ASET Technology Alberta Fall 2020 - 14

A site plan of EchoHaven from 2005. This
sustainable Calgary community now has
17 of its 25 units occupied.
Image courtesy of EchoHaven
Development.

The neighbourhood of Blatchford aims to check off many
of these boxes for better buildings, and superior energy
systems for those buildings. The 536-acre development in
Edmonton is being designed by a team from the city with
the goal of creating a "sustainable community that uses
100% renewable energy, is carbon neutral, significantly reduces its ecological footprint, and empowers residents to
pursue a range of sustainable lifestyle choices," according
to its website.
A large piece of this sustainability strategy comes from
Blatchford's district energy sharing system (DESS), a landmark heating and cooling system that will replace all of the
traditional gas heating and cooling devices. The DESS is a
centralized system that uses geothermal heat to warm up
homes and then distributes that heat around to whichever
home needs it.
"There's a borehole field underneath our storm pond [with] 570
holes, 150 meters deep, that they're harvesting the heat from
the ground to use as the energy source for the first stage," Tom
Lumsden, Blatchford's development manager, explains.
This won't be the only system of its kind in Blatchford. Lumsden says a second district energy system will soon join it,
this one's heat rising from a surprising source.
"The next energy centre that's going to be built is actually
going to harvest the heat from sewage," Lumsden says.
"There's a couple of huge sewers that run underneath
Blatchford, [and] have for about 100 years. And they're going to tap into the heat from the sewage to provide the energy source for the next group of homes and buildings."
On the outskirts of Calgary, a sustainable community of a
different kind exists, called EchoHaven. The community got

14 | FALL 2020 | TECHNOLOGY ALBERTA

its start when a group of six families got together twenty
years prior to find out how they could build up sustainable
housing.
What began as one acreage developed slowly into a community of sustainable homes, with the first move-in happening in late 2010. Brian Taylor, the president of Echo-Logic
Land Corporation, EchoHaven's developer, says that like the
Blatchford houses, there are those in EchoHaven that operate with no gas line.
These homes are able to operate without gas through a
combination of solar power, stronger insulation and a technology called air source heat pumps.
"They [the pumps] work kind of like a refrigerator, where a
refrigerator is taking the cold out of a box and dumping it
into the room. And so to us, we take air from outside, and
dump it into the room," Taylor explains.
Besides energy systems, a large part of sustainable buildings has to do with the goal of net zero construction, where
the annual energy costs of a building are equal to the
amount of energy it generates. This is a hefty task, but one
that Godo Stoyke has tinkered on for the past few decades.
Stoyke is the president of Carbon Busters Inc., one of the
development companies creating buildings in Blatchford.
Carbon Busters has been around since the early '90s. In
that time, Stoyke has worked on projects in Canada, Europe
and the United States.
For the first twenty years of Carbon Buster's activity, the
company focused on retrofitting existing buildings to be
more energy efficient. Stoyke notes this is an important job,
given that most buildings created recently are expected to

ASET Technology Alberta Fall 2020

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