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Airdrie builds Canada’s largest municipal rooftop solar grid

5 years ago

The City of Airdrie just outside Calgary is now home to Canada’s largest municipal rooftop solar energy installation and mayor Peter Brown is enjoying the bragging rights. The 1.55-megawatt, 3,800-panel system provides renewable energy to Genesis Place Recreation Centre.

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Faced with the challenge of diminished lumber supply and lower prices, the British Columbia government has made investing in higher-value-added products like engineered wood a priority, betting that supporting mass timber construction can be a winning proposition for the industry.

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A mass-timber office project in Vancouver and a four-storey timber-frame rental apartment in West Kelowna are among 11 winners of the province’s pilot Net Zero Energy-Ready Competition.  The winners will receive up to $390,000 each to put toward completing their buildings.

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The Toronto Chapter of the CaGBC June event featured green retrofits and new green buildings at Humber College, Sheridan College, the universities of Guelph and Toronto as well as Western, Fanshawe College, George Brown College, and host Mohawk College.

Energy Profiles Limited

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VIDEO: By feeding industrial emissions from Ontario factories to algae, Pond Technologies in Markham, Ont. helps reduce carbon emissions and then uses the algae it grows to create everything from plant-based protein to health supplements.

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Half of the provincial governments are now in the hands of conservative premiers opposed to carbon pricing, arguing instead that technology – to reduce emissions and then capture and store what’s leftover – is a better solution to climate change.

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One of Canada’s largest science projects is humming away on the south Saskatchewan prairie, capturing thousands of tonnes of climate-warming carbon dioxide every month and storing it underground where it should remain buried for eons.

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The Charging the Future Challenge will help accelerate the most promising Canadian battery innovations from lab to market. Five finalists will be eligible to win up to $700,000 to develop their battery prototype with one grand prize of $1 million.

BOMA

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Four years ago, the Lavergne Group surprised tech company HP with a system where printers could be tossed whole into grinders and the bits efficiently sorted into neat piles by colour and type, creating bins that separated black and white plastic.

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DEFG, a firm focused on customer strategy and experience in the utility sector,  released research developed as part of Solar IQ titled “Solar End Stage: Planning and Risk Scenarios for Removal of Solar.”

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Conferences are a big part of life for many professors but a growing number are concerned about the environmental impact of all of the air travel. Hundreds have signed a petition asking universities to reduce the amount their employees fly.

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As of 2019, 11.8 per cent of Canada’s land mass had been set aside for conservation. Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPWS) says Canada’s goal should be to almost triple that amount by 2030 and ultimately protect half the country’s land mass from development.

BOMA

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Facing an insurance hike that could be north of 25 per cent, Vancouver strata members are learning they can’t escape the threat of catastrophic weather in a warming world, even though they have not directly endured recent extraordinary floods or fires.

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The new map of “zones d’intervention spéciale” (ZIS) where a moratorium forbids construction in flood-prone areas still include “errors”. Five cities are affected by the measure, even though they were never been hit by the floods of 2017 and 2019.

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Drought and freshwater shortages have plagued Salt Spring Island, due to the warming climate because most of the island’s water supply comes from rainfall. Lack of rain is causing the two main lakes on Salt Spring to dry up.

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Thousands of homes and vast swaths of forest were consumed by the Horse River Fire that ripped through Fort McMurray in 2016. The fire’s extreme intensity and the speed of the fire illustrated a stark risk that experts had worried about for years.

Matrix360

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A new CDP report finds 70 per cent of 1,500 companies fail to provide forest data. The Money Trees report says brands including Dominos, Mondelez, Next, and Sports Direct are among those that didn’t disclose effects on forests worldwide in 2018.

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Directors of RWE had probably never had heard of Huaraz, Peru before 2015. But Saúl Lliuya, a mountain guide and farmer there, sued RWE for climate-related damage. A court in Hamm, Germany agreed with Lliuya’s argument and let the case proceed.

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Chevron wants to modify plans for a liquefied natural gas export facility on Canada’s Pacific Coast to an all-electric design it says will produce the lowest GHG emissions per ton of LNG of any large project in the world.

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Air Transat, Canada’s No. 1 leisure airline, has achieved ISO 14001:2015 certification for its head office in Montreal, the culmination of a long process implementing a system for environmental management and improvement of its sustainability practices.

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