Advancing the Geothermal Cause

The Daily Commercial October 13, 2006

By Korky Koroluk

A drill began work on the banks of the Rideau Canal late last month as work began in earnest on the project that will become EcoCité on the Canal, a 25-unit apartment building that will incorporate many cutting-edge environmental measures.

One of them is a geothermal system to heat and cool the building, using ground loops installed in 14 deep wells which will end up being under the building.

That’s why one of the developers, Christopher Sweetnam-Holmes, held a little gathering lately, just to let interested people peer at the wells before they disappear from view beneath the building.

It seems strange to refer to a geothermal system as cutting-edge technology. After all, such systems have been around for many years, and just about anyone in the AEC sector is familiar with them.

But as environmental concerns grow, and as the LEED rating system moves into the mainstream, people are taking second and third looks at geothermal systems, despite their reputation for high up-front costs.

Those costs are still there and still high. If you want a geothermal system for your home, expect to spend as much for it as you might spend for a new car.

So it’s largely left for people interested in other, bigger applications to advance the geothermal cause — people like Sweetnam-Holmes and his partner, Cheryl Gladu. They describe themselves as “eco-entrepreneurs” who are “aggressively green.” They’re dedicated environmentalists as well as developers, and their EcoCité project is aimed at buyers who share their strong environmental concerns.

And it’s left, too, to outfits like the Canadian Geo-Exchange Coalition (CGC), a group that includes hydro utilities, some private companies and several public-sector agencies. It does a lot of promotional and marketing work

The numbers of projects using the earth itself for heating and cooling is growing. One of the biggest systems is the Enwave Energy Ltd. deep-water system that uses 4° C water taken from far out and deep down in Lake Ontario, to cool something like 130 buildings in the south end of Toronto’s city core. Many of them are landmark buildings, like the TD Centre, the Royal Bank Plaza and the Air Canada Centre. And the system has been extended to cool things down at Queen’s Park and other provincial government buildings.

The installation in the government buildings is expected to save the province $4.5 million over 30 years and reduce carbon emissions by 30,000 tonnes. That’s equivalent to taking 8,000 cars off the road.

If Enwave and the city of Toronto are using cold lake water, the opposite is happening in the Yukon village of Haines Junction. There, with a second well needed to guarantee the community water supply, a deep drilling project struck a relatively rare warm-water aquifer in which the water is a constant 17° C. Not only that, it’s under artesian pressure, so it doesn’t even have to be pumped — it just flows.

Now the village is able to use geothermal energy in its municipal buildings, and others are tapping in, too. And there is now an assured reserve of drinking water, as well.

Geothermal systems are becoming more efficient. Less energy is expended to produce energy. In Canada, geothermal or geoexchange units must have a coefficient performance of 3.0 or more. Put another way, every unit must produce at minimum three kilowatts of heat energy for every kilowatt of electricity needed to operate it.

The point of all this is that the earth is able to provide us with the gift of abundant heat — a gift we have scarcely begun to unwrap.

Doing so is still pretty costly for the individual home-owner or small business. But circumstances are forcing us to tear away a bit more wrapping every day. That’s what Sweetnam-Holmes is doing with his wells at EcoCité.

The CGC has an interesting website at www.geo-exchange.ca If you want to know about environmental initiatives that EcoCité will use, go to www.ecocite.ca.

Korky Koroluk is an Ottawa-based freelance writer. Send comments to editor@dailycommercialnews.com