Going green in sunny Alberta

I've been hunting around for home-based solar panel options, and I came across a new housing development in Alberta, of all places, that will be the first solar-powered community in North America. Now, I'm certainly not advocating you move to Okotoks, Alberta, but why aren't more developers building these kinds of communities here in Ontario?

"The most immediate benefit of this project will be a decrease in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. An average Canadian
home produces approx. 6 - 7 tonnes of GHG per year. Estimates for Drake Landing Solar Community indicate the savings of
approximately 5 tonnes per home per year. This reduction well exceeds the Government of Canada's One-Tonne Challenge
goal and, over the life of the system, should reduce GHG gas emissions by about 13,000 tonnes – while providing
comfortable homes with excellent indoor air quality for 52 families."

Oh, and be sure to check out Tom Rand's latest Globe and Mail blog post, where he wrestles with the issue of profit vs. saving the planet.

Heat From Under Our Feet!

Can we heat our buildings for free? A vast, virtually untapped clean energy source is right under our shoes. I emailed last week with Robin McKim, who works for Earth FX Energy and is a strong advocate of "geo" or geothermal energy.

Does geothermal energy involve tapping into the heat from the molten core of the Earth? Isn't that incredibly dangerous and likely to cause volcanoes?

It taps into the heat stored in the earth, not the molten core. Soil everywhere is the same temperature (approx. 10-15 celcius). The system harvests this heat/cool depending on the season and incorporates it into the building. The only place in the earth that does not experience this constant temperature range is above the frost line where the ground can obviously freeze. Four feet is this frost line in our local climate, so ensuring that we dig below 5 feet is a guarantee that the system will function at full capacity.

You say that you need to only tap five feet into the ground to tap Earth's heat. How does that work?

This depth is only used in horizontal geo, one of four installation configurations. If the building has a good deal of land around it, 5 foot deep trenches are dug and several hundred feet of piping are installed in the horizontal configuration. In the case of having not a lot of property, vertical installation is necessary involving drilling around 200-300ft straight down. In the case of a small urban building this drilling would have to be done multiple times to accomodate the large load of energy needed to heat and cool the building. However, the holes for drilling are only about 6 inches wide.

What can you use that energy for? Home heat? Water heating? Electricity?

When I wrote my thesis paper on renewables in Canada, I was looking for the most practical technology to reduce emissions. I said to myself, "what takes up the most energy in the typical house." As one might expect, heating and cooling account for the greatest portion of energy usage (around 70% in the typical home). Therefore a technology that addresses that would be the most practical in terms of lowering household consumption and emissions.

Geothermal energy has nothing to do with electricity. It cannot operate a single lightbulb. It strictly provides energy in the heating and cooling form. As well as controlling the climate of the house with a water-to-air heat transfer, water-to-water systems are available as well so that one can heat the water tank and infloor heating if installed.

Why hasn't this technology been exploited yet?

This is the most puzzling question you could ask. No one really knows. People are afraid of the upfront costs, but as you'll see in the following question, it is not really an issue. Some people just can't believe it will work. They think it's too good to be true and are afraid. But finally, I would say that lack of exposure is chief among causes restricting it.

Can you point me to some good websites that can illustrate your point further?

nextenergysolutions.com is the national leader in systems distribution. They import American models and sell them nationwide. There site has a good background on the nature of the technology.

earthfxenergy.com is the company I currently work for and has the same information as nextenergy, but condensed a little more.

How much would it cost for a family of four in a modest house, both rural and urban, to set up the system? How long for there to be a return on the investment?

A 2000 sq. ft. house with 4 occupants in a rural setting generally costs about $20 000 for horizontal installation (around $9 000 more than the cost of a new furnace and AC unit).

The same dwelling with a vertical installation (urban) would be about $3 000 more.

As for the ROI, it is actually incredible. For example, EarthFX energy, the company I'm with has never installed a system that has been payed back in longer than 5 years. On top of that, 10% has been the lowest rate of return during that 5 year period. One client experience a 20% return while the system payed for itself in less than 3 years.

As far as environmental friendliness goes, given the same home we discussed above, the installation of a geo system equates to taking 4 cars off the road per year or planting 750 trees. The system lasts 25 years (like conventional systems) so that's the equivalent of taking 100 cars off the road or planting 18 750 trees.

