The Ontario Clean Air Alliance has drawn attention to a situation in which five McMaster University students have started a hunger strike to protest the university’s decision to install four gas-fired electricity-generating turbines on campus as well as to call for divestment of the university’s endowment from fossil fuel companies. Like all our grandchildren, those students will be 50 in 2050 and will be living with whatever is left of the world.
Canada is a big cold country. Heating buildings is our third largest source of carbon emissions, after transportation and fossil fuel production. Most small buildings are heated by ducted gas-fired forced-air furnaces. Cold climate heat pumps are now a good source of Zero-Emission (ZE) heating and cooling for homes and small buildings. It is easy to install heat pumps in new homes or to replace an aging gas furnace with a heat pump in existing homes. But Canada also has thousands of large buildings such as university campuses, hospitals, schools, factories, office buildings, big-box stores, and residential condos. Large buildings are typically heated by hot water radiators fed by large gas-fired boilers. Replacing those systems with something else is a costly and disruptive process, and large-capacity heat pumps are not yet available. Electric heat is expensive, and we need every kwh we can generate for other purposes.
However, there are at least 3 feasible alternatives to be considered and developed. Who better to do such a study and oversee the best solution than a university engineering department? Federal and provincial governments should want to fund the study and the resulting prototype solution which could then be replicated in thousands of new and existing large buildings across Canada.
The 3 feasible alternatives are:
- Large-scale heat pumps. Challenge the 3 biggest heat pump manufacturers to develop a range of heat pumps suitable for existing and new large-scale buildings.
- Small modular reactors. SMRs can safely and efficiently co-generate both heat and electricity from the same equipment and fuel. Westinghouse SMRs have powered US navy submarines and aircraft carriers without incident for over 50 years. Each aircraft carrier is staffed by 5,000 highly skilled personnel who would not be put at risk. GE-Hitachi, NuScale, and Terrestrial Energy expect to have a range of SMRs operating as early as 2028. SMRs are being developed to be safely and widely deployed in European-style district heating configurations as shown below. The electricity can be sold to the grid. Compared to older large-scale reactors, SMRs are much more efficient at extracting energy from the fuel. So existing stockpiles of so-called nuclear waste can be used up as fuel for SMRs. France has been reconstituting and using their nuclear waste successfully for decades.
- Deep Geothermal Energy – Deep geothermal can also be used to co-generate electricity and heat. The energy is fully scalable using infinite heat from the earth’s core. It circulates by natural convection, so no energy-consuming pumps are required. It is instantly dispatchable and can back up intermittent sources with no costly battery storage required. The Eavor-On company has had a prototype running in Alberta for 2 years using precision drilling and pipeline technology from the oil and gas industry.
Both Eavor-On and Terrestrial Energy are Canadian companies that can provide made-in-Canada ZE (Zero Energy) solutions that are saleable to other countries and provide high-value industrial benefits across Canada.
Diversity is the key to successful decarbonization. Hydro, wind, solar, bio, geothermal, and small nuclear can all work well somewhere, but none of them work well everywhere. Every source needs its own unique set of skills and resources. Diversity means more skills and resources are available in total.
Given the steadily increasing frequency, severity, and astronomical cost of extreme weather events, and the latest even more dire warnings from the world’s top climate scientists, it’s time to recognize that the world needs every possible form of ZE energy. Each of the above technologies can be deployed for locations and applications for which they are best suited. But SMRs and Deep Geothermal are the only ZE alternatives that offer the enormous cost and space savings of co-generation. As a G7 nation, we should be setting an example for the world, and benefiting from it. We already have all the technology and resources needed to solve our share of the climate change problem. All we need now is the political will to get it done.
Hugh Holland
Hugh Holland is a retired engineering and manufacturing executive now living in Huntsville, Ontario.
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