Category Archives: Economic Development and Employment

The more renewable the better at local utility

Every little bit helps.

And in terms of greenhouse gases sent spewing into the atmosphere when electricity is produced, a little bit in relative terms adds up to big load of carbon.

When I asked John Wynsma, vice-president of generation for the city-owned Peterborough Utilities Group (PUG), how much the utility was reducing greenhouse gas output by generating electricity from renewable sources he responded with an insider’s view of the reality of climate change.

The short version: About half the greenhouse gases we deal with in Ontario drift up from the north-eastern United States. About a third are produced by cars, trucks and other means of transportation and 15 per cent by industry. That leaves only eight per cent coming from power generation.

The message: Renewable electricity sources are helpful but electric cars and trucks that run on natural gas are the way to make a difference.

But then he ran the numbers. And it turns out that over the past eight years as it developed into a major player among municipal electricity generation companies, PUG has also made a difference.

The utility has produced 650,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of renewable electricity. The effect has been a CO2 reduction of just under 51,000 metric tonnes. That’s like taking 10,000 cars off the road for a year.

That result has come by focusing primarily on two methods of renewable “green” energy production: hydro dams that use the power of river water and solar energy.

Wynsma was recruited by PUG eight years ago with a mandate to build up the generation side. Ironically, as a private consultant back in the 1990s he prepared the proposal that Trent University used to get licence approval for what today is the Robert G. Lake dam and generating station just north of the university.

Originally known as the Trent Rapids project, it wasn’t built until 2008. By then Wynsma would be running the generation side at PUG and his division would partner with Trent to bring it to life.

When he arrived the utility had one hydro generation station, the London St. dam, and generated six MW of electricity. Since then it has partnered with Trent on two more run-of-the-river dams, bought a hydro dam in Campbellford and added a second site at London St.

Two smaller dams will be developed at Lock 24 and Buckhorn over the next two years and a second Campbellford dam will be taken over in 2018.

On the solar side there are the 10 MW Lily Lake solar farm that opened in 2011 and rooftop projects on the Kinsmen Arena in Peterborough and Asphodel-Norwood Community Centre that will be on line shortly. Twenty 500 KW solar projects will be built in the Apsley-Bancroft area next year.

All told, PUG has a current generating capacity of 36 MW.

When all the new projects are producing “we’re going to be very close to 60 megawatts,” Wynsma says, “so we’re very excited about that.”

Energy Ottawa is the only municipally owned utility in Ontario with more generation capacity.

The impetus for expanding PUG’s generation stable was economic. Larry Doran, a former PUG president who hired Wynsma, looked at the prices being paid for renewable energy and saw a business opportunity.

It was a good call. PUG now pays the city a dividend of $5.5 million a year with $3.1 million coming from generation.

“I can see those dividends from our company going up, quite nicely, over time,” Wynsma says.

Growth has also meant job creation. When he came there was one full time operating manager for London St. Now the division has 16 full-time staff, all of them in good-paying technical and management jobs.

And he sees another opportunity for green job creation, although this time not for people, at the Lily Lake solar farm.

“If I have one thing I’d like to do, which we saw in Europe, is to put some sheep on it,” Wynsma says.

Sheep trimming grass while sun-power flows into the grid. It’s where the past meets the future in electrical generation.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, August 13, 2016.

Composting at 100 per cent at Food Forest

It’s the end of the lunch rush and Food Forest Cafe is buzzing with conversation, so Adam Deck and Katie Tuma suggest we do our interview out back.

Turns out they were speaking literally. We head outside to an open area behind the Water St. restaurant. Three mismatched chairs, which I later learn likely came from a thrift store, are waiting for us.

Next to the chairs are a few orange, five-gallon pails. Katie says there would usually be a lot more. The pails hold food scraps that farmers and gardeners pick up and use for compost, returning the pails later. During an average week Food Forest gives away 18 pails of the stuff, or 90 gallons.

Deck waves toward a brick wall that separates the courtyard area behind this section of Hunter St. buildings from those along Water St.

On the other side of the wall is a large dumpster bin that other restaurants in the block share and pay to have hauled away.

“Because we’re a plant-based restaurant 100 per cent of our food waste can be composted,” Deck says. “So, at the end of the week we have less than one garbage bag.”

That’s less garbage than most households produce. It goes to the curb for pickup by the city, a big cost saving for them and a load off the landfill site.

Food Forest is vegan and gluten free. It’s no coincidence that the plant-based nature of their menu produce minimal garbage. Deck and Tuma are health and ecology advocates first and restaurateurs second.

They met while studying ecological restoration at Fleming College in Lindsay. Inspired by what they were learning. they looked for a way to make a difference on their own. A vegan restaurant run on strict environmental principles was a natural outlet.

