Project Showcase

Deployment of low cost IIoT sensors to measure air quality and occupancy inside Red Deer Polytechnic’s Alternative Energy Lab (AEL) building for optimizing HVAC use. The technology is vendor agnostic and use advanced data analytics model (including AI) to efficiently control (real-time) HVAC unit based on zonal air quality and occupancy. Minimal intervention and HVAC retrofitting is required which makes this approach economically feasible.

The project incorporates patented ZERO-MIXING technology into its HVAC system retrofit, a departure from conventional systems that often struggle with inefficiencies associated with traditional water-mixing configurations. This innovative approach enhances operational efficiency, leading to substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, aligning with SSRIA environmentally sustainable goals. Furthermore, the project prioritizes minimizing embodied carbon by strategically optimizing system design, minimizing material usage, and selecting low-carbon building materials whenever feasible. This holistic approach addresses both operational and embodied carbon emissions, contributing to a more sustainable and environmentally responsible building.

Ecopilot software is an add-on to an existing Building Automation System (BAS) that uses real-time data, indoor wireless temperature sensors, 5-day weather forecasts to exploit the building thermal mass to provide heating and maintain cooling within higher mass concrete building structures. The technology consists of hardware and software containing real time AI (artificial intelligence) algorithm that sends temperature setpoint offsets to central HVAC systems and creates dynamic scheduling of start and stop times of central HVAC equipment, such as boilers, chillers or AHU’s (air handling units).

This project will install six advanced micro-wind turbines on a small commercial building to evaluate the feasibility of building-integrated wind energy in Alberta. By analyzing real-world performance data, the study will provide critical insights into efficiency, reliability, and economic viability. The collected data will be used to develop an economic model and a system sizing tool, supporting future adoption and optimization of micro wind power solutions.

Design and construction of a very low embodied carbon, all electric, high performance (Passive House Principles), net zero on site energy, affordable, missing middle, garage and workshop with legal backyard secondary suite above. Built on an existing single family urban lot in Calgary, using prefabricated building envelope products.

Implement an integrated suite of key innovations in multifamily construction that help overcome regulatory & industry hurdles to make significant reductions in embodied carbon, and reach the goal of Net Zero operation. Demonstrate and present a Net Zero building specification for the missing middle stock building programs currently being developed in association with the City of Calgary, MDDL, Alberta Ecotrust, Passive House Alberta, and NRCAN/LEEP.

Kanas Shelter Corp. has acquired an office tower in downtown Calgary for the purposes of converting to residential units and seeks to implement next generation energy technologies with the same goals of reducing energy costs, providing energy security and emissions reduction.

This project seeks to implement a micro-grid including the following systems

• Fuel cell for heat and power (first-of-kind in this market)
• Electricity storage
• Variable Refrigerant Flow for heating and cooling

This combination of leading-edge technologies represents an innovative solution to drive down energy costs while also significantly reducing carbon emissions.  Calgary has approved the conversion of many office towers to residential. This solution will help to demonstrate that the legacy technologies, while well understood, are now not the best solutions in our journey to reduce emissions.

The Eco Positive Home project demonstrates energy system solution with onsite generation combined with seasonal and daily thermal storage that overcomes issues with heat pump operation in cold temperatures while maintaining a small but high utilization connection to the grid. The water conservation elements will reduce water consumption by 50%.

The primary objective is to develop, validate, prove, and then deploy the energy and water solutions across a range of scales. This will include the development of packaged systems and solutions which may then be deployed by mechanical and plumbing contractors across Canada and abroad.

The energy systems solution is intended to generate a negative utility and effectively negative carbon due to the displaced carbon from the home and the two EVs it powers. Further benefits include grid stabilization and addressing peak demand issues at the distribution level of the grid through thermal storage and load shifting.

A lower life cycle cost system with multiple redundant low carbon energy sources will provide climate resiliency and community resiliency due to grid impacts and larger scale deployments that will be unlocked by this proof of concept.

The project innovation is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Site built retrofits are relatively straightforward. You build to what’s there and solve the problems you encounter as you go.

Panelized solutions take a lot of expensive upfront work. This project is innovative in that it builds on the project team’s experience to take advantage of the benefits of both.

The project reduces greenhouse gas emissions by making the wall upgrade portion of the deep energy retrofits more affordable and more likely to happen. It does this be reducing costs below what is currently done.

A range of techniques for upgrading exterior wall insulation have been and are being tried: site installed rigid insulation, both mineral fiber and foam sheets with furring of some kind to attached siding, stick built 2×4 walls supported at grade on treated boxes, site made Larson trusses, I joists, and a couple of panelized solutions. All of these options are expensive and require substantial on site labour.

For the site built techniques, the existing cladding usually needs to be removed and disposed of and there is considerable skilled labour required to cut, fit and install the materials. Panelization requires exacting measurement of the existing building (usually digital) and careful translation of those measurements to panel drawings in order to ensure a good fit. There is also the need for the precise installation of some kind of support bracket, a facility big enough to fabricate the wall panels, trucking to transport them and a crane to install them.

The hybrid component based approach addresses some of these obstacles to reduce cost and complexity as follows:

– Much reduced demolition labour and disposal volume.
– Simple prefabricated components that can be made almost anywhere and that can be transported and installed with minimal equipment. -Components that will reduce installation time over all, especially finicky work from scaffolding.
– Components that can be installed quickly by entry level and lower skilled workers.
– Standardize the treatments for as many of the junctions, utility and service penetrations and building conditions as we can to reduce the labour and thinking required to maintain insulation continuity, improve water resistance and increased air tightness.
– Formalize installation and completion procedures that improve efficiency.
– Uses material efficiently.

