in Alberta to get a landfill gas recovery operation and trooping down to some exposed pipe on a cold winter day to show us how it all works.
The whole facility treats waste as a tremendous resource and all it takes is a slight shift in how you see the world to realize it along with them. It's a theme we've covered over and over again on Green Energy Futures.
Twenty years in, creating electricity from landfill gas still isn't that common, but Edmonton is not resting on its laurels. A new biofuels plant under construction will convert 100,000 tonnes of undiverted trash into 38 million litres of biofuels annually.
"It's quite a complex process - we create a feedstock initially where we take the garbage and shred it up into something the size of a corn flake or a potato chip," says Burkhard.
"That waste will then be fed into what is called a bio-refinery, that will raise the temperature of that material to 750 degrees Celsius and crack the bonds of the garbage." That cracking process creates syngas, which is a mix of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Through another process called catalytic synthesis the whole mix is turned into methanol.
"The methanol has all kinds of uses. It can be refined further into ethanol for ethanol-blended gasolines. Raw methanol can be used for making windshield wiper fluid, glycol and a whole series of other chemicals that are used in the petrochemical industry."
With Edmonton currently trucking 70 loads of garbage a day one hour southeast to a dump in the small town of Ryley, getting that diversion number up as high as possible means cash savings.
"Landfills aren't obsolete just yet, but we're getting very, very close," says Burkhard.]]>UBC Is Heating Up and Getting Greentag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.28075362013-03-05T17:54:38-05:002013-05-05T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
The new hot water style heating system at UBC can now integrate renewable energy systems like biomass, geoexchange, solar thermal and waste heat into this natural gas system all because the barrier for entry is lower. The bouncer at the old steam heating system was pretty strict -- you had to be 190 C to get in. Now you only have to get the temperature up to 80 C.
While district heating makes a lot of sense on a university campus it's still not a terribly popular idea in North America. Canada is still a tiny player in district energy and most of the district heating systems in Canada are either university campuses or hospitals.
"District heating is basically a very old fashioned way of space heating. Instead of every building having its own little boiler and forced air systems, this is a hot water based system and you have pipes that take the hot water out from a heating plant and run it through the buildings and then bring it back to be reheated," says Nancy Knight the associate vice-president of planning at UBC.
Having a hot-water system versus a steam system is the game changer when it comes to adding renewable, lower-carbon heat sources to the system. The turn-of-the-century steam system that's being replaced operates at high pressure and at around 190°C, the hot water system that's replacing it works at 80°C.
Biomass: modern hewers of wood
With 14 kilometres of pipe it's not a system that's going to be replaced overnight, but it is in progress and they've already added some low-carbon sources of heat. In a back-to-the-future sort of way, the Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility burns locally sourced wood waste and tree trimmings and provides 25 per cent of UBC's baseload heating needs. This biomass plant opened in 2012 and it reduces UBC's natural gas consumption by 12 per cent and campus greenhouse gas emissions by nine per cent (5,000 tonnes).
To put the biomass plant in perspective Knight says "It fits on two city lots, it takes two trucks a day of wood waste and it heats about 2,000 homes." Of course this plant heats university space, not homes, but Knight's point is that biomass can "slip into a nieghbourhood very easily. It's not an intrusive technology at all."
A trailer truck pulls up to the four-storey, 1,900 square meter building and the wood is tipped into a large holding area. Instead of burning the wood in a typical boiler the wood is turned into syngas. That syngas is separated into two streams -- one burnt for heat and the other is cleaned up and burned for electricity.
"Now, this is a challenge because the syngas is not as clean as it needs to be," says Knight. "So cleaning up the gas before it goes into the engine is an area of significant research activity that our clean energy researchers are involved in. So, if we can crack that nut and make the biomass able to generate not just thermal energy but also electricity easily, think of what the opportunities for that would be."
Like the Center for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS), which we profiled, UBC is using its campus as a laboratory for new, low-carbon technologies. The CIRS building is also the clearest example of what this low-carbon Lego system would look like in the future.
