ASET Technology Alberta Fall 2020 - 15

feature

A few of EchoHaven's
future-focused homes. The
houses use technology like
solar systems and air source
heat pumps to perform more
cleanly and efficiently.
Image courtesy of EchoHaven
Development.

last until around 2050. However, the best way to make a
cleaner, high-efficiency building is to start with the bones.
"You can have much better paybacks if you do that with the
design phase," he says.
"Let's say you have a wall: If you insulated that wall with
more insulation, made a thicker wall, it'll cost you much less
when you do it while you're designing the building. If you
have to retrofit it and you take off the siding, put new siding
and so on, it's much more expensive."
Stoyke says that this is the standard that commercial and
residential builders should adhere to across the board. "We
definitely should not be building buildings right now that are
not climate ready, and we're still doing that," he says.
Besides Blatchford's buildings, another part of their sustainable strategy comes from transportation design. This
is important to address, given that transportation accounts
for an even larger proportion of GHG emissions than buildings (23% in 2016). Anjali Varghese is the manager of planning and infrastructure of Blatchford. She says the development's team has worked on this issue as well.

"We've tried to do a bit of everything,"
Varghese says. "This is not just a
community that uses renewable energy,
but we've tried to make sure that it's a
community that is really designed for
people to walk and bike and be outside
and be connected to nature."

Varghese says when designing an urban community, it's important to look at both physical and cultural climate. She
points to the connection people have with cars as a part of
Edmonton's culture.
"People probably still want to own cars, but that doesn't
mean that they need to use their car every day," Varghese
says. "We can still have a community that's really geared
for walking and biking and making sure we have amenities
within the community so they're not leaving as much. But
there's still places for them to park their car or do those
sorts of things."
Stoyke has noticed this cultural difference in cities as well.
"In terms of Canada and the US, I think we are fairly similar in the sense that we've had a very car-centric design of
urban planning," he says. "That means of course, you have
to support a larger and larger infrastructure, basically that
municipal infrastructure such as sewage, water, electricity
and so on."
Addressing these citywide transport troubles is key to
avoiding a situation of largescale congestion, or massive
areas taken up by lots. Stoyke points to the example of Los
Angeles as a city that could stand to lose a few pounds of
vehicle infrastructure, given that 14 per cent of the area's
county land is dedicated to parking.
"Trains, buses, those are ways we can make transportation
more sustainable and reduce the number of cars and also
reduce the amount of parking," he says.
Alberta city planners are reading from the same playbook
as Stoyke. The city of St. Albert recently rolled seven electric buses out onto their streets, with plans to convert their

TECHNOLOGY ALBERTA | FALL 2020 | 15

https://www.sencanada.ca/content/sen/committee/421/ENEV/reports/TransportationReport_FINAL_e.pdf https://la.curbed.com/2015/11/30/9895842/how-much-parking-los-angeles https://www.electricautonomy.ca/2020/06/11/electric-bus-fleet-receives-albertas-top-environmental-honour/ https://www.electricautonomy.ca/2020/06/11/electric-bus-fleet-receives-albertas-top-environmental-honour/

ASET Technology Alberta Fall 2020

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