Wonderful if Eguana connects Following is an article from this past weekend that appears to be ideally suited to Eguana's technology.
It has now been directed to the company.
WATERLOO REGION
Waterloo Region is uniquely situated to locally source much more of its power
LG
By Leah GerberRecord Reporter
Sat., Oct. 16, 2021timer3 min. read
WATERLOO REGION — Approximately $2.1 billion was spent by the community of Waterloo Region in 2014 to import energy in the form of fossil fuels and electricity, according to a study from Waterloo Region Community Energy.
The organization found that 45 per cent of this energy is wasted as pollution, and that most of those billions of dollars fly out of the region, as only about 13 per cent is retained by local distributors and retailers.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
“We’ve been very successful at generating reliable, cheap energy for the last especially 100 years. But we’re only now beginning to fully understand the social, economic and environmental consequences of having such affordable, cheap energy,” says Matthew Day, the Community Energy Program Manager for WR Community Energy.
“The sheer amount of resources it takes to ship that energy from a central place whether its Bruce Nuclear or Niagara Falls or even underground piping. That’s extremely expensive infrastructure.”
The overall goal set by WR Community Energy is:
to cut down on how much energy is used in the region
to source significantly more of the energy needed from local renewable sources
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to keep the money spent on energy circulating in the local economy
to increase the region’s energy resiliency.
Last month the Ontario government announced it will begin investigating the concept of community net metering through a pilot project in London.
The project is a single building complex that will generate its own renewable electricity. It will send any extra power it generates to the grid and receive credit to use toward electricity taken from the grid for the rest of the year.
Instead of focusing solely on individual buildings, WR Community Energy is looking at the region as a whole, and planning how and where renewable energy can be generated and distributed in the region on a large scale, as well as finding the best ways to reduce the amount of energy used in the first place.
Waterloo Region Community Energy is a collaboration between the Region of Waterloo, the three urban municipalities, and the five local energy utilities that distribute electricity and natural gas in the region. These entities came together to create and release the Community Energy Investment Strategy for Waterloo Region in 2018.
First, the energy consumption in the region was inventoried for the baseline year of 2014. The organization found that:
$810 million was spent on gasoline
$706 million on electricity
$297 million on natural gas
$221 million on diesel
$22 million on fuel oil
$21 million on propane.
Then the group identified opportunities for reducing the amount of energy used, and how to utilize and distribute renewable sources of energy locally. This will cut down on how much money is spent to import energy into the region, and how much of this energy is wasted as pollution.
There are already initiatives underway in the region to produce energy locally.
“We have so much local energy generating capacity. And Waterloo Region is unique in the province for our ability to generate a lot of this energy locally,” says Day.
This includes tapping into a major source of renewable energy right under our feet, he says.
“We can use what’s called geoexchange really efficiently in Waterloo Region because we sit on top of two aquifers. One aquifer we drink out of and there’s one below that we can use for a source of what’s called free energy. It’s essentially a sustainable amount of 10 degree water.”
Geoexchange can be used to heat and cool many buildings simultaneously in the region. The first step toward this was the feasibility study for district heating in downtown Kitchener which showed it was possible to heat and cool the city’s innovation district using geoexchange, and cut green house gas emissions by 53 per cent. The city has now put out a request for proposal for a designer to develop the idea, says Day.
WR Community Energy has also mapped out the opportunities for large-scale renewable energy production in the region including the best places for ground mounted solar panels in the area, where best to capture heat from wastewater, and where else to implement geoexchange.
Other renewable initiatives include, among others, local hydro electric power plants, and the BioEN research and development facility in Elmira which generates power from organic waste.
Early next month WR Community Energy will be releasing details about the region’s energy plan for the next three years, including a report on using geoexchange in the region. More information about the WR Community Energy can be found on the website wrcommunityenergy.ca