The building is mostly heated by waste heat from a neighbour that has a large, inefficient lab exhaust air-handling system. It also has geo-exchange and solar thermal technologies integrated into the building as well. These renewable heat sources can be integrated into the campus system because of the flexibility of the new hot water district heating system.
As the hot water district heating system is built out and UBC upgrades its buildings as part of its greenhouse gas reduction plan the possibilities for expansion expand. There are several science buildings on campus that vent heated air into the environment as a matter of course. With a bit of planning and some strategically placed heat pumps the UBC campus could be get a significant amount of its heat from the air exhausts it uses for science purposes.
Saving money, reducing emissions
According to Knight they'll save about 20 per cent of their energy costs just with the steam to hot-water conversion alone. A 20 per cent reduction in energy costs on a campus the size of UBC is nothing to sneeze at. It means more money can be put into the purpose of the university, research and educating students.
The conversion will cost $85 million and will be done in 2017. The plans include 14 kilometres of insulated pipe, 131 energy transfer stations and a 52-megawatt natural gas peaking plant to be built this year.
The reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emission is also impressive. Their first GHG reduction plan will be complete in 2015 and it was a 33 per cent reduction from 2007 levels. They'll get there with the steam to hot-water conversion which is a 20 per cent reduction, the biomass plant which is a 12 per cent reduction and the final piece is a tune-up program on all of the buildings which will bring up the final 10 per cent. If you're clever at math you'll see that they're on track to exceed their goals by a fair bit.
"Our next big target is 67 per cent reduction from 2007 by 2020. So we're starting to think what are the next low-carbon energy sources that we can tap to get those, and the big one we're looking at right now is a major heat recovery initiative off the cooling towers of one our main research enterprises on campus," says Knight.
An ambitious goal to be sure but one that UBC seems committed to achieving.]]>Farming for Biogas: Closing the Loop on Cow Pooptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27590832013-02-26T15:31:27-05:002013-04-28T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
Growing up in Alberta it's pretty hard to forget the smell of fresh manure being spread on a nearby field. That's why when James Callaghan, a dairy farmer from Lindsay Ontario, first heard about biogas he was intrigued. Not only was it a way to deal with environmental concerns about local water and animal waste but he could diversify his farming operation by generating heat, electricity, animal bedding and a near-odourless fertilizer.
If you haven't been to a working dairy farm in the past ten years you might be surprised at the technological whizbangery of it all. Stainless steel is everywhere, cows are brought into automated milking stalls on an elevated platform at milking time and in the barn slow moving, automated pooper-scoopers carry the manure away.
This is how it all works at Maryland Farms, a fifth generation dairy farm about two hours east of Toronto. Callaghan is a genial guy who can crack a joke about the last time the Leafs won a Stanley Cup and then in the next minute get into the intricacies of running an underground cooling field with pipes full of hot gas. He runs the farm with his two brothers and two of his sons, who are getting into the business as well.
While milk might be their primary business it turns out that what those slow moving pooper-scoopers collect can be turned into a valuable resource as well -- electricity. It's a fairly simple process -- when organic material, like cow manure or vegetable waste, breaks down in an oxygen-free environment it produces methane, the main ingredient in a product that most everyone knows as natural gas.
This process is called anaerobic digestion and the methane that is collected is burned for electricity and heat.
"I never thought we'd be producing electricity here and selling it to the grid," says Callaghan.
"We've been at it for a little of over a year. We've had a lot of learning experiences in that time but we're not going to give up on this and we're going to learn how to run it and we are getting better at it as time goes on.".
While the potential for big bucks was a key factor in Callaghan's decision the environmental factors played a role in his decision as well. Back in the early 2000s the idea of nutrient management in Ontario came up - nutrient management being the official bureaucratic term for regulating how much raw manure you can dump on your soil so it doesn't affect local water sources. By using an anaerobic digester you mitigate the effects of dumping raw manure onto fields.
"One of the main reasons we started looking at this was because once your manure is digested the smell is eliminated when you go to spread that product back on the field. You also kill the majority of the pathogens in your manure as well so it's better for the environment and better for the watercourses," says Callaghan.
"It makes the neighbors happier as well."
The stuff that's left over from the anaerobic digestion is a dry, soil-like, spongey substance called digestate that smells like... well not much really. Not only does it get spread on the fields it also gets used as bedding for the cows.
Methane producing bugs
It turns out that you can't do it all with just cow manure. You need "FOGs" as Callaghan calls them. These FOGs are fats, oils and grease from the restaurant industry and they're delivered to the farm by a third party. Creating the methane is a complex biological process and it's a bit like Goldilocks, it has to be just right.
"Our best product in order to help produce methane would be French fry oil and molasses which are very high in energy and they work well with the manure to produce methane," says Callaghan.
"But you always have your other products such as donuts that will have sugar and a lot of energy in them too. Instead of dumping it in landfill sites we're taking it here and we're reprocessing it and making methane out of it."
It's a tantalizing recipe: French fry oil, molasses, donuts and cow manure, shaken not stirred - all to make electricity.
More power
After the anaerobic digestion has happened, the methane bugs have done their work and the biogas has been harvested it's time to put it to work. The methane is pumped through underground pipes to cool it down and to strip some of the moisture out of it before it heads to a large V12 engine. It's a 500-kilowatt monster and being in the room when it was running was one of the loudest places I've ever been.
"All of the power that we produce we send it out to the grid. We get approximately $0.16 a kilowatt for whatever is being produced. We can go down as low as 250 kilowatts and still run that engine and up to a max of 500 [kilowatts]," says Callaghan.
That guaranteed $0.16 cents a kilowatt-hour rate is important to the viability of the project. Callaghan has a 20-year contract through Ontario's feed-in tariff program and it helps innovators like Callaghan take risks on unfamiliar technology like this.
It was a little over $2 million initial investment and Callaghan hopes to have it paid off in ten years.
Callaghan also heats his house and several of the farm buildings with waste heat from the engine. Even after all of that there's still leftover waste heat - He's considering starting another business based around his bio-digester.
"We do have excess heat here and we definitely could put up a greenhouse and grow vegetables. That's another business that could happen in the future but right now we're going to work on this unit and make it as efficient as possible," says Callaghan.
Spoken like a true farmer.]]>Run-of-River 101: Human Scale Hydrotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27116222013-02-20T07:24:43-05:002013-04-22T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
It's more of a kinder, gentler version of bigger hydro power projects -- none of the flooding of massive tracts of land.
Don Gamache of Innergex was our helpful guide. Sporting a mountain man beard, 4x4 truck and plenty of warm clothes he's the plant operator for the Fitzsimmons Creek run-of-river project and two other nearby run-of-river projects.
For Gamache it's a dream job. He gets to spend time outside in the mountains, enjoying the fresh air and tooling around on snowmobiles to ensure that these multi-million dollar machines run like clockwork.
The Fitzsimmons Creek project is a 7.5-megawatt power plant right in the Whistler Blackcomb ski resort and it produces enough power to cover the annual energy consumption of the site. Not too bad when you consider its 38 lifts, 17 restaurants, numerous snow-making machines and other buildings and services.
And it's hard work. It's only Gamache and one other full-time employee (along with two part-timers) who wade through hip-deep snow to check water intakes, monitor oil levels and do the ongoing preventative maintenance that must be done to ensure that a multi-million dollar machine doesn't smash itself to bits.
Gamache has a patient, fatherly tone as he goes over how it works. It turns out that run-of-river doesn't involve micro-propellers in streams at all, not even close.
You divert a portion of a river, stream or creek that has a lot of elevation change, into a pipe. You take that pipe and run it several kilometers downhill to a powerhouse where, with an assist from gravity, you use the force of the water to spin a turbine and generate electricity. At Fitzsimmons creek there is a 250-meter elevation change (what's called head) and the pipe travels 3.5 kilometers downhill from where it's diverted to the powerhouse. That builds up a lot of pressure. When the water in the pipe finally gets to the powerhouse the water is at 350 psi.
Big business for small(er) hydro
Run-of-river is growing fast in British Columbia. There are currently 45 different operations totaling 858 megawatts in capacity with several more on the way. One of the bigger players is Innergex, a Quebec-based company with 11 operational run-of-river projects in B.C.
"B.C. has all the elements you need in the equation for run-of-river. You benefit from Costal Mountains with a very high head, you have tons of creeks, huge accumulations of rain and snow, which provides the flow you need. It's the perfect topography, perfect climate, and there is huge potential in British Columbia," says Richard Blanchet, senior vice president for Innergex.
The big difference between these projects and the massive hydroelectric projects of old is scale and the lack of water storage. In conventional hydro projects vast tracts of land are flooded in order to accommodate water storage. Run-of-river the projects are at the mercy of the flow of river, this means more variability in the electricity output, but fewer environmental impacts.
In the winter output drops and a project like Fitzsimmons Creek can even be shut down for periods of time, as it was when we were there. It's in the spring when the melt in on that these projects make their money.
Environmental impacts
Compared to a large hydro dam the impacts tend to be much lower, and these projects produce nearly no greenhouse gas emissions, but no type of energy development is without impacts.
Perhaps the biggest factor is that run-of-river projects are typically constructed in remote, mountainous, and ecologically diverse areas.
A small dam called a headpond is created at the top of the stream in question. This is where water is diverted into a pipe called a penstock. That pipe then travels down hill several kilometers to the powerhouse. In the business this area between the headpond and the powerhouse is called the diversion reach and is the area where the most hydrologic effects are felt.
Access roads have to be cut to the headpond and the powerhouse and you have to get the power out of there with transmission lines.
At Fitzsimmons Creek the power is needed locally and the transmission infrastructure was buried on already disturbed land.
While some water is diverted to generate power, it is key is to always maintain a flow rate in the stream that never drops below a minimum level in order to protect the ecological health of the creek and the fish and other species in it. (To see the environmental mitigations that took place at Fitzsimmons Creek click here).
Monitoring is required to ensure this happens. A report in January from the Globe and Mail found over 700 water-use and reporting violations at 16 B.C. run-of-river facilities in 2010 alone. This information came to a light after a government audit was accessed through a Freedom of Information request by the Globe and Mail newspaper.
"Just under half of the 749 violations dealt with improper water use, including increasing or decreasing water flow too quickly - also known as "ramping" - which can strand or kill fish," says the report.
The Fitzsimmons Creek facility had 25 violations in 2010, the fifth highest. Bas Brusche, the director of public affairs for Innergex was quoted in the report saying there were only three violations in 2012 and one was due to lightning.
"We have started a fish-monitoring program [and] we have spent now about $230,000," Brusche was quoted as saying.
Run-of-river positives and negatives
This isn't to say that run-of-river hydro is bad, but it is important to discuss its impacts. Run-of-river projects can offer tremendous positives when compared to almost any other form of electricity generation.
It emits nearly no carbon, no mercury and no particulate matter, and because water is dense can produce a lot of energy for a relatively small environmental disturbance. In a comparison of several common electricity generation technologies by the Ontario Power Authority run-of-river was found to have the lowest environmental impact by far.
Run-of-river projects have also been developed in remote First Nations communities. Developers get a profitable run-of-river project and remote First Nations like the Douglas First Nation get reliable electricity and the economic development opportunities that come with it.
Located on the north end of Harrison Lake it's about 65 kilometers from Vancouver in a straight line but about 6.5 hours by a frequently washed out logging road. When you consider that that road was the only way in for their previous energy source, diesel was trucked in for generators, run-of-river looks pretty good by comparison.
