Last week, in my quest to see whether British Columbia could become a 100 per cent renewable energy region, I looked at personal transportation. This week I take on the far more challenging task of long-distance trucking, boats, ferries and planes.

Ponder this: a typical eighteen-wheeler truck has a 400-horse-power engine. It burns stored solar energy from ancient, 300-million-year-old marine organisms. If you used horses to pull that much load, you’d need 400 of them, and 400 hectares of land to keep the horses pastured.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Which is Better: Slaves, Horses or Fossil Fuels?

Alternatively, you could use 4,000 humans—and a hundred overseers with whips to keep them pulling. Maybe this is why slavery was so common before we discovered the concentrated energy of fossil fuels—the true ‘concentrated solar.’ Any particular coalmine, gas-field or oil-well might embody twenty million years of stored solar radiation, and we are exhausting it in twenty years, giving an effective solar concentration rate of fifty thousand: releasing a million years of accumulated carbon ever year.

Using this incredible supply of energy, we have been able to develop our modern world with its highly advanced science and engineering, its automated factories and its global transportation network, shipping vast quantities of stuff around the world.

Holland, with 17 million people, ships 1.6 billion tonnes of cargo a year, half by road and a third by water—all using fossil fuels. That’s a hundred tonnes (seven shipping containers) per person per year. If B.C. (with 4.6 million people) has a similar consumption pattern, we are shipping 460 million tonnes of cargo a year.

So the challenge of making British Columbia a 100 per cent renewable energy region has a huge cultural dimension, as well as a fuel dimension.

How much stuff do we really need to consume?

How much stuff do we really need to consume? 20 per cent? 50 per cent? With our current shopping habits we are literally consuming the planet to pieces, turning GDP into Gross Depletion of the Planet.

• How much less stuff would we need if we embraced a sharing economy, with shared vehicles, shared food gardens, and shared tools and equipment?
• How much less raw material would we need if we made an all-out effort to convert B.C.’s economy into a circular economy, with zero waste, and 100 per cent recyclability for everything we buy?
• Could 3-D printing reduce the amount of global trade and usher in a more localized economy? In China, a company has 3-D printed an entire house using cement and construction wastes for just $5,000. The future might see the 3-D printing of furniture, office supplies, medical supplies, prosthetic limbs, machine tools, play equipment, boats, shoes—even aircraft wings, propellers and small fuselages.
• Could we build a zero-growth economy that meets our fundamental needs, while still enabling people to increase their happiness and fulfillment?
• Would a 4-day working week help us get there?
• Would we consume less if we had a change to more cooperative ownership of businesses, more B Corporations, and more cooperative, values-based banking, which might be less driven to make us buy, buy, buy?
• Or do we simply need far more affordable housing, so that people would not need to work so hard stoking the economy simply to pay the monthly rent or mortgage?   

These are all important questions that we need to ponder. I am not aware of any study that looks at all these factors together. If one has been done, please let me know.

The 100 per cent renewable energy problem

So now I’ll put my BCSEA hat on and explore the technical dimension of the problem: how can we switch B.C.’s freight transportation from diesel and gasoline to 100 per cent renewable energy?

Some local urban delivery could go electric right now, using electric cargo bikes. In Europe, Cycle Logistics has estimated that 51 per cent of Europe’s city freight could be shipped by bike. For heavier loads, a Smith Newton electric truck can carry up to 12 tonnes, with a 150 kilometres range.

As soon as we move out of the city, however, we run into major challenges. There are many ways to make trucks more fuel efficient, and trucking companies can engage in load-sharing and freight-matching to reduce mileage—20 per cent of the trucks on Germany’s roads travel empty, and maybe it’s the same here in B.C. A University of Arkansas research project estimates that one-in-six trucks could be taken off the road with no loss in utility.

Can rail take the freight?

Clearly, electrified railways could be a partial solution, and with less use of coal, rail capacity would be freed up. In Canada, coal accounts for 13 per cent of rail freight traffic; in America, it is an incredible 44 per cent of the annual tonnage. Eighty per cent of Canada’s coal is exported from Vancouver’s North Shore and Roberts Bank terminals, and from Prince Rupert, and when B.C. no longer exports coal there will be capacity freed up along the routes. For every destination to which rail can carry freight, however, there are dozens of destinations to which it can’t.

So could we lay new electrified railway tracks alongside flat highway routes? It is really unlikely.

Alongside rail, there are three possibilities for using 100 per cent renewable transportation energy for trucking: 

Will it be hydrogen?

There is a strong consensus that regular cars and light trucks will be electric, but that does not apply to heavy-duty trucks. Mark Jacobson and his team at The Solutions Project at Stanford University, California have mapped out how every state in the U.S. could achieve 100 per cent renewable energy using sun, wind and water. They are assuming the use of hydrogen for long-distance trucking, using renewable electricity to generate the hydrogen by splitting water, which is then used in a fuel cell to generate electricity for an electric drive. (Most of today’s hydrogen is derived from natural gas, which is clearly not a renewable solution).

Using hydrogen requires three times more electricity than direct electric drive, but the technology is known, and on-site electrolysis, which is already happening in Holland, California and sixteen other states in the U.S. would eliminate the need to ship or pipe hydrogen around the province. Every truck would need to be a fuel cell truck, however, which makes it far more complex than biofuel, which works with existing vehicles. 

Blue Fuel, a B.C. company linked to Aeolis, one of B.C.’s major wind energy companies, knowing how much wind energy potential there is in the northeast of the province, has developed a partnership with Siemens Canada to create the world’s largest hydrogen electrolysis infrastructure on 400 hectares of land near Chetwynd, with a view to producing green hydrogen.

Will it happen? Many people have written off hydrogen because they think about cars, not trucks, and the car of the future is clearly electric. Joe Romm, who is extremely knowledgeable on practical responses to climate change, says Tesla Trumps Toyota—but for trucking, hydrogen may yet be the answer.

Will it be biofuel?

First generation biofuel, such as ethanol made from corn, requires the use of good farmland, and its production is so carbon intensive that it hardly reduces greenhouse gas emissions at all. Corn ethanol is seen by some as being part of the problem, not the solution.

The holy grail is second generation cellulosic biofuel made from switchgrass, corn stover (the leaves and stalk of maize crops), wood wastes, wheat straw or municipal wastes, but the reality has lagged far behind the hopes. In the U.S., instead of a billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol being produced by 2013, as mandated, progress has been really slow, and production was a thousand times less than required at under a million gallons.

Hopes for the production of biofuel from algae have withered, too. To make it productive, algae needs a constant stream of CO2—and if it comes from fossil fuels, via carbon capture, fossil carbon will still be released when the algae fuel is burnt. Effective progress in the algae direction is almost zero, as we learnt from Dr. John Benemann in our BCSEA Webinar in 2013.

In Finland, which has extensive forest coverage, their Roadmap to a Renewable Methane Economy envisions biomethane from municipal and forest wastes as providing 60 per cent of the fuel for heavy road transport by 2050, the rest coming from electricity (5 per cent), hydrogen (10 per cent) and bio-dimethyl ether (20 per cent). The Finnish Biogas Association estimates that there is enough available biomethane from wastes to cover 40 per cent of total transportation needs, including 60 per cent for trucking.

There is also another approach that may work. BioRoot Energy, based in Montana, has a technology that can make higher mixed alcohol biofuel from any kind of waste, including municipal solid waste, sewage sludge, construction debris, industrial waste, liquid waste and woody biomass waste, using a rotary kiln gasifier to convert the waste into a liquid fuel and a slag residue, yielding syngas that is then converted into a liquid fuel for use in any vehicle. Plastic wastes will release fossil carbon, but biogenic wastes will not.

Or will it be direct electric drive?

The third possibility is that there will be sufficient advances in electric drive and battery technology to make long-distance electric trucking possible, using one of five possible recharging possibilities: plug-in ultrafast charging, battery switching, overhead charging through wires, dynamic in-motion charging from the road below, or stationary inductive charging from above.

Ultrafast charging for larger vehicles is already happening in Geneva, Switzerland, where the multinational corporation ABB is rolling out a 400 kw 15-second flash-charge at bus-stops on large capacity electric buses. In Britain, there’s a trial happening in Milton Keynes, with buses driving a 24-kilometre route that includes two 120 kw stationary recharging strips. ABB feels confident that the future of mobility is electric—but will it extend to trucks?

Battery switching is another possibility, demonstrated by Tesla to be quicker for a car than refueling at a gas station. Might a future electric truck pull into a pit-stop and switch to a new battery while the driver relaxes over coffee?

