Category Archives: Energy

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.

Rainwater reservoir helps Robinson Place stay green

Homes with a rain barrel connected to the downspout are fairly common today, saving up nature’s own water source for use watering gardens and washing cars.

But 20 years ago a rain barrel was a sign that whoever lived there was on the cutting edge of eco-awareness.

So to with Robinson Place, the massive but elegantly designed building at Water and Charlotte streets commonly referred to as “the MNR office.”

When it opened 20 years ago Robinson Place had a hidden resource down in the basement: a 35,000-litre rainwater tank, equivalent to a 24-by-12-foot swimming pool, eight feet deep.

Water from the tank is used to flush toilets. A seven-storey, 350,000-sq.-ft. building that provides office space to more than 1,000 provincial government employees has a lot of toilets.

David Burns didn’t know about the rainwater system when he signed on as building manager at Robinson Place. Nor was he aware of the large natural area, waterfall and vegetable garden tucked away on the Otonabee River side of the building.

Burns works for CBRE GCS Canada, a property management company hired by the province. Robinson Place is the largest of several buildings he is responsible for in Peterborough and area and his own office is there.

Designed as the provincial headquarters of the Ministry of Natural Resources (now Natural Resources and Forestry), it was originally used solely by MNR. Today it also has offices for six other ministries.

In eco terms, the building’s defining accomplishment is achieving LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum status two years ago. Most LEED Platinum buildings were built with the exacting standard in mind. Robinson Place is one of just 12 in Canada to qualify in the “existing building operations and maintenance” category, and the first government building.

Technical upgrades that pushed the building into the platinum circle included magnetic bearings in the compressors of huge cold water “chillers” that drive the air conditioning system. Using a magnetic field instead of mechanical shafts reduced energy use, Burns explains.

Across the board, energy consumption has been reduced by 31% over the past decade, he says. Aggressive recycling promotion has steadily increased the rate of diverting waste from the city/county landfill site. In 2012 the diversion rate was 62%; for 2015 it was 77%.

Features like the vegetable garden also contribute to LEED success, Burns says. We walk from the bright, sunny lobby out to a rear stone courtyard. Off to the right is a gate, latched but not locked, in a tall fence covered with vegetation.

Inside the garden area, roughly the size of large backyard, we sit at one of several picnic benches. It’s a natural area without trimmed grass or landscaping. Seven raised vegetable planters, each six feet by four feet, are the most noticeable feature.

The planters overflow with tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, lettuce, spinach, onions, beets and carrots. Burns and 10 to 20 others who work at Robinson Place and tend the gardens each summer deliver their harvest to the nearby Lighthouse Community Centre at St. John’s Anglican Church.

Another hidden resource that contributes to the “green” aspect of Robinson Place is a bicycle parking area in the underground garage.

“We have a very high percentage of staff that bicycle to work,” Burns says, “in the range of 80 to 100 bicyclists.” Several garage parking spaces were converted to bike racks and a bicycle repair station.

The vegetable garden sits on top of the parking garage entrance. We go back out the gate and stroll alongside the waterfall, which more closely resembles a gently descending set of rapids. The quiet burble of tumbling water makes for a soothing little oasis.

It’s a popular lunchtime retreat, one that Burns and many of the building’s workers appreciate.

“I have people come up here from Toronto, consultants, and they say, ‘Oh my God, I wish I worked here.’ And I say, ‘Sorry, you can’t, because I am.’”

Employers take note: good, green design can help attract, and keep, good people.

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, July 30, 2016.

Quaker curbs waste loss

Up on the third floor of the century-old Quaker Oats plant, Stephen Loch points out a set of doors next to a panel of high-tech measuring devices.

This is the brain of Quaker’s waste measurement and control system. Steel “containment vessels” brought from production lines two floors below hold waste material from a run of Quaker Oats, granola bars or whatever was being produced.

Each container has an RFID tag, a radio-frequency identification device similar to those inserted under the skin of cats and dogs.

When the doors open the container is pushed into a set of arms, picked up and weighed. The measuring device records the weight and reads a radio signal from the tag that identifies what production line the container came from and the product it was running.

“Then we would enter it in our tracking system,” explains Loch, the plant manufacturing manager. “So then we understand where our waste losses are coming from.” RFID tracking helps cut production costs. It also helps make the plant more sustainable, says manufacturing director Terry Labrash, a Peterborough native whose parents still live in the south end of the city.

“We strive to be what we call a zero landfill site,” Labrash says. “Less than one per cent of our total waste goes to landfill. Part of that is our strategic partnerships that we have with our food waste byproduct stream.”

Food waste includes oat hulls and “fines,” powdered material that Loch defines as “basically different grades of flour.”

Eight years ago Quaker invested in a new building attached to the 12 large grain silos at the back of the plant. Trucks from Quaker’s waste management partner, SPB Solutions Inc., drive in and are loaded with hulls, fines and “wet” waste from the chewy granola bar and Instant Quaker Oats lines.

SPB Solutions, a national company with a local location in the Pido Rd. industrial park, processes the material for use in animal feed.

During an interview in his office Labrash sketched an overview of the company’s current modernization plan for its oat milling process, which he describes as a “substantial investment.” Milling oats is still the heart of the operation. Oat grains are hulled and the seeds (the hull is a husk; the seed is a groat) are cleaned, sorted, separated, graded and processed with heat and steam.

“We are going to take 68 pieces of equipment and replace them with nine pieces of equipment,” Labrash explains. “And there will be a significant reduction in our energy consumption.”

The plant has cut annual energy use by five per cent (1.7 million kw/hours) and water use by eight per cent (nearly 10,000 cubic metres) over the past five years. Modernizing milling operations will significantly improve those numbers, he says.

It is easier to grasp how 69 machines can be reduced to eight as Loch takes us through the plant. On one milling floor, wood frame “aspirators” continually shake the grain while blowing in air to help sort it. Each is about four feet high and four feet wide.

On another floor a new stainless steel Buhler aspirator is waiting to be assembled. About two-thirds the size of one of the old wooden machines, it will replace six of them.

Some of the old, single-function milling machines date back 80 years. The modern replacements are multi-taskers. Loch mentions that one of the new energy-efficient processors will replace 18 old pieces of equipment.

Another step toward conservation is the application of ideas from a “resource conservation summit” that brought experts from within the company – Quaker is owned by beverage and food giant PepsiCo – and outside consultants to Peterborough last year.

“We just blitzed all of our processes in the entire facility looking for areas of opportunity on conservation,” Labrash says, “and identified some 160 action items that we are now prioritizing for execution.”

As that happens Quaker will further reduce the amount of water and energy it uses, and the waste it produces, while continuing to help feed the nation.

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, July 2, 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.