Planning and construction is happening on 67 more run-of-river projects in the province of B.C. While the government of B.C. faces protests over its controversial Site C project, a massive hydro dam in the Peace river area, run-of-river offers a human scale, lower impact solution.]]>Is This the Greenest Building in Canada?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26629552013-02-11T17:48:11-05:002013-04-13T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/
The Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability, or CIRS, building on the University of British Columbia campus is a building that nearly lives and breathes. This four-story, 60,000 square feet structure practically pulses with life compared to its cold, clammy, inanimate cousins.
It's a $37-million living laboratory that aims to be more than just a place to go to class or do research. It's going after LEED Platinum status, but that is the common, humdrum points-based green building certification program that everyone and their mom knows about. They're also pursuing a Living Building Challenge certification. This certification is so hard to get, there are only three certified living buildings in the world.
A living building is scrupulous in its materials choices and waste diversion and recycling practices during construction and is self-sufficient in water, electricity, heat and waste treatment.
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Water, water everywhere
Alberto Cayuelo is the associate director of the UBC Sustainability Initiative and the CIRS building. When he talks about the building he talks about its regenerative nature and the positive relationships it has with the environment around it.
"This building generates no storm water runoff whatsoever," says Cayeulo. "No water from the building will go into a storm sewers or into waste water sewage systems and then the building has the capacity to even treat waste water from other buildings and return useful water back to the campus."
Every water bottle that's filled up in the building is filled with treated rainwater that's collected from the roof. With a 1,000 square meters of roof it's no problem to fill the 100,000 litre cistern in the basement. The water is then filtered three times, disinfected with ultra-violet light and chlorine and finally a bit of baking soda is added to bring it up the right pH level.
The way this building handles its occupants' poop and pee goes over and above what any regular building does. Waste is treated on-site using ultra-filters, aeration tanks and constructed wetlands to get the water to the point where it can be used again to flush the toilets and begin the whole cycle again. Of course this can't continue forever and as sludge builds up it's carted away. While there is no use for the sludge currently there are plans to use it in a nearby composting operation.
This waste treatment centre is one of the key architectural features of the building. It's on the main floor, encased in glass and visible to anyone who walks by. This is the part of the building that is most alive as water rushes around and the smell of plants mingles with that of the sewage. Some buildings feature fountains or fancy landscaping -- at the CIRS building you get sewage treatment.
Net-zero energy
While district heating schemes are just getting started in Canada what's happening at CIRS could best be described as a symbiotic arrangement with the buildings around it.
The main heat source for the building is waste heat from the lab exhaust pipes of its neighbor, the Earth and Ocean Sciences building. According to the models this heat source provides more heat annually than the CIRS building needs. With every large university in Canada sporting buildings with these lab exhaust pipes it's curious to think why this near-free heating scheme isn't on every campus in Canada,
It's pretty wild when you think about it -- the entire heating needs of a four-story 60,000 square feet building are being provided by its inefficient neighbour.
The building also preheats its cold incoming air with its warm outgoing air and has a small geo-exchange system, which it needs in the winter. It also has a small photovoltaic array that provides about 10 per cent of the building's power needs. While the rest of the building's electricity needs come from the grid they've taken numerous steps to conserve the amount of electricity they use.
"We've a designed the building that requires less than 100 kilowatt hours per square meter per year. Compare that to your typical office tower in Vancouver which could be something between 200 and 300 kilowatt hours or maybe even more in some cases and that's a fantastic number," says Cayuelo.
Innovative materials
Wood is the main structural material used in this four-story building and this being B.C. the wood is locally sourced. It's a warm and inviting material and it just makes sense when you consider the amazing forests B.C. has. Glued laminated beams were used for the structure and stained cedar was used on the exterior of the building.
The exterior also had one of my favourite features. A vegetated living wall on the western side of the building provides cooling in the summer when the leaves block the light and passive heating in the winter when the leaves die back. It's features a plant called chocolate vine creeping up a metal framework and since it's on the west side it keeps that warm summer sun from overheating the building. The 450-seat lecture hall is day-lit and also features a green roof.
When you dive into the materials used for the building it quickly gets super nerdy. Pine beetle infested wood was used for the structural decking, finding a higher use for a low value product. They fussed over the galvanization process used for their exterior metal cladding and they use seating materials that don't off-gas any volatile organic compounds.
Aside from the auditorium the building is ventilated naturally with windows that people open manually and with automatic vents at the top of the atrium. As hot air rises and collects up high, vents in the clerestory release the hot air to ventilate the building. It seems like a small thing, but by using these techniques it means the building uses a much smaller air handling system and consequently, much less electricity.
Greenest building in Canada?
So is this the greenest building in Canada? Well, it's darn near close. The process of getting a Living Building Challenge certification is an arduous one. While LEED Platinum is a pretty exclusive club, with about 1,075 certified projects in the world only three projects have successfully completed the final audit undertaken after the building has been used for a year or more that is needed for a Living Building Challenge certification.
One of the three Living Building Challenge certified structures in the world is just across the Juan de Fuca Straight from UBC, it's a home located in Victoria.
Determining what the greenest building in Canada is a bit of a fool's errand. What exactly is green anyway? But if green is a journey to architecture that regenerates and repairs the environment around it then the CIRS building is something to aspire to.]]>How Sewage Is Heating Vancouver Homestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.26167032013-02-05T12:21:49-05:002013-04-07T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/ The False Creek Energy Centre is tucked under the Cambie Bridge in downtown Vancouver with a five-fingered smokestack lit by purple lights marking its position. Its cutesy exterior belies a serious district-heating machine. It goes deep underground and it feels a bit like an ultra-modern cave troll lair from the future. The deeper you go the louder it gets and it would have been foreboding if I didn't have the helpful Chris Baber giving the tour.
He's the neighborhood utility manager for the False Creek Energy Centre and is in charge of the day-to-day operations of this sewage heat recovery operation. And for someone who has to deal with sewage all day, he's a pretty cheerful guy.
"Smells like money," he says, standing on a walkway overlooking the wet wells, as tens of thousands of litres of sewage streams underneath our feet. Ok the gunky sewage is pretty stinky, but it wasn't as bad as I imagined.
The good old fashioned heat pump
It might sound fancy but the technology in play here is already in every home -- the heat pump. Just like the geoexchange systems from our geothermal episode, heat pumps are a very common piece of equipment. Every fridge has a heat pump that strips heat from the air making your fridge nice and cool for your veggies and cold cuts.
However, it's pretty clear that this isn't a regular heat pump. It's an imposing piece of machinery the size and shape of a semi-trailer truck.
This sewage heat recovery system is the first in North America, with the other systems in Oslo, Norway and Tokyo, Japan.
The process has a couple of steps. First the sewage is run through a filter to get any nasties out, then it's pumped through the heat exchange system where the large, custom designed heat pump strips the heat out. That heat is then upgraded and transferred to pipes which carry the hot water into the homes and buildings of the nearby customers.
Roughly 70 per cent of the total heating energy comes from the 3.2 megawatt sewage heat recovery system with the rest coming from a large set of natural gas boilers. The natural gas boilers are there for backup when the system needs maintenance and for the chilliest days of the year when there is a big demand for heat.
District heating schemes make a lot of sense in dense urban environments. A furnace in everyone's basement can't compete with the efficiency and economies of scale you get from a large heating plant.
"It's basically a shared infrastructure platform that has the economies of scale and adaptability to plug in a variety of renewable low-carbon energy sources that otherwise wouldn't be feasible on an individual building," says Baber.
While this district heating scheme runs on waste sewage heat and natural gas they can run on any number of technologies.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Iceland has the largest penetration of district heating systems anywhere in the world with 95 per cent market penetration, mostly from geothermal. Denmark comes in second with roughly 60 per cent of the population getting their heat from district heating schemes mostly from biomass.
