Free heat in cold climates.
The data centres that sprinkle the globe and that are the engines of the internet are famous for the incredibe amounts of heat they generate - and usually waste. For colder climates, that's an even greater waste.
But when TELUS looked at building a new office tower, and combined its wits with an innovative developer (Westbank Developments) and an innovative energy developer (FortisBC Alternative Energy Services), they found a way to capture the heat from the neighbouring TELUS data centre in order to provide space heating and water heating services for the new building's tenants.
The result? One million square feet of office, residential, and retail space that has 80% of all its heating needs met with waste heat.
Add to that a LEED Platinum building design, 200+ solar panels, and the fact that the project was innovatively financed with $225 million in green bonds (the first time in North America that green mortgage bonds have been used to support real estate financing), and you get a model fro clean innovation adoption.
How can we help more Canadian clean innovation get off the ground?
Turning bright ideas into demonstration projects that can then be scaled up, commercialized, and adopted takes a lot of time and a lot of capital. Companies and entrepreneurs need support at key junctures to successfully go through this process.
Accelerating clean innovation in Canada means helping the bright idea-makers turn their ideas into marketable products. Find out how through Smart Prosperity's work on Accelerating Clean Innovation.
Get a tour of the waste-heat system in TELUS' 2015 Sustainability Report.