Very interesting. Here are some more sites to check out:

• An overview of the heat pump in a home system
• A massive selection of renewable energy companies in Canada
• An simple overview of other geothermal harvesting
• Tom Rand's practical problems in making the urban jungle green
  

Guilt-Free Takout...

Here's  a shocking number:  13,510,000.  That's
how many tons of non-biodegradable waste -
plastics and styrofoams - that the USA used in
2003.  Here's a step in a different direction.
I got this letter forwarded through a friend:

We're about to launch a campaign next week, that will make Toronto a
much more eco-friendly city, and YOU CAN BE A PART OF IT!

All you have to do, is come down to the Gladstone Ballroom on Jan.
25th, see a kick-ass show of acoustic music, comedy, recycled art,
and then... SIGN THE PETITION!

Our organization, Naturopack, is aiming to ban styrofoam from
Toronto restaurants/cafes (because it's toxic to humans, and doesn't
ever biodegrade), and to promote the use of sustainable and
biodegradable containers (made of sugar cane, corn and potato).
Styrofoam has been banned in many US cities, and we have no excuse to
still be using it here. Also, plastic cups and cutlery can easily be
replaced with corn and potato plastics, which are completely
compostable and biodegradable.

Help us change Toronto! Please pass this on to anyone you know who
wants to see positive change in the city.

Hope to see you there!!!

Kurt Firla
www.naturopack.org

ps-we're lighting the Gladstone with bicycle power that night,
(seriously) so bring your bike shorts!


Sounds like a pretty good idea.  If you own a restaurant or just want to stop
using as much plastic, you can buy some alternatives here.  My wife will
bring already used (cleaned, of course) take-out containers to restaurants to
see if they will substitute them.  For the most part, they don't.  However, near
us, Utopia is a restaurant that uses recycled paper take-out containers.  If you
know of other restaurants that use ecofriendly take-out containers, let us know!

Also, check out the above links to find out about bicycle power, or 
GET NAKED this summer!

A Green Building?

What is a green building? Apparently, construction accounts for 54% of greenhouse gas emissions in North America. That’s a lot. So there are groups dedicated to examining how we can “green” our construction industry. From alternative building materials to energy efficient design to vigorous recycling and disposal of construction material there is a veritable revolution in how we plan our buildings. This is quite exciting. Tom Rand’s green hostel plans to place a windmill on its roof. A suburb in New Zealand has designed itself as a communal settlement with rammed earth walls, milk paint interior and pedestrian-friendly design. A straw bale house in downtown Montreal in traditional style? Apparently, all these new materials are easier on the planet because they are locally available, and require less processing than traditional building and insulating materials. A pilot project in Toronto to encourage green roofs – roofs that are covered in vegetation – will hopefully result in more efficient use of all the rooftops in Toronto. Think about that! All those warehouses that you see when you fly into town, imagine them covered in grass, or crops, or solar panels! Harper says that there is no way we can meet our Kyoto requirements. I simply don’t believe him.

John Gibson Comes Down on Polar Bears...

John Gibson, of FoxNews fame, had this to say about labelling polar bears 'threatened'...

Apropos of today's warm weather in the East and impending return blizzard to the Plains, let us consider the plight of the world's endangered polar bears.

The Wall Street Journal carried a story Thursday about how polar bears may be added to the endangered list by the Bush administration because of fears that their habitat may be melting in our current global warming heat wave. We even had an administration official on this program last week on the polar bear problem.

Well, am I red-faced. Turns out if you look at the polar bear problem, the problem is too many polar bears. Well, maybe not too many, but there's a lot of them.

In the 1950s the polar bear population up north was estimated at 5,000. Today it's 20- to 25,000, a number that has either held steady over the last 20 years or has risen slightly. In Canada, the manager of wildlife resources for the Nunavut territory of Canada has found that the population there has increased by 25 percent.

Turns out the polar bear is being used by environmental groups to force the Bush administration to cave on global warming. To admit it is here, to admit it is bad, and to ratchet back the U.S. economy to slow down our production of greenhouse gases, which would save the polar bears habitat from melting, maybe, even if there are more and more polar bears around to watch their habitat melt.

This is called the spotted owl theory of environmentalism. Find a critter that might be hurt by human activity, and using that critter as a plaintiff in a lawsuit — I'm exaggerating only slightly — get the human activity to stop.

I've seen logging stopped this way, fishing stopped, and now with the polar bear mega population in danger of breaking into a sweat, a whole lot of things might be stopped if environmentalists get their way. And that’s my word.

and "BloggyBlogster" Comes Down on John Gibson...

A famed Toronto comedian, here going by the name BloggyBlogster responds to Mr Gibson (caution: strong words ahead)...

Dear Mr. Gibson!!

Thank you for your in depth analysis of the current environmental crisis. Thank you for your diligence and unwavering devotion to the scientific evidence. Who knew! More polar bears now than before!! Wow! Guess global warming isn’t happening!!

When you wake up in the morning, do you have to take your brain out of barbicide and put it in the container that is your head? Or do you just shake around until you can see, and then have a coffee and some fucking eggs, with your bottle of Jack Daniels?

There are indeed more polar bears now than in the 1950’s indeed! There are also a lot more dick bags. And by dick bag, I mean dick bag, by which I mean you.

How dare these polar bears cry for help when they are clearly able to fuck and reproduce!! That would be like the human population increasing astronomically over a 50 year period, and then crying for help during a famine or flood! Which is preposterous. Just as no humans anywhere on planet earth need help, so too don’t the polar bears! And so too doesn’t the earth!

I am arranging a gathering of dickbags in Nunavut this winter. Would you like slap your dick bag in a wheel barrow and wheel it on up there and see the north floating away like your conscience?

One might think that you are just trying to incite people with your brilliant opinions. One also might think that you are the lowest common denominator, therefore a non-believer in Darwin.


Yours truly,
Rona Ambrose, I mean John Baird, I mean, Steve Harper, I mean ahh fuck it!! Eat Polar Bear!!!…

Green Hostel in Downtown Toronto!

Tom Rand, the smartest person most of us know, has a new blog on The Globe and Mail's website, starting now. It will chronicle his attempt to turn a decrepit building on College Street in downtown Toronto into a cutting-edge "green" hostel/hotel.

The URL is: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/hoteldiaries

Please link to it, bookmark it, sign up for the RSS feed (which will deliver updates right to your inbox) and comment often!

Ecological Footprints...

We all know that overconsumption is bad for Earth, but I was shocked to find out from taking my ecological footprint that it would take 3 Earths to sustain us all if everyone lived like me. And I’m fairly conservation-minded. This can be a kind of depressing statistic, but a fascinating one. Take it yourself, find out how you score. Then get your boss to take the office quiz. If you find you want to make changes to lower your score, then you can balance those luxuries that you need, and those that you don’t… If you want to do further research into ideas to cut down your material consumption check out this site for some basic tips or this one to lower your energy consumption.

The concept of the ecological footprint is based on a comparison between the amount of arable land on earth divided by its population. Apparently, when the total amount of ecologically productive land area is divided by the human population, there are about 4.5 acres (1.89 hectares) available for each person.

Our global footprint is 23% larger than what Earth can regenerate, which means that it takes Earth one year and two months to regenerate what we use in a year. Humans solve this imbalance by liquidating more assets. Check out how this breaks down by country and by other factors.

From Poo to Petroleum?

There is a Canadian company who can transform dung into diesel! Dynamotive is a Vancouver based company that uses a process called pyrolysis to convert waste wood chips, coffee hulls and other throwaway bits of junk into Bio-oil, a diesel oil like fuel. Bio-oil is sulphur dioxide free and has 50% of the nitrogen oxide of conventional fuel (these are the compounds that get together to form acid rain...) The company has successfully transformed the flatulence into fuel scheme on a pilot scale and is presently looking to increase operations.

Dynamotive's pyrolysis is interesting because it breaks apart organic material that we would usually toss out - waste wood, coffee hulls, garden clippings - and reforms their molecules to make fuel. The processor seems to feed off its own fuel and recycles any spare combustible gases to operate at 75% efficiency. Hey DBH, this could be a possible solution to your legitimate worries about ethanol and overuse of arable land for fuel! Looking for an ethical investment, anyone?