GREEN BENEFITS
UBC is not just a leader in research for smart cities, it’s leading by example
More than just an institution of higher learning, the University of British Columbia empowers its students and faculty in ground breaking research that endeavours to make an impact on real world issues. In part two of a series, we look at UBC’s world-leading sustainability efforts and the potential for the university’s initiatives to have an impact across the globe. Burning wood has been a primary energy source for humankind since time immemorial. Even today, it remains an essential means to cook food and heat homes in many parts of the developing world.
Just ask University of British Columbia engineering professor Walter Mérida. “I come from a place where energy is carbon-intensive,” says the university’s director of its Clean Energy Research Centre (CERC), a hub dedicated to the science of environmentally friendly sources. The soot and smog caused by fossil fuels in Guatemala City — where he grew up — serves as a constant reminder of the goals of the centre.
“Billions of people around the world are living in very basic conditions, and they still use firewood to provide their energy services. Most of the growth in the next century will come from regions where this is commonplace.”
The negative implications are numerous, from air pollution to climate change to ill health among populations cloistered together in fastgrowing, sprawling urban landscapes expanding to accommodate more people migrating from the countryside to the city.
At UBC, what has been a source of air pollution and climate change, is being turned into a sustainable energy initiative. About five years ago, the Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility (BRDF) was deployed under the campus as a Living Laboratory initiative, connecting the university’s operations to the research capacity on campus. The BRDF uses waste wood — sawdust and bark, for instance — to provide heat for the university.
The initiative is just one of many ongoing experiments taking place at UBC, aiming to move cities around the world forward — not only making them more environmentally sustainable, but ‘intelligent’ too.
For Mérida, clean energy is really a means to an end. “It’s about the services people want: transportation, health care, entertainment and everything else,” he explains. “Clean energy is the link that connects all of these needs sustainably and, in turn, promotes economic, social and environmental stability as cities grow.”
The Clean Energy Research Centre (CERC) is a key pool of knowledge, talent and research with more than 50 world-leading scientists, engineers and other academics engaged in finding applicable solutions to the clean-energy challenges of today. Alongside the researchers at the centre are dozens of graduate students from across a wide variety of disciplines, including engineering and business.
But CERC and other sustainability initiatives at UBC are not just relegated to the ivory towers of academia. Industry is a key partner in the research. “Rather than try to push technological innovation from the campus to the world, we try to look at the world and figure out what the big challenges are,” Mérida says. Only through this kind of engagement can new ideas make a difference in the lives of billions of city dwellers and beyond, he adds.
UBC is already proving change is possible. The campus — with more than 60,000 students, faculty and staff — is a city unto itself, generating its own utilities and related services for the most part sustainably.
In 1997, UBC became the first Canadian university to develop a sustainability policy. In 2007, it met its Kyoto targets despite concurrent growth in student population and infrastructure. In 2010, UBC created the University Sustainability Initiative. Since then, UBC has set the most aggressive greenhousegas emission reduction targets of any of the top 40 universities in the world, achieving a further 33 per cent reduction by 2015 and is on track to becoming a carbonneutral campus by 2050.
“For the last 10 years we’ve been developing this model of using our infrastructures on campus to develop emerging technologies,” says professor James Tansey, executive director of UBC Sustainability Initiative and the Centre for Social Innovation and Impact Investing at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.
“The concept is that the campus is a laboratory for validating and testing new technologies and ideas.” The Bioenergy Research and Demonstration Facility stateof-the-art energy facility that converts waste wood into carbon neutral energy is just one example of the living laboratory concept applied to realworld problems.
But UBC is home to many other sustainability initiatives, including leveraging big data and growing connectivity that foster better city planning. These ongoing experiments are taking place at “test bed sites” across UBC’s campus, Mérida says. Among them is research involving electric cars and ‘smart’ parkades. “Parkades and cars are two of the most under-utilized assets in any city around the world,” he adds. The study aims to boost their utility by using cars and parkades to store renewable electricity, thereby powering cities and vehicles alike. These ‘smart’ parkades would feature industrialscale battery banks that would store power generated by solar and wind, charging vehicles and providing power back to the grid.
That’s why UBC is investing tens of millions in infrastructure — all of it aimed at moving the needle forward toward smarter, more sustainable cities. Tansey adds: “If cities are better managed, if traffic is better, if buildings are more intelligently integrated into infrastructure, then the potential for efficiency savings with big environmental benefits are huge.”