Earth tubes are a simple, passive geothermal system that takes advantage of the earth’s constant temperature below the frost line. By drawing fresh air for your building through an earth tube you pre-heat or pre-cool your air depending on your needs. This saves you a ton of money, according to architect Tang Lee an earth tube system can save you up to half of your ventilation heating costs. At the Epcor Tower it saves the building $50,000 a year.
Soon solar will be so cheap it won’t make sense not to have it on your house, office building or spare building facing south. The price of solar has dropped one hundred times in the past 35 years, that’s not a typo. Learn what’s driving the low cost of solar and where and when you’ll start seeing it in the near term this week at Green Energy Futures.
Kent Rathwell, the co-founder of Sun Country Highway, a company that installs electric charging stations, drove a Tesla Roadster across Canada in the dead of winter just to prove it could be done.
The International Energy Agency estimates the cleantech market will be a three to four trillion dollar concern by 2020. Tom Rand is helping Canadian entrepreneurs get a slice of that trillion dollar pie through his work at the MaRS cleantech business incubator and through investing in early stage cleantech startups with the MaRS cleantech fund. Learn all about this week on Green Energy Futures.
We profile Morgan Solar, a Canadian startup that aims to develop a cheaper to produce and more efficient solar module.
We talk to two Canadian startups working in the energy storage space, Temporal Power, a a company making flywheels and eCAMION doing community battery storage.
We get behind the cute logo and figure out if Bullfrog Power is for real.
The rocket stove takes our fascination with fire and bends it 90 degrees. It’s a hyper efficient wood stove that uses far less wood to get a far more effective result.
In Sherwood Park, Alberta just minutes from refinery row city hall, the famous Festival Place Theatre, condos, a high school and more buildings are all heated by biomass, wood to be exact.
Ever looked at the breakdown of your electricity bill with all of its transmission and distribution charges and wondered if there was a better way? There is and it’s called distributed generation. Learn about it this week at Green Energy Futures.
With the Edmonton Auto Show under our belt we went to check out the Future of Transpotation Symposium There we met the people who are driving and using the next generation of vehicles today.
Shiny, spinning and promising the latest and greatest experiences you can get behind the wheel of a car – when you’re at a car show almost anything is possible. That’s why we headed to the Edmonton Auto Show to get a handle on what the world’s biggest manufacturers are doing in the EV, hybrid and fuel economy space. Follow us as we talk to industry executives and dive into the numbers behind what’s next for the auto industry.
We head to Calgary to explore how the car sharing service Car2Go works. With 300 Smart cars spread throughout Calgary they make their money on by-the-minute, on demand car rentals within 93 square kilometers of Calgary’s inner core. Parking, gas, maintenance and insurance are all included in the rate and you can find the nearest car with your smartphone. Check it out, this week at Green Energy Futures.
It took a 45-person team to build Edmonton’s first net-zero home. In six short years since then net-zero builders are constructing cheaper and radically simpler net-zero homes. We Peter Amerongen and Simon Knight, two net-zero pioneers.
Sometimes the Grassi really is greener. Lawrence Grassi that it is. It’s a middle school in the Albertan mountain town of Canmore and while not a showy building it’s 70 per cent more efficient than a comparable building and it was built on budget. Learn how they did it this week at Green Energy Futures.
The Nanaimo Regional District is home to about 145,000 people on the east coast of Vancouver Island. This west-coast municipality is turning its trash into compost, clean energy and carbon credits.
The T’Souke First Nation on Vancouver Island developed and implemented a plan that slashed 75 per cent of their energy use and installed solar PV to provide clean power. It turns out it’s a lot easier to go net-zero when you drastically cut your energy use.
Landmark Homes builds super energy efficient homes in a factory. Not only is this process more energy efficient – it’s also about 10-12 tonnes of CO2 more efficient. The homes they’re building are understated energy efficiency lions.
The Cowichan Bio-Diesel Cooperative is the plucky little coop that could. In 2004 they started selling 20-litre jugs of bio-disel at the local farmer’s market. Nine years later they’re planning to produce 150,000 to 200,000 litres with a mix of corporate and retail clients.
When Servus Credit Union acquired an old Dell call centre and decided to turn it into their corporate headquarters it was a bit of a fixer-upper. It was a concrete tip-up building originally designed for the climes of Oklahoma 3,000 km south of Edmonton. Well, they decided to keep the building but go full-out on a creative renovation to make a better building.