In the final phase, the project team tests the idea of simple panel like modules. The expansion potential is enormous but will depend on the size of the market for deep retrofits in Canada and the northern US. That market is dependent mostly on cost and affordability. The project team is confident they can reduce the cost of the wall component of deep retrofits but they won’t know by how much until we test and refine it.

This project adapts the Energiesprong panelized retrofit technique brought to Canada by Peter Amerongen (ReNu Engineering and Retrofit Canada). The prefabricated panelized retrofits use natural, low embodied carbon wood fiber insulation in order to increase efficiency of production. Demonstrating these innovative panels on different types of buildings (1 fourplex and 1 single family dwelling) will not only impact these buildings but also contribute to the larger aggregation of panelized retrofit projects, further de-risking and facilitating its uptake.

Wood fiber, a high performing insulator and carbon sequestering material, is often deemed too costly for residential retrofits, as is exterior insulation more broadly. The project targets barriers such as high costs, low awareness of bio-based materials, and limited industry training, which hinder the adoption of exterior insulation/retrofits and deter building owners. The project will employ prefabrication to enhance the use of wood fiber insulation, promoting a shift away from synthetic materials. Prefabrication reduces waste and site variables, maximizing efficiency and reducing costs.

By integrating innovative prefabrication methods with wood fiber insulation for panelized retrofits, the project aims to lower embodied and operational GHG emissions beyond what is achievable with current practices. By retrofitting existing structures with exterior insulation, energy consumption for heating and cooling decrease and operational emissions decrease significantly. The use of wood-fiber insulation minimizes the embodied carbon associated with insulation, especially compared to typical exterior insulation materials like EPS.

These two demonstration projects (1 fourplex and 1 single family dwelling) will be monitored and their performance catalogued along with the production and installation process in a case study, leveraging the expertise and networks of our project team to ensure objectives are met and resulting knowledge is shared widely.

This project demonstrates an all-electric combined HVAC and domestic hot water system using a single heat pump for both new and existing multi-unit residential buildings, which provides low operational and embodied carbon at a lower cost than competing all-electric solutions.

The project comprises two innovative elements:

– a single heat pump integrated with a ventilation system to provide the entire building’s heating, cooling, DHW, and ventilation needs
– cold air distribution (CAD), which uses very low temperatures to increase the cooling capacity of the air delivered to indoor spaces, reducing duct size and fan and pump energy.

Project objectives include:

1. Confirm the cost savings compared to the typical alternative all-electric solution.
2. Confirm predicted energy and carbon performance is achieved.
3. Gather, analyse, and report on monitoring data to ensure occupant acceptance; optimize operation of pilot system; and inform optimized design and operation of future installations.
4. Develop and disseminate exportable knowledge and products to support solution scale-up.

Traditionally, concrete has been the predominant material for housing foundation/basement construction.

In Alberta, on average, over 35,000 new homes start construction annually. 75% of them are single-family, semi-detached and townhome units. The total embodied carbon of concrete foundations in these homes is estimated to be 198,410 tCO2e. Replacing concrete with NLT (Nail-Laminated Timber) for building foundations can reduce emissions in three ways.

1) Reduce embodied carbon of the building by eliminating the usage of concrete. A typical 2,200-square-foot single-family home in Edmonton region uses 41 cubic meters of concrete and 530 meters of steel rebars for the basement, resulting in an embodied carbon of these two materials is 12.95 tonnes CO2e. In contrast, constructing the same basement using NLT would result in an embodied carbon of only 1.10 tonne CO2e, less than 10% of using concrete and steel.

2) The NLT basement would use approximately 17 cubic meters of lumber and sheathing, storing and estimated 15 tonne of CO2e in the structure.

3) Cast-in-place concrete requires at least four-days of winter heating in the winter for curing, but NLT foundation does not. By eliminating four days of heating, while NLT foundations do not. This will save 630 liters of propane, reducing GHG emissions by 0.8 tonnes per basement in the winter.

In partnership with the University of Alberta, Landmark plans to construct 60 NLT foundations with various housing types in 2025 and 2026, reducing embodied carbon by 1,103 tonnes CO2e.

Despite wooden foundations, PWFs, have been accepted by Canadian building codes for nearly 40 years, they have not been widely adopted due to general public’s misconceptions about durability of using wood in foundation and concerns that wood is prone to moisture damages as underground structure. These concerns can be addressed through demonstration projects and public education on the features and benefits of mass timber.

This project aims to demonstrate a high-performance mass timber foundation solution using prefabricated Nailed-Laminated (NLT) panels for buildings covered under Part 9 (Housing and Small Buildings) of the Alberta Building Code. Sixty NLT foundations will be constructed for various housing types, starting with simpler walkout townhomes and progressing to more complex single-family homes, to showcase the effectiveness and versatility of the NLT solution.

The goal of the project is to demonstrate a high-performance NLT foundation solution for residential housing and prove its viability. To achieve this, the project has three key objectives:

1) Obtain regulatory in Alberta

2) Construct 60 NLT foundations with different housing types over two years

3) Demonstrate the advantages and economic viability of BLT foundations to support large scale adoption