Carbon savings
But the real reason the City of Vancouver installed this system was for the greenhouse gas savings. Vancouver has ambitious goals about all buildings built after 2020 to be carbon neutral and with 55 per cent of all of the energy use in Vancouver happening via buildings it's going to take some work.
The False Creek Energy Centre reduces greenhouse gas emissions by around 70 per cent according to Baber (74 per cent in the first four months of 2012 according to this city report). Vancouver is able to get these carbon savings while using a large electric heat pump because of the low carbon hydroelectric plants that powers the province.
While this idea might not work in every province, it is certainly working in Vancouver and it even works as a selling feature.
"Many of our customers really appreciate the fact that by virtue of living in this area and connecting to a system they have a significantly smaller greenhouse gas footprint than a resident in a comparable neighborhood with comparable lifestyle," says Baber.
The price
Now it's not all sunshine and lollipops. The cost to heat any building that's connected to natural gas infrastructure has dropped to historic lows. The shale gas boom in North America means natural gas is uber-cheap right now and even with the low-cost B.C. hydro grid this sewage waste heat system has about a 10 per cent premium attached to it.
However, the advantage of this system is price stability. While natural gas is cheap right now neither you, nor I, nor the pointy heads sitting in front of four computer screens can predict the price of natural gas in the future.
"Natural gas prices fluctuate considerably and it's fairly difficult for someone who uses a lot of natural gas to really predict how much he'll be spending on it from year to year," says Baber.
"The people that are connected to this system should benefit because we get most of our heating from sewage and because that sewage is basically free. We don't have the same exposure to variations in gas prices that other heat users might have. So, over the long term we expect customers to have very stable and predictable rates."
Plans to expand
Like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles we head into the sewers, pizza in hand, to explore a scheme to bathe the city of Vancouver (or at least one neighborhood) in near-boiling hot water.
No it's not another evil scheme hatched by the Shredder -- it's a district-heating scheme that mines heat from sewage and saves tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions.
There are big plans for the False Creek Energy Centre. The plan is to go from heating 250,000 square metres to 650,000 square metres as more nearby buildings get connected.
The city is planning to develop the False Creek Flats area on the other side of False Creek as well.
"So over time we can add new pipe, connect new buildings and when the amount of energy demand exceeds with this this system can produce, we just build another energy center in another location," says Baber.
"It's fairly modular, it's very expandable and it's very adaptable to different energy sources. It's really all about adaptability, future-proofing and enabling the recovery of waste heat that otherwise there'd be no economical technical way of recovering."
We don't often think about the energy we flush down the toilet or that goes down the drain, but luckily we've got people working on projects like the False Creek Energy Centre that can see the value in the stuff we throw away.]]>The Most Efficient Transportation On the Planettag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.25678882013-01-29T08:06:40-05:002013-03-31T05:12:01-04:00David Dodgehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-dodge/Toronto, Windsor or Edmonton are roads. As seen from space the new Anthony Henday ring road forms a dramatic necklace around our home base of Edmonton.
Ever since the 1950s the car has been the accidental architect of our cities. Billions of dollars have been dedicated to roads, overpasses, tunnels and other car infrastructure.
But this single minded dedication to making sure cars got to where they wanted to go as fast as they could has had some pretty serious unintended consequences.
As our country becomes more and more urban it's clear that while our cities will continue to grow in size and population there's only so many roads that lead to the places people want to go. This leads to everyone's favourite way to wile away a few hours a day -- traffic gridlock.
As Andrew Coyne says in Maclean's "Traffic is slowly strangling our cities." Increasing traffic uses more fuel, increases pollution and commute times and Coyne quotes a German study which finds that "being in heavy traffic triples your risk of a heart attack within an hour."
Enter the bicycle. It is the most efficient form of transportation on the planet. You can move five times faster than walking and go three times as far on the same amount of caloric energy. Cars use 50 to 80 times more energy than a bike to travel the same distance and as any public heath expert will tell you North America is suffering from rising obesity rates.
