Sustainability : Innovation + Job News

On the heels of many of the world’s global powers finalizing the agreements of COP21, an ambitious proposal dedicated to easing the effects of man-made climate change, researchers in Toronto are easing the issue in a development closer to home. 

Last week, York University unveiled a smart grid solar-powered charging station, developed by the university’s own Faculty of Environmental Studies. Part of what makes the charging station unique was that it was developed specifically with Canada’s cold winters in mind, and as such, was created with more durability, according to York University professor and lead researcher Jose Etcheverry, whose team developed the smart grid charging station. 

The issue with creating effective solar panels for Canada is not necessarily the solar panels themselves, but what Etcheverry calls the balance of components. While the balance of components might work well in warmer climates, it may not see as much 
return in a colder climate like Canada’s.

“Picture using a solar-EV-battery system, like the one we deployed at York University, in the far north of our country, in the Sahara and Atacama deserts, the jungles of Costa Rica and the schools of Mumbai,” says Etcheverry. “For that to happen we require good design that yields durability, reliability, beauty, local support and modularity. These are all key design and performance parameters that we are trying to distill and foster with our installation.”

Data from the station will be used to inform the development of more smart grid solutions and expand the presence of electric charging stations, which will be connected to the power grid at York University. The station is designed in a way that it’s easily to install in most parking areas. “We are gathering technical and performance data from the systems to help inform the development of smart solutions in municipalities nearby and faraway,” says Etchevarry. “We are very open to innovative collaboration and look forward to new partners.”

At the unveiling of the station last week, Ontario minister for transportation Steven Del Duca says that projects like this will help ease the inevitable transition to clean energy. 

“The Ontario government is supportive of green, clean, innovative technology that will transform the way we live, move, work and adapt to our environment,” Del Duca said at the time. “Charging stations that are fast, reliable and affordable will encourage Ontarians to purchase electric vehