Centre hardly offered solutions, businessman says

Local business owners claim the Energy Solutions Centre is solutions-less, after their attempts to work with the government body on green infrastructure projects have proved fruitless.

Local business owners claim the Energy Solutions Centre is solutions-less, after their attempts to work with the government body on green infrastructure projects have proved fruitless.

The centre is a branch of the territorial Department of Energy, Mines and Resources.

Its mandate is to encourage Yukoners to be more energy-efficient by providing information and education, conducting research projects and working co-operatively with federal, territorial, First Nation, provincial and municipal government organizations to deliver programs.

In 2006, Frank Turner, a high-profile dog musher and owner of Muktuk Adventures, went to the centre with a proposal for a pilot project to be housed on his Takhini River property.

If successful, the project would make the Muktuk ranch completely “green”, using only emissions-free systems to create electricity.

But Turner said he received minimal response from the centre, which eventually referred him to Yukon College’s Cold Climate Research Innovation Centre.

The Muktuk bed and breakfast has been off the grid for 10 years, using photovoltaic solar panels to help meet the ranch’s electricity needs.

The panels convert solar radiation into electricity, which is stored in batteries to be used later by guests and staff.

This year, Turner added a solar-powered hot water system integrated with a wood-burning boiler.

The water is heated by solar panels on the roof of the main building, and unlike the photovoltaic panels, the hot water panels work even on a cloudy day.

“It’s like magic. It’s like alchemy,” said Turner. “You’ve got the sun, even when it’s cloudy, and all of a sudden, you go from the sun to a cup of tea. It’s beautiful.”

A high-efficiency boiler also contributes to heating the water that serves the building, effectively reducing the electricity consumption.

However, the nearly $200,000 in infrastructure is not enough to meet the ranch’s energy requirements, and a diesel generator fills in the gaps when the solar panels fail to keep the batteries fully charged.

The generator burns fossil fuels for approximately three or four hours a day in the summer, and about eight to 10 hours in the winter, when energy demands are high and sunshine is scarce.

But Turner said he hopes to one day be completely emissions-free without plugging into the grid, which is mostly fed by hydroelectric power.

“There’s nothing in the world that would give me more personal satisfaction than achieving that goal,” he said.

After an exciting discussion with a client in 2006, Turner said, he thought he was closer than ever to achieving that goal.

The client was an English aeronautical engineer who was on holiday at the Muktuk ranch.

The engineer took an interest in his host’s energy-conscious infrastructure and suggested a year-round underwater turbine could possibly replace the diesel generator. He even sent Turner some drawings of what the instream micro-hydro system might look like.

With the turbine located beneath the ice that covers the river for much of the year, Turner could get electricity from it in the winter months, when energy needs are greatest.

Turner took the engineer’s idea to the centre. He asked the government to use some of its resources to develop the experimental turbine-powered generator, which would be located as a pilot project in the Takhini River near Turner’s property.

If the project worked, the generator could then be used on other rivers in the Yukon and across the North, Turner suggested.

Colin McDowell, the centre’s director, said when Turner proposed the idea in July 2006, centre employees set out to do some research on existing and emerging technologies.

They held discussions with Canmet, the country’s largest research centre on clean and renewable energy, as well as the Water Survey of Canada and multiple suppliers of in-stream turbines.

The technologies they looked into “didn’t appear to offer a lot of optimism for that particular situation,” said McDowell.

They relayed this information to Turner, who put them in touch with the English engineer.

McDowell said the engineer responded with “some rough-scale drawings of what he thought should work. And admitted that, while he was interested in that kind of stuff, he was by no means an expert.”

The centre had the designs reviewed by other engineers, but received few comments and ended their research on Turner’s project in September 2008.

“At this stage, our conclusion was there was no obvious technology that would present itself as viable,”
said McDowell.

Although the centre does conduct some research projects, McDowell said it focuses more on adopting technologies that have been proven in the South and may be viable in the North, and the results of the centre’s research actually seemed to disprove Turner’s project.

Furthermore, the centre doesn’t have the resources to enter into a partnership like the one Turner proposed.

Turner said he was frustrated it took the centre so long to get back to him, and that it wasn’t willing to put more into researching the project and turning an idea into a reality.

He did end up talking with people at the Cold Climate Innovation Centre, but nothing ever came of those conversations either.

“I thought it was a good thing to try to develop renewable resources here,” said Turner. “Apparently there’s not too many people in government that share that feeling, even though we’re supposed to have these programs.”

McDowell said centre employees have been frustrated by the experience as well, and there is no one the centre has worked harder for than Turner.

“We haven’t been able to win in any way,” said McDowell. “We put a lot of work into it, we’ve put a lot of time and energy into it ... and yet we’ve had complaints. I personally don’t really understand it.”

Turner is not the only business owner who has been frustrated by his interactions with the centre.

“They are absolutely, totally and irrevocably useless,” said Bruce Henry of Soapy’s Car Wash at Centennial Motors in Whitehorse.

Last summer, Henry went to the centre looking for information about the money he could save by installing photovoltaic solar panels and a high-efficiency boiler to heat the hot water at his car wash, he said.

Henry said the first few times he went to the centre, he was referred to a government brochure rack.

“They had no experience with it,” he said. “They had no knowledge of what I would save. Nothing.”

Henry offered to go into a partnership with the centre, using his solar panels as a pilot project.

He proposed that if the centre made a financial contribution to his solar panels, it could collected data from the project to distribute it to the public.

The centre said it would not make a financial contribution to the project, but Henry could compile the data himself and give it to the centre, which would distribute it to the general public.

Henry wasn’t interested.

McDowell said the centre couldn’t support Henry’s project because the technology wasn’t innovative enough and is already proven in the North. The Gold Rush Inn uses solar panels to heat its water for many months of the year.

McDowell said he didn’t think taxpayers would have viewed funding the solar panels as an appropriate use of their money.

Henry went ahead with the project anyway and has used solar power to heat the water at Soapy’s for the past two summers.

Turner still hopes to one day be completely green, if not for himself, then for his five granddaughters.

“That’s part of the motivation ... to leave things a little better for them,” he said. “Because I have no idea, the way we’re going, what it’s going to be like in
a few years.”