Okotoks
I watched a feature on the National a couple of nights ago about renewable energy in Alberta. Part of it featured Okotoks, one of the 'greenest' places in North America. I was interested because of the solar housing project there that I've featured on this site (all the garages hook together to hold one giant solar panel) and because Jan's late sister lived there for many years and now her oldest brother does too.
It's a town of 18,000 outside Calgary with a small, trickling river running through it. they've decided to cap the population at 25,000 because there's no way it can sustain itself with the water supply it has.
They get their water from the river and put their effluent in there too. However, their effluent is better than the water that comes from the river in the first place. They treat it and purify it then take the solid waste and turn it all into compost.
The town recycles nearly everything (although Jan's nephew who worked in the large recycling center says they threw out a lot of stuff, probably because you're only allowed three bags of garbage per week.)
They have a huge indoor pool that is heated mostly by solar energy. This isn't unusual for outdoor pools that only operate in the summer but it's rare for indoor pools that require a great deal of energy in the winter. What they save with solar on the pool heating alone could heat 20 houses with natural gas in any given winter month. But a lot of other things are heated by solar and wind, including the arena and other public buildings. This all started because the town was booming but they had little natural resources to sustain it. It's now become a role model for the rest of the world.
I was happy to see inside one person's house that was a part of the solar housing development. (Special one time government grants made it no more expensive than a normal house to live in.) The people featured had no interest in a sustainable community, they just walked in out of the rain and into a showhome. There's a furnace-like heat exchanger that takes the hot water from a pipe running under the ground, not unlike a natural gas line, and heats your home on demand. The homes are all R-2000 so they have fresh air ventilation as well.
The Drake Landing Solar Community (DLSC) is the first community in the world that is designed to meet 90% of its space and water heating requirements from solar energy. (They have a central boiler that heats the remaining ten per cent, but imagine paying 90 per cent less on your gas and electricity bills.)
They showed several solar walls: black exterior walls that heat air before it's drawn into the building. Very cool, first time I've seen them in use on such a large scale.
Energy from the summer is stored deep underground in bore holes and reused in the winter. Huge tanks of water store heat from the sun above ground as well.
If we moved to Alberta, that's where we'd move.
- For more information, visit the Okotoks web site