The benefits of the bicycle certainly were not lost on the City of Vancouver when it decided to flip the traditional urban script.
"Cycling is our second highest priority in the transportation system. Since 1997 we established priorities with walking being the highest priority, cycling second, transit third, and the automobile is at the bottom of the list," says Jerry Dobrovolny, the director of transportation with the City of Vancouver.
And unlike cities that dabble in making their cities more bike-friendly, Vancouver has actually dramatically increased the use of bikes and decreased traffic congestion in downtown Vancouver.
Vancouver's design success
Jerry Dobrovolny is a six-foot-six former pro football player who has presided over the startling growth in cycling in Vancouver. According to Dobrovolny trips have gone up by 180 per cent over the past 15 years and the amount of people cycling to work has grown from 3.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent.
And they did it not by focusing on the middle-aged-man-in-lycra, or MAMIL for short, but by building bike infrastructure that kids and grandmas and people that aren't super proficient bike riders would feel comfortable using.
"We know that there's many people that are interested in cycling, but they're not comfortable riding next to cars," says Dobrovolny.
"We feel that we can get the 60 per cent that we know from studies that are interested in trying to cycle... we feel confident that we can get them out on their bikes."
Nearly all cities have bike lanes, but paint on the road just isn't safe enough for kids, seniors and non-MAMILs. Instead Vancouver is using separated bike lanes and bike boulevards.
Separated bike lanes are dedicated lanes built only for cyclists that are physically separated from cars. Bike boulevards are re-purposed residential streets that have been made bike friendly. "It's a regular street, but it's been designed so that bikes generally have the right of way," says Erin O'Melinn, the executive director of Hub, Vancouver's largest cycling advocacy organization.
I went for a tour of around parts of downtown Vancovuer with O'Melinn and it was remarkably easy to get around on a bike.
There is green paint and stencils on the road helping carve space for cyclists, there is clear signage and on the bike boulevards there are single-lane roundabouts to slow down cars and barriers that stop cars but let bikes through.
This calms traffic on the street and encourages people to bike, because they don't have to interact with as many vehicles, says O'Melinn.
These bike boulevards are great for residential areas and there is quite an extensive network of them in Vancouver but it's the separated bike lanes that are the real game changer.
Separated bike lanes on the Dunsmuir Viaduct saw four times more cyclists using the road. Safety has improved as well.
"Since the separated lanes have gone in downtown we've seen a big reduction in the number of collisions of all types, including the number of people riding on sidewalks, so pedestrians feel much more comfortable," says O'Melinn.
Financial sense
Reducing pollution and improving health are great reasons to invest in cycling, but another reason is that it's cheap like borscht.
"Whereas heavy trucks and buses and automobiles break down the road infrastructure and result in a lot of added costs in terms of maintenance. When we build a pedestrian or bike facility they last for 100 years," says Dobrovolny.
Heather Deal is Vancouver city councillor who was involved when the city decided to convert a whole lane of traffic on the Burrard Bridge into a bike lane.
"That was the first time we took space away from cars. I was assigned the media, I thought this is the last time I'll ever get elected because I'm going down over one kilometre of one lane for traffic," says Deal.
"That day came and we had hundreds of cyclists at the edge of the bridge waiting to cross when we cut that ribbon at 7 a.m. There were news helicopters circling overhead. There was a radio station that had put up a booth to interview cars while they were caught in the inevitable traffic jam that was going to happen."
"We cut that ribbon and we cycled across that closed lane and nothing happened. There was no traffic backup. There was no armageddon. Chaos did not ensue. The city survived and so did we. We went on to get re-elected and build more bike lanes after the next election."
While Vancouver certainly has some climatic advantages that other cities don't that hasn't stopped winter cities like Minneapolis and Montreal from investing in cycling infrastructure.
And in Vancouver what looked like a confrontational move to take space away from cars actually wound up creating more space for cars and a new, safer space for bikes, a pleasant surprise for Heather Deal and her colleagues on council.]]>