Tuma describes their relationship as “partners in life and in the restaurant.”

Food Forest opened three years ago in a smaller George St. location just north of downtown. A year ago they expanded to the 32-seat Hunter St. site, where they have 10 employees.

The restaurant’s fun, quirky feel fits its clientele and its owners’ personalities, but it was put together with intent.

Pine boards used during the interior renovation are all recovered scrap, most of it sourced from Deck’s father, who owns Deck Transport, a third-generation local trucking firm.

“We also do a lot of thrifting,” Tuma says. “Most of our small pots and cups and teapots are from the thrift store. . . . We aren’t really fans of buying all new.”

When possible they go beyond re-use to “don’t use.”

They don’t give out cutlery as part of their busy take-out business. Take-out containers are made from cane juice pulp, not paper, but they would rather you not use them at all. They charge 25 cents per container and encourage customers to bring their own instead.

“After doing a couple hundred of those orders that saves a lot of waste,” Deck says.

“And gets the conversation going,” Tuma adds. “We have really strict policies – our non-straw in house policy; we don’t give out take-out cutlery – things like that those create conversations, which makes some people uncomfortable but it allows us to explain why we’re doing it and that causes them to think about things in a different way.” They buy their organic vegetables locally whenever possible – Jenny Ross of Earth Nook Farm is their main local provider – and manage the entire business with a mindset of being sustainable, waste free and low carbon.

But the key element, they say, is serving only plant-based food.

“In regards to climate change, wth animal agriculture, especially the intense factory farming that goes on, the greenhouse gas emissions are more than all transportation combined,” Tuma says.

They see no endpoint to their sustainable journey.

“It shouldn’t just stop at a green promise or something like that,” Tuma says. “We kind of assess what we can improve on and how we can get the community involved. It’s fun … fun having that role.”

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner.  By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, June 18, 2016.

This is a greener General Electric Peterborough

There was a time when the machine was everything in industry, and everything was designed around the machine.

Not today. The machine is one piece in a process and everything about the process is important.

That focus on the entire work environment – and its effect on the natural environment – is evident during a tour of GE Canada’s venerable Park St. plant.

Raul Ceron, the plant quality and process improvement leader, leads the way to Building 16 and a bank of ovens where huge stators are baked to harden their coating. A stator is the stationary section of a motor. The 20-foot-tall ovens can accommodate a 30-tonne stator.

Russell Nash, the advanced manufacturing engineering leader, says the new, largest ovens were installed during Project Caribou, a comprehensive overhaul that began three years ago.

“These other ovens were retrofitted with RTO, regenerative thermal oxidizers, and we were able to get some incentives from Enbridge Gas on that,” Nash explains. “Essentially what it does, the heat that you are generating in the oven goes through an oxidizer and that subsequently reclaims the heat and it goes back into the oven.”

Carbon filters added to the top of the emission stacks mean they also burn cleaner, reducing their environmental impact.

Enbridge is also a player in week-long “eco-treasure hunts.” Hunt teams includes specialists from other parts of the GE operation as well as suppliers such as Enbridge and Peterborough Utilities Inc. They look for ways to improve environmental efficiency.

Projects identified during a hunt are followed up on, “then we come back in a few years and do another one,” Nash says.

Involving suppliers is key, he says, “because things are always changing, things are always improving. So they are coming to us with different ideas, different ways of doing things, different products that we can use.”

Project Caribou had a larger scope. The $26-million investment involved tearing down 300,000 square feet of old, unused building space – equivalent to 60 football fields – and redesigning other buildings.

Building 16 is still vast, with 30,000 sq. ft., of floor space, but the main workspace ceiling was lowered to 20 feet. Towering skylights in the peaked roof remain, providing natural light that employees asked for. All surfaces are white and the space feels very modern.

A single steam boiler system that served the entire plant is also gone.

“Now we have distributed heating systems. We have high intensity, low intensity radiant heaters and we have two smaller boilers,” Ceron says.

The project reduced energy use by 15%, an annual saving of 45 million BTUs. Scrapping the old steam heat system cut water consumption by 60%.

Consolidation also brought more efficiency to the work process. Stators, for example, are now built and baked in the same building.

“Imagine moving 30 tonnes of weight on a transfer cart between buildings during the snow time,” says Ceron. “I mean, it was a lot of movement and a risk to quality.”

Moving heavy machinery also involved injury risk for workers and made a lot of noise.

“We reduced the amount of noise, externally to our neighbours, with not having to transfer equipment back and forth,” says Steve Masciangelo, environmental health and safety manager.

“Removing the buildings helped us with the noise as well, so around the facility it’s quieter.”

The improvements save money and make the plant greener, both part of GE’s vision for a competitive future, says Rahim Ladha, GE Canada’s communications director.

“Our customers are looking at that sort of thing as well. Increasingly it’s becoming part of their evaluation of their supply chain, their attention to environmental performance and their footprint.”

Ceron, who transferred to Peterborough from a GE operation in Monterrey, Mexico three years ago, hopes the improvements bring new work to the plant.

“There are opportunities … but we don’t know it yet. We are working with the global team.”

Once thought to be in survival mode, GE Peterborough is now on a global treasure hunt, dressed in green and looking for jobs.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, May 7, 2016.

Tourism goes green at Elmhirst’s Resort

KEENE – Describe something as organic and what comes to mind is chemical free or “all natural.”

Our fascination with natural versus bio-engineered has obscured an older meaning of organic: something that has developed as part of a natural course of events.

Elmhirst’s Resort is organic in both senses.

Across the course of five generations a family farm developed into a thriving hospitality business that wraps together the farm, a resort and conference centre and the Rice Lake shoreline.

Greg Elmhirst, the current general manager, easily reels off the farm and family history. It begins with his great-great-grandfather, a farm and some cottages; sons who took over responsibility for the separate operations; a grandson who bought the resort. Segue to great-uncle Harold who inherited some of the property and later sold it to Greg’s father, mixed in with other family ties and transactions.

The result as it stands today is the resort with its main building, guest centre and conference room, 30 cottages, spa, pool and waterfront area; and the adjoining 210-acre farm, where Greg’s father, Peter, raises beef cattle, ducks and turkeys.

Eighty per cent of the beef served in the resort’s two restaurants comes from those grain-fed cattle. The meat is processed 20 kilometres away at Hilts Butcher Shop and the poultry at Morrison’s Custom Poultry Processing in Omemee. Every slice of duck and turkey Elmhirst’s serves comes from the farm, including the duck topping for poutine at the Wild Blue Yonder Pub.

A large garden near the resort entrance produces up to 8,000 pounds of vegetables and herbs for the restaurants each summer: “Lots of tomatoes, some squash, a tiny bit of corn, sort or ornamental, heirloom style potatoes,” Elmhirst says. “And lots of herbs, basically all the herbs we use.”

Guests appreciate the commitment to locally produced food, he says: “We have more people at Elmhirst’s because of it.”

Guests would be less aware of other ecologicallyvfriendly aspects of the operation.

Not far from the garden is a new, roughly 2,500-square-foot building, open at one end. Inside sits a giant pile of what appears to be wood shavings. It is known as waste wood, ground-up scraps from the production of wooden pallets, furniture and cabinetry.

The waste wood feeds a compact, high efficiency boiler in a separate room at the back of the building. Hot water from the boiler is piped to radiators. Fans blow air across the rads and that warm air heats all the rooms and common areas in the main resort building.

The wood heat system evolved over time – organically, if you will. Elmhirst recalls that it began in the mid-1990s with outdoor, wood-fired boilers where “you just threw a four-foot log in.” The forced air system came later. Switching to wood pellet fuel in 2004 upped the efficiency rating and ended the need to feed logs to the boilers in the middle of the night.

The waste wood boiler, installed last year, burns even cleaner and has reduced heating costs by 75%, Elmhirst says.

Six years ago 11 of the 30 cottages were retrofitted under the federal ecoEnergy Retrofit Homes program. An energy consultant’s report on one cottage showed the upgrades reduced annual greenhouse gas emissions by two tonnes.

Elmhirst’s is also switching to all LED lighting in the cottages and guest rooms. The boats that guests can use are powered by low-emission four-stroke motors. There are two banks of solar panels, ground-mounted at the farm and roof-mounted on the main resort building.

The management team also developed naturally. Greg, whose first position was recreation director fresh out of college, is the de facto COO and CFO. Peter ran the resort until 10 years ago but now concentrates on the farm. Peter’s life partner, Anne Marshall, handles marketing. Greg’s wife, Martina Linde, runs the spa. Steve and Caroline, his brother and sister-in-law, are also involved.

Greg and Martina’s 23-year-old son has indicated he plans to extend the Elmhirst involvement to a sixth generation. That’s the latest development in an organic business model, both old-fashioned and new-age.

This is one of a series of articles commissioned and paid for by Sustainable Peterborough and published in partnership with The Peterborough Examiner. By Jim Hendry, Peterborough Examiner, original article published Saturday, April 23, 2016.

2015 Report Card

The 2015 Report Card is now available; it is Sustainable Peterborough’s 4th Report Card! It highlights just a sampling of our numerous collective accomplishments. For a full listing of all the sustainable successes reported by our partner organizations, please visit our Sustainable Activities Database.

If you would like a few paper copies of the Report Card, please contact us.

No trees were harmed in the printing of our Report Card. The 2015 Report Card was printed on FSC certified 100% recycled paper, using vegetable inks!