Overhead cabling seems unlikely due to the long rural distances that truckers need to drive in addition to highway travel. In Sweden, Volvo is developing a magnetic resonance system that enables a truck to charge up as it drives along the road, but widespread adoption would run into the same problem as overhead cabling—the need for universal, country-wide coverage. Trucks in B.C. need to get to Prince Rupert and Fort St. John, as well as Hope and Nanaimo. Maybe engineers will design an electric truck of the future that can recharge through all three means: rapid ultra-charging, in-road charging and battery swap.

Which will it be?

Electric technology for long-distance trucking is the least developed, but progress in battery technology is happening far faster than progress in hydrogen or biofuels. If you hear that Tesla’s Elon Musk is investing in a trucking company, that might be a smart time to invest.

Biofuel is a complex field with various fuel pathways, some of which seem to be going nowhere while others promise progress. Its big advantage is that it can be used by the existing fleet; the downside is the slow speed of progress.

Hydrogen for fuel cell electric drive is a proven technology, but it requires the large-scale production of renewable electricity to make the hydrogen, and an entire fleet of new hydrogen trucks, such as the Tyrano, which Vision Motor Corp., based in California, is making.

It will be one of the three—but trucking is a transcontinental affair, and B.C. could never get there alone. There are a host of initiatives that a lively government that was committed to the cause could initiate or join. B.C.’s universities could push ahead on the technology; the provincial government could work with California, Oregon and Washington State in the Pacific Coast Collaborative to make renewable energy trucking a priority; we could host a major conference on the future of trucking to identify the problem and explore the solutions. It’s all better than nothing, which is the government’s current approach.

Ferries, boats, and ocean shipping

The same basket of choices applies to water and air transportation. Simon Fawkes of Blue Coral Charters operates the Aerial Sea, a 42’ sailing catamaran. In July 2014 they crossed the Strait of Georgia on 2 kw of solar electric power with a team of students from York University’s Faculty of Environmental Studies. Another catamaran, the 115 ft. Planet Solar, with a massive 20 kw solar system, is currently cruising the Mediterranean at 5 knots as part of a world tour. In Bristol, England, a 12 passenger 12 kW hydrogen fuel celled boat is cruising local waters.

But what about B.C. Ferries, or the big contained ships? In Japan, the NYK Group is planning a futuristic container ship: the Super Eco Ship 2030 will be powered by hydrogen fuel cells, wind, and up to 9 MW of superconductive solar, and be packed full of innovations.

To make the hydrogen, it will use liquefied natural gas, since no-one has found a way to do electrolysis at sea, which needs a constant flow of renewable electricity. If there was a battery breakthrough sufficient to carry a ship across the ocean, it would not need hydrogen. One alternative might be to use a biofuel as the source for the hydrogen. As planned, the ship will achieve a 70 per cent fall in carbon emissions.

B.C. Ferries, meanwhile, has just ordered three new ferries from Poland which will be designed to run on natural gas as well as diesel. No progress there.

In 2012, the Dutch consultancy group EcoFys studied the use of different biofuels for the European Maritime Safety Agency. They looked at tankers and container ships, ferries and cruise ships, and found that it was technically possible, and that there was a market. The barriers were regulatory and policy-related.

Europe has a Renewable Fuels Directive, for instance, which requires that 20 per cent of all energy must be renewable by 2020; but it needs to apply to ship bunkering parties, as well as to energy suppliers. If a future Canadian government gathered up the political courage to bring in a similar directive, it would have a very forceful effect on development.  

Flying into a green future on…what?

So far, most bets for future green flying are on biofuel, with many major airlines doing trials for biofuel feedstocks such as cellulosic crops, algae, camelina, jatropha, municipal solid waste, and halophytes, which can live on salt water irrigation in a desert environment. CNN reports that “since aviation biofuel was approved for use in 2011, more than 1,500 commercial flights have been powered by a blend of traditional fuel and biofuels,” and there have also been 100 per cent biofuel flights. The Sustainable Aviation Biofuels Users Group lists a lot of famous aviation names—but is the commitment really there?

In summary, this is not an easy game. But nor were electric vehicles, ten years ago. I am totally confident that the change will happen. There are at least 193 truck manufacturers in the world, including two Canada: Hino, whose Woodstock assembly plant makes Japanese trucks; and Paccar, based in St-Therese, Quebec, which makes Kenworth, Peterbilt and DAF trucks.

 When it comes to alternative fuels, Paccar looks to biodiesel and natural gas, and Hino has developed a diesel-electric hybrid truck which leads the world. Will Hino/Toyota produce the breakthrough all-electric or all-hydrogen heavy-duty truck? Or will biofuels prevail? Only time will tell.

Next Week: In Part 4 I will explore the all-important question—what will it take to make it happen?

This series originally appeared on the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association website.

Image Credit: Planet Solar cuts through the Corinth Canal via Instagram.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

Last week I started to explore the possibility that British Columbia could become a 100 per cent renewable energy region, as 140 regions in. Germany are planning to become.

This week, we look at transportation. Is it possible that we could get where we want to be and ship our goods where they need to go without any use of fossil fuels?

Helsinki, capital of Finland, is taking a big step in this direction, with its goal that by 2025, nobody will need to own a car in the city at all, thanks to an advanced integrated ‘mobility on demand’ network of shared bikes, transit, LRT, and computer-automated Kutsuplus minibuses that adapt their routes to take you wherever you want to go.

The cars, trucks, ferries and planes that we use to go about our daily lives are 38 per cent of the cause of global warming in B.C., so this is clearly a big deal. So let’s start at the easy end, and work our way into the difficult, uncharted territory.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

Have You Ever Tried Cycling in North Vancouver?

Cycling is easy: the bustling city of Copenhagen has already demonstrated that 35 per cent of its commuters can get to work by bike, and many cities in Holland can boast equally good numbers.

“Ah, but it’s flat,” you might respond. “Have you ever tried cycling in North Vancouver?”

“Ah,” I respond, “have you ever tried an electric bike?” Electric bikes defy gravity, making hills vanish with a twist of the hand. In so doing they open up new realms of possibility for older cyclists, and anyone who doubts their ability to cycle a 10 km round trip. Add safe protected bike-lanes, off-road bike trails, clearly marked intersections, good bike-sharing schemes with bike-attached tablets that give GPS based-directions, as they are doing in Copenhagen, and you’ve got a set-up in which cycling becomes irresistible.

There’s a cost to all this, of course – but in Holland, which has 35,000 kilometres of bike paths and spends $580m a year on bicycle infrastructure, the cost is 4.3 cents per kilometre pedaled by each cyclist, compared to 22 cents for a motorist. In other words: it is five times cheaper. For shorter distances of 5km or less the bike will also get you there faster than a car. In Copenhagen, they justify the cost of the bike infrastructure by the health care savings: the health benefit of cycling comes to $1 per km, creating an overall annual benefit to the Danes of some $388 million.

But even so—where will the money come from? It could come from existing transportation budgets, by spending less on roads. It could come from an increase in the gas tax. It could come by changing the way we use income from the carbon tax, spending it on positive climate solutions instead of returning it in tax reductions. It could come from a special green bonds issue. Or it could come from road tolls, which make sense in a post-carbon world when gas taxes will no longer exist. 

1,000 Kilometres a Day – in an Electric Bus

Next up is public transit, bus rapid transit and light rail transit. There are cities all over the world with excellent systems, from Portland to New York, Paris to Tokyo, Curitiba to Bogota. Light rail can be fully electric – and so can a regular bus. There are 100 per cent electric buses on the road without overhead cables in Seoul, Montreal, London, Helsinki, Los Angeles, Edmonton, Geneva (using a 15 second flash charge), Adelaide (solar electric), Umea (Sweden), San Francisco—and soon, everywhere. In the U.S., the Proterra electric bus has set a world record, travelling over 1,000 kilometres in a single day, using rapid fast charging during the day.

In China, the auto-manufacturer BDY recently received an order for 1,800 electric buses that can travel300 km on a single charge, with 1,200 going to Dalian in northeast China and 600 to Nanjing in eastern China. With that kind of range, fast luxury electric coaches travelling into Vancouver from Whistler and the Fraser Valley cannot be far away, equipped with tables, coffee and orange juice.

Next, there’s railways. The West Coast Express from Vancouver to Mission could easily be electrified, as railways are in many parts of the world. If you have never travelled on a fast, comfortable train, you don’t know what you’re missing. When I lived in England, I would regularly take the two-hour ride from South Devon to London. The seats were arranged in groups of four around a table, enabling you to spread out, work, and talk to fellow travellers if you wanted to. When I travelled on a high-speed train across South Korea, averaging 300 kph, the journey was so smooth you hardly knew you were travelling. It’s just a matter of commitment, to make the investment.

In the Lower Mainland, there is an existing Fraser Valley Interurban rail line that runs from New Westminster to Langley, Abbotsford and Chilliwack where a light rail train could operate, sharing the track with existing goods use. Maybe the rail line that carries coal to Roberts Bank at Tsawwassen could also share the track, allowing a light rail passenger service to operate there too.

The Electric Car – and Pick Up Truck

So now we come to the big one—the electric car. Among those who observe the scene, there is a sense of welcome inevitability that the future of cars and light trucks will be electric.

Not hydrogen fuel cell, since a fuel cell electric vehicle uses three times more energy than a straight EV.

Maybe not biofuel, since progress on second-generation biofuels grown on marginal land is slow, and most biofuel still has a large carbon footprint, with the exception of recycled biodiesel, as distributed by the Cowichan Biodiesel Co-op and other groups.

And not natural gas, since gas is a non-renewable fossil fuel that increasingly depends on fracking for extraction, polluting the groundwater with unknown chemicals and releasing fugitive methane emissions into the atmosphere.

EV prices are falling, and choices are increasing. EV drivers report a really positive driving experience, and B.C.’s charging infrastructure is spreading. If B.C. was to follow Norway’s example, with a well-organized system of incentives, 10 per cent of all new cars sold could be electric. The question is not ‘if,’ but ‘how soon?’

At today’s fuel-prices, a regular car costs $200 a month to lease and $150 for gasoline, which comes to $11 a day. A Nissan Leaf, offered for lease in America for $199 a month, and costing just $10 a month on electricity, comes to $7 a day. With prices like that, anyone who does not drive a leased EV will be losing $4 a day, or $120 a month.

And if you live out in the back-country, where you really need your rugged pick-up truck? They're coming: Tesla has plans for an EV pick-up truck similar to the Ford F-150, and Via Motors already has one on the assembly line. 

The best policy approach to accelerate the EV revolution is simply to set a high standard for fuel efficiency. In Europe, by 2020, new cars will need to produce no more than 95 grams of CO2 per kilometre, reduced from the current 120 g/km. The same approach could be used to reduce emissions to zero, giving auto-manufacturers time to plan and retool. This is not something B.C. could do on its own, however; it would require federal regulation to make it Canada-wide.

Could B.C. Produce Enough Electricity?

Would there be enough electricity if every car and light truck in B.C. were to be electric? If two million electric vehicles each traveled 15,000 kilometres a year at an average 25 kwh per 100 km, each vehicle would use 3,750 kwh a year, totaling 7,500 GWh, compared to the 60,000 GWh that B.C. consumes every year.

Solar PV on half of B.C.’s south-facing rooftops could produce 7,500 GWh a year; alternatively, since a 3 MW wind turbine can produce 7.5 GWh a year, sufficient for 2,000 cars, a thousand turbines could produce the power for two million electric vehicles. A 30 per cent efficiency improvement on every home could free up the same amount of power.

Given the potential for far more travel by bike and transit, a more realistic calculation might be for one million EVs driving 10,000 kilometres a year, resulting in 2,500 GWh of additional demand, or just 4 per cent of B.C.’s current power usage.

The Car-Sharing Revolution

In 1998, just 905 people belonged to carshare groups around the world. By 2012, that number had increased two thousandfold to 1.78 million. By 2020, carsharing revenues are set to hit $6 billion, with12 million members worldwide.

The real breakthrough, however, comes with peer-to-peer carsharing, when people put their cars into a shared rental pool. It started in San Francisco several years ago, and has spread through outfits such as Getaround, Buzzcar, RelayRides and Communauto in Montreal, with owners earning up to $300 a month. It is only a matter of time before it reaches Vancouver and Victoria.

So picture a 100 per cent per cent narrowed, creating space for trees, food and children’s play. With narrower, slower streets come more neighbourhood friendships, more green space, and an increase in our social and ecological wealth. What’s not to like about this future?

Next week: In Part 3, I will explore the more difficult challenge of achieving 100 per cent renewable energy for long-distance trucking, boats, ferries and planes. In Part 4, I will wrap things up by asking how we might be able to achieve all this.

This series originally appeared on the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association website.

Image Credit: Rush hour on the Dunsmuir separated bike lanes by Paul Krueger via Flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.

They’re doing it in Germany: 140 regions of the country have set a goal to become 100 per cent renewable energy regions, covering 30 per cent of Germany’s land and 26 per cent of her people, as we learnt in the June.

Could British Columbia do the same? The climate emergency warnings are dire, and the need is great. When viewed historically, it is clear that the age of fossil fuels represents only the tiniest blip of time. Deep down, we know we need to stop using them.

Here in B.C., 80 per cent of our greenhouse gas emissions—the direct cause of climate change—come from burning fossil fuels, so it’s clear that a transition is needed.

So let’s embark on a mental exercise to see what it might involve. Would the transition away from fossil fuels fatally weaken B.C.’s economy, as some conservative thinkers fear? Worse yet, would it drag us back to the dark ages? Are the fear-mongers right? These are important questions to address.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

This week, I’ll look at electricity and heat. Next week, I’ll tackle transportation.

Electricity—the Easy Part

In British Columbia, we use fossil fuels for three main purposes—electricity, heat and transportation. We are fortunate when it comes to electricity, for our power supply is already 95 per cent renewable, thanks (for better or worse) to B.C.’s big dams, coupled with run-of-river and wind power. The solar revolution will soon reach B.C., and several regions of the province are blessed with great wind, so there will be no problem filling the gap, even when demand increases to cater for a growing population driving a million electric vehicles. More on this later.

The Burrard Thermal Generating Station in Vancouver, which burns gas, is scheduled for closure, and BC Hydro’s two other smaller gas-fired generators at Prince Rupert and Fort Nelson could be phased out. There is also a 275 MW gas-fired generation plant in Campbell River, owned by Capital Power, which could be phased out when its contract with BC Hydro ends in 2022.

We waste a lot of electricity, too, which means we could save it if we wanted to: the average home in B.C. uses 11,000 kilowatt hours a year, which more than twice the average in Britain (4,600 kwh) and three times the German average (3,500 kwh).

Heat for Buildings—the Complicated Part

The next challenge is to substitute renewable energy for the oil and gas we use to heat our homes, and to provide process heat for industry.

In Victoria, Mark and Rob Bernhardt have demonstrated that a passive home that needs 90 per cent less energy for heat can be built for the same effective price as a conventional home. This means that it is possible to set the bar high for all new buildings, with a building code requirement that they be zero carbon, as Britain requires for all buildings by 2020. Over time, this will become the norm for all buildings.

The tougher question is how to retrofit the two million or so existing buildings.

Every house that uses an oil or gas furnace can switch to a solar heat pump, combined with greatly increased insulation to keep the heat in. A solar heat pump is more commonly known as an air-source heat pump, but since it’s the sun that provides the heat, why not call it what it is?

A heat pump can also extract heat from the sea—which is how Brentwood College is heated in Mill Bay on Vancouver Island; from sewage—which is how Olympic Village is heated in Vancouver; and from the ground beneath a building or parking lot, which is quite common. The use of heat pumps will increase electrical demand, but meeting the increased demand will not be one of our problems on the road to becoming a 100 per cent renewable energy region. 

In The Hague, Holland, the small town of Duindorp has built a district ocean heat system that is heating 800 low-income homes, using the same heat pump technology as Brentwood College. Any community near a large body of water could do the same.

How Could We Achieve It?

Technical possibility is one thing: but how to turn it into reality? People are notoriously reluctant to turn their lives upside down for a home retrofit unless there is an important driver, such as a failed system. An increase in B.C.’s $30-a-tonne carbon tax would persuade some people to make the change, but equally, we could learn from San Francisco’s experience, where they have required an owner to bring a house up to the new energy code at the point of sale for over 30 years without any great social revolt.

Requiring a building to be upgraded to zero-carbon heat as a condition of sale would make the retrofit affordable for the seller, who would roll the cost into the sale-price; it would also make it affordable for the buyer, who would offset the increased price with lower energy bills. It would spread the load for the building industry, enabling them to train new staff knowing they had years of work ahead of them; and it would reach the bulk of B.C. homes, since the average Canadian family moves house five times during their lifetime, or once every ten years.

District Heat Using Renewable Energy

Replacing oil and gas in commercial buildings, apartment buildings and condos presents a higher order of challenge. One approach is district heat piped in from a central installation, sourced from industrial waste heat, water or ground-source heat pumps, biogas from composting, or the incineration of biomass. There are plenty of examples in Scandinavia, where they like to incinerate their garbage. In Sweden, however, recycling has become so effective that only 4 per cent of the garbage stream is left for incineration, and they have had to start importing Norway’s garbage to keep the plants going.

This type of building also rarely changes hands, so requiring an upgrade linked to change of ownership won’t work; instead, we require that commercial and multi-unit residential building owners commission an audit every ten years to address building energy efficiency, and receive grants, loans and tax incentives for an upgrade.

Year-Round Solar Heating – Is This The Future?

Looking ahead, seasonal solar heat storage is perhaps the most exciting prospect on the horizon. At Drake Landing, part of a subdivision in Okotoks, south of Calgary, 52 homes built to the R-2000 standard collect more solar heat than they need during the summer. The heat is pumped into an insulated underground storage system with 144 boreholes and brought back in winter, providing 90 per cent of the heating needs. The same is happening in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Austria, sometimes for a whole community or a hospital using a district heat system, sometimes for a single building.

The European Solar Thermal Industry Federation has a goal that by 2030, 50 per cent of all new buildings will use seasonal solar heat storage, and 50 per cent of retrofits will do the same. If you want to see how much progress has been made, check out this database of 131 large-scale solar heating plants, the oldest—in Vaxjo, Sweden—dating back to 1979.

What’s driving Europe’s progress? In March 2007 a binding target was adopted by the 27 EU countries requiring that 20 per cent of their final energy consumption should come from renewable energy by 2020. We need to do the same. British Columbia has an overall goal to reduce GHGs by 33 per cent by 2020, but we have no sectoral goals. To achieve the same kind of technology progress as Europe, we might adopt a goal that every regional district should meet 20 per cent of its building heat needs from renewable energy by 2020, excluding baseboard heaters, rising to 40 per cent by 2025 and 100 per cent by 2030.

Heat for Industry—the Even More Complicated Part

So what about the high-temperature heat that industry needs, currently provided by burning gas? This brings us to the highest level of challenge. In May 2014, the Carbon Trust produced a useful summary of industrial renewable heat progress.  Globally, renewables supply 9.5 per cent of the world’s industrial heat, the rest being provided by coal (45 per cent), natural gas (23 per cent) and oil (16 per cent).

B.C.’s pulp and paper sector already uses biomass from its own wastes to create heat, burning black liquor (a waste from converting pulpwood into paper) and wood wastes.

For the very intensive heat up to 800°C that’s needed to make steel and iron, countries are embracing a variety of means, ranging from burning charcoal and biomass in Brazil to burning bio-liquids in Germany and using concentrated solar energy in Italy. Making cement requires even more intense heat, in excess of 1450°C, which is currently produced by burning oil, gas, coal and coke. In Brazil and the EU there is some use of biomass instead; Germany and Poland are burning organic municipal wastes.

Is It Possible in B.C.?

How much heat of this kind might be available in B.C.? The answer as far as I know is that no-one has done the research to see if we could match B.C.’s industrial heat needs to our renewable heat resources, factoring in the distances involved in trucking biomass from a forest to an industrial plant. At the super-sustainable Dockside Green neighbourhood development in downtown Victoria, where the Nexterra district heat plant was planned to operate on biomass, the rule of thumb was 100 kilometres trucking distance. The limit would change if or when trucking develops long-distance electric drive, but that’s not even on the horizon yet.

As for what’s on the horizon, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a way to make steam from direct solar energy using a cheap sponge-like surface made from foam with a graphite surface that sits on top of water. The sponge draws the water up and the graphite collects concentrated sunlight, and when they meet they generate steam. It’s obviously not a year-round system, but it shows that there is innovation going on, deep in the research labs where brilliant minds get to play.

Would it Destroy Jobs and the Economy?

Most of the transition described above would create new jobs, and since the renewable energy would be generated in B.C., the money spent would remain within the provincial economy, creating demand as it circulates.

The main situation where the transition could create stress is if an imposed requirement created higher costs, causing a business to lose orders, a situation that could be addressed with price and tax incentives.

Where there's a will, there's a zero-carbon way. 

Stay tuned for next week's installment on greening B.C.'s transportation.

This series originally appeared on the B.C. Sustainable Energy Association website.

Image Credit: Mrs TeePot via Flickr.

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.