The power of going green

The best view of Whistler-Blackcomb’s soon-to-be-complete micro hydro project belongs to the tourist 45 metres above it on a zip-line—a kind of horizontal bungee jump. But at 80 km/h—and screaming her lungs out—she seems to have missed it. In fairness, the pale blue pipe hugging Fitzsimmons Creek for about a quarter of its 15-km length doesn’t look like much, dwarfed as it is by stands of centuries-old Douglas firs, western hemlocks and red cedars. But when complete in November, three months ahead of the Olympics, the $32-million project will make Whistler better than carbon neutral, producing an annual 33.5 gigawatt hours of clean, renewable energy—more than enough to power its 38 lifts, 17 restaurants and 270 snowmakers.

The so-called “green hydro” project will divert part of the stream into a pipe, just over a metre in diameter. Speed and kinetic energy will be generated in its final 500-m descent, when the water comes crashing down a steep, 75-degree slope. At the base, a turbine will capture that energy before returning the water to the watercourse below.

“It’s not the W.A.C. Bennett dam,” says Arthur De Jong, environment resource manager for the resort, pointing sheepishly to piping no taller than a 10-year-old. But his reference to B.C.’s gigantic hydroelectric dam—one of the world’s biggest—is apt. The megalithic ’60s-era project required over 100 million tonnes of gravel, sand, rock and concrete, new roads, reservoirs, intake towers and transmission lines, and did irreparable damage to fish stocks and the First Nations communities it displaced through flooding. That’s the old way to generate energy. Whistler already has roads and transmission lines in place to begin transmitting energy from its micro hydro project at Fitzsimmons Creek. To link with B.C. Hydro, they’ll simply need to run a 300-m cable, and flip a switch. The project is considered a model for small-scale renewable energy production.

But it’s just one example of localized power generation and alternative energy sources that Canadian companies are exploring to control costs, reduce their ecological footprints, and generate environmental credibility. For the first year ever, Maclean’s has partnered with Toronto publisher Mediacorp to present a list of Canada’s 30 greenest employers. It provides an inside look at some of the initiatives Canada’s corporations are undertaking to improve their environmental footprint—“and their bottom line,” adds Mediacorp managing editor Richard Yerema.

In Quebec, for example, paper giant Cascades Inc. has cast its eye to garbage. For the past three years, it has been powering its mill at Saint-Jérôme with biogas generated from the decomposition of waste at the nearby Ste-Sophie municipal landfill. When burned, the biogas generates steam for the mill’s four paper machine dryers—the most energy-intensive task associated with paper-making, explains communications director Julie Loyer. In winter, Loyer adds, the steam is also used in heating, and now satisfies nearly 85 per cent of the mill’s thermal energy needs. That replaces an annual 36 million cubic metres of natural gas and reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 540,000 tonnes per year—the equivalent of removing 15,000 cars from the road every year. The $10-million initial investment, meanwhile, has already paid for itself, and the low-cost biogas has reduced annual electrical and energy costs at the St-Jérôme facility by almost a third.

In Montreal, McGill University is also experimenting with alternate energy sources. Rather than venting out the substantial waste heat generated by the university’s IT and data centre—where it’s seen as a nuisance—the university will capture, pipe and re-use the waste heat in surrounding buildings, reducing overall heating costs, says associate vice-principal Jim Nicell. A planned retrofit of McGill’s Otto Maass Chemistry Building, meanwhile, is expected to cut its energy use by 60 per cent. And since 2006, McGill has also been generating heating and cooling savings of 40 per cent at Lady Meredith House, home to the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, where it has installed a geothermal exchange system. The historic red brick building on the corner of Peel and Pine streets is lined with liquid-filled pipes that run deep underground, explains Nicell. In winter, the warmth trapped in the earth is captured by that liquid and pumped into the building, warming the air; in summer, when the ground is cooler than the atmosphere, heat from the building is expelled underground.

They’re even tinkering with locally generated power in Alberta. Enmax, Calgary’s city-owned utility, has announced the construction of the $30-million Downtown District Heating project, which could help to delay or even eliminate the need for a controversial transmission line to be built to Calgary from northern Alberta. The downtown plant will also provide waste heat to 10 million sq. feet of core-area office space, through a network of underground insulated pipes instead of separate boiler systems.

The “old idea,” of having a centralized coal plant and transmission lines, which requires enormous outlays of steel, copper and land, is “fundamentally uneconomic,” says Gary Holden, the Calgary-born CEO. “Building power generation near cities, where you can take advantage of waste heat, is really the future of the generation market,” he says, adding that several European cities, spurred by high costs, have been re-using heat for decades.