Get ready to Ramboll

Welcome to the Promised Land

Last week I hinted that I would be talking more about GEERS in this post, but breaking news – especially good news – trumps prior plans.

In case you didn’t see my tweet yesterday, Guelph’s Community Energy Initiative (CEI) got a big shot in the arm from across the pond. Danish District Energy leader Ramboll Group announced that it was setting up shop here. This is a tremendous economic development win for the city, but it’s only the beginning.

The origin of this news flash dates back to 2007, with the creation of Guelph’s CEI. The plan set a goal to use District Energy (DE) to produce significant energy efficiency gains for the city. (If you need a DE primer, I recommend my prior post Git ‘r Done.) At the time, this was a bold and, at least on this continent, unique proposition. Many cities had DE systems – some, like Veresen’s system in London Ontario, dating back nearly a century – but no city stated its intention to build out a citywide DE network.

Fast forward to 2013. As part of the implementation of DE, Guelph commissioned and published a District Energy Strategic Plan. This document stated a more specific goal – to meet at least 50% of the city’s heating needs using DE by 2041. This was even more bold and ambitious than the CEI objective, and placed Guelph’s plans even further beyond anything any other North American city had in the works.

Then in February of this year, a Guelph delegation consisting of me, Mayor Karen Farbridge, Chamber of Commerce President Lloyd Longfield, and Guelph Municipal Holdings Inc. General Manager Rob Kerr, travelled to Germany to participate in the Transatlantic Urban Climate Dialogue Plus. While in Berlin, our delegation met with a number of leading companies in the European DE market. Ramboll Group was one of them.

We described Guelph’s plans, and delineated how the CEI has enlisted a broad cross-section of the community and enjoys widespread and enthusiastic support as a result. We expressed our conviction that the DE market in Ontario, across Canada, and indeed in all of North America is on the verge of explosive growth. This growth will be driven by rising energy costs, increasing urban densification, and growing concerns over the effect of fossil fuels on our climate. We positioned Guelph as the gateway to a market that was about to blossom.

Our case was well received. Each of the three companies agreed to visit Guelph to explore the opportunity further.

In May and June, we hosted delegations from each company. Our European colleagues learned more about the details of our plans, and heard about the prior month’s visit by the Minister of Energy to announce two Combined Heat and Power (CHP) projects totalling 18 megawatts of electricity production. They also toured the city, saw the elements of the DE network that were already in place, and cased out the areas where we planned to continue building this new thermal energy utility.

We soon learned that our estimates of the cost and difficulty of implementing the system were out of whack. North American DE players are project focused, and the costs reflect this. Their European counterparts are program focused and are willing to offer prices with a long-term view. In other words, when ordering, say, 100 metres of DE piping as part of a program to lay over 100 kilometres, a North American company will offer a price for the 100 metre quantity; a European one will price based on the full 100 kilometres. By partnering with our new European friends, we stood to reap the benefits of significant bulk purchase pricing.

Another factor which was out of whack was our understanding of the ease of constructing a DE network. The first thing our Danish friends pointed out was that our roads are straight. So what? At first we didn’t understand why this was relevant. Of course our roads are straight. Aren’t all roads? And why does that matter, anyway?

European cities are, generally, ancient. At least more ancient than the automobile, which is the main reason for straight roads. European cities tend to be constructed along natural features, like rivers, deltas, lake shorelines, or seashores. Pipes are straight. Laying them along Mother Nature’s curves and bends is nightmarish, but it’s par for the course in the mature European DE market.

In North America, straight lines predominate – except for in the centres of the cities that were first settled on the east side of the continent. As you travel west, and as you travel out from the centre of older eastern cities, you find – you guessed it – straight roads. And since DE networks generally follow roadways (like other infrastructure such as water mains, sewer lines, buried cables, and so on), straighter means cheaper.

Another factor is the width of our roads. In European cities, at least in the downtown areas, drivability is clearly an afterthought. Negotiating some of the narrow lanes in anything larger than a Fiat Uno is a hair-raising experience. Installing any infrastructure means that the roads will be shut down for the duration of the work. Crews are lucky if they can find a route for the pipe that doesn’t interfere with existing services.

Our roads don’t feel that wide, but only because most of us haven’t experienced European ones. In some parts of Guelph, our Danish visitors gaped at wide roads, wide shoulders, and wide ditches – for the first time in their careers, they considered that they could run their pipe without halting traffic. It was a completely new and astounding idea for them.

The bottom line is that Guelph – and indeed all of North America – is the promised land for DE. It didn’t take long to reach agreement with all three companies. Ramboll is just the first – more good news is coming to Guelph, more economic growth, more jobs, and an exciting future at the forefront of a huge new market.

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Energiewende

I spent this week at the penultimate meeting of the Transatlantic Urban Climate Dialogue (TUCD) in Germany, over and over hearing the term energiewende. Some of our hosts translated this as “energy change”, demonstrating characteristic German modesty. If I bought a Tesla Roadster, installed a solar array on the roof of my home to power it, ever after laughing at the price per litre posted at the local petrol station, and then referred to my accomplishment as changing a tire, it would be a similar understatement. Energiewende is no mere change. It is a revolution.

Visible signs of energiewende abound. Solar panels are a common sight on roofs of homes, factories, and institutions – the Free University of Berlin has several hundred kilowatts-worth of photovoltaics atop many buildings erected or annexed during the Cold War era when the city was hemmed in on all sides by the repressive and utterly democracy-free German Democratic Republic. As our train glided across the countryside at 200 kilometres per hour (120 mph) on the way from Berlin to Essen in the Ruhr valley region, we frequently squinted through the rain dotted windows to see farms of wind turbines rising above the landscape, sleek blades silently rotating with elegance and simplicity. From a hilltop in the Ruhr Valley city of Bottrop, a region once synonymous with coal mining, steel production, and air pollution, the silhouettes of massive power plants are visible on the horizon, their gargantuan stacks belching steam and carbon dioxide no longer, mute relics of a largely bygone carbon economy.

Energiewende makes itself felt in other, more subtle ways. Bathroom faucets often have no manual taps, but sensors that only dispense water when you present your hands – no absent-minded soul will ever leave the water running as they exit. Step off the hotel elevator onto your floor, and the hallway almost instantly lights up, activated by motion sensors that ensure all is dark when no one is there to benefit from the light. Step into your hotel room, and you will find all electricity extinguished – until you slip your access card into a slot on the wall by the door. On entering a Canadian hotel room, by contrast, you would find the lights blazing, as they would have been since the cleaner finished up many hours before. (This card slot has an added practical benefit of making sure I never misplace my room key.)

More subtle is the revolutionary way the room is heated. The hotel has no furnace. Hot water is piped into the building from a plant some distance away, a plant which takes waste heat from industry and puts it to work once more. (More on the idea of District Energy, or DE, in my previous post.) Alternatively, in places not yet served by the District Energy network, buildings are served by micro-CHP (Combined Heat and Power) units. As the name suggests, these devices provide both warmth and electricity. DE and CHP are both largely invisible, their components hidden away in basements or buried under pavement.

Finally, and least conspicuous of all, are the elements of the building envelope – energy-efficient windows, insulation, weatherstripping, and air exchange systems – which together help to make European buildings half as energy intensive as their North American counterparts. Our hosts in the city of Bottrop spoke of a number of housing projects which are “net positive”, meaning that the buildings produce more energy than they use. Some such projects are targeted at members of society on the lowest rung of the economic ladder – low-income earners and beneficiaries of social assistance. These people stand to be hardest hit by rising energy prices, and so stand to benefit the most from a dwelling that receives cheques rather than bills from the local utility.

When I think about my home in Ontario, I realize that the province has really missed the boat with its Green Energy Act. So much of the focus is on green energy generation – wind, solar, and biogas. There is an energy conservation component, but it is the poor cousin. The Feed-In Tariff (FIT) program has more than its fair share of flaws, but it stands head and shoulders above the SaveOnEnergy program.

Coal and oil are becoming ever more scarce and hence ever more expensive, and our environment cannot support their continued use. We need to replace all of our dirty energy generation systems with clean ones, make no mistake. This will be a hard hill to climb. But it will be far easier if the hill is shorter. At the same time as a revolution in green energy generation, North America needs a revolution in energy efficiency. District energy systems, combined heat and power, and building envelope improvements are all critical to shrinking the hill.

Our German TUCD hosts often spoke of everything they have yet to accomplish. They haven’t solved every problem – far from it. But they have made incredible progress. They have developed the technologies, the businesses, the public programs, and the social structures to make it happen. Through TUCD, they have been showing us how – we simply needed to ask.

In Germany, I’ve seen the hill. I’ve seen the way the German people are shrinking the hill at the same time as they are climbing it. And I am completely confident that North Americans can follow their lead.

We need our own energiewende. Our German friends are showing us the way.