By David Dodge
Happy New Year from Green Energy Futures!
This week’s episode of Green Energy Futures on CKUA Radio marks the 642nd radio program we have produced on sustainability for CKUA. This includes 330 EcoFile Radio programs on sustainability, 73 episodes of the “The Climate Change” show and 238 episodes of Green Energy Futures!
Greta Thunberg is Time Magazine’s “Person of the Year” for 2019 and the Canadian Press named climate change as the story of the year. This got us thinking about how long this story has been around. We produced 73 episodes of the “Climate Change Show” in the 1990s for the CKUA Radio Network.
What’s fascinating, is that while the issue of climate change swirled around in a morass of political gamesmanship for the last three decades, people have been toiling away on solutions with little support and very little fanfare. Those are the people and stories we highlight on Green Energy Futures.
As we look back on 2019 we recall four game-changers for a world transitioning to a low carbon economy.
1. Blatchford–largest carbon-neutral community
When Edmonton was confronted with the fractious issue of closing it’s downtown airport the City came up with a visionary idea to repurpose the large parcel of land in downtown Edmonton.
In 2019 Mayor Don Iveson cut the ribbon on the Blatchford carbon-neutral community where 30,000 Edmontonians will live once completed. It’s the largest project of its kind in the world and it will be a showcase for the super-efficient homes Edmonton builders have been pioneering for more than a decade (see previous stories: Net-Zero 101, Landmark’s Affordable Net-Zero and 26 other stories on net-zero).
2. Largest solar project in Canadian history
Then in late 2019 Calgary-based Greengate Power announced the largest solar project in Canadian history by a factor of four! The Travers solar project is approved for development in Vulcan County, Alberta and will consist of 1.5 million solar modules. The half-billion-dollar project will produce enough electricity for 100,000 homes. We spoke to CEO Dan Balaban, who emphasized the project is unsubsidized. Solar and wind are now the cheapest new sources of electricity at utility-scale.
3. Switching solar for diesel in the north
Solar factored into many stories in 2019. Early in the year we visited the northern indigenous community of Fort Chipewyan to see ATCO’s 600-kilowatt solar project. It’s phase one of a two-phase project that includes another 2.2 megawatts of solar being developed by Three Nations Energy. The projects will reduce diesel use in the community by 800,000 litres per year and provide 25 per cent of the remote community’s electricity.
4. Transforming a ’60s building to net-zero
And our final story that matters from 2019 comes from the University of Calgary. The MacKimmie Library project took a ’60s era brutalist building, added a double skin of glass, some passive building principles, and solar modules and achieved a beautiful net-zero ready building.
Buildings are responsible for about one-third of greenhouse gas emissions so one big nut to crack in our evolution to a low carbon future is renovating these buildings to net-zero just as they are already doing in the Netherlands. The program is called EnergieSprong and the goal is to renovate every single building in the Netherlands to net-zero by 2050.
That’s it for our look back at just a few of the stories that matter from 2019.
We wish you the best of the holiday season and a happy new year from Green Energy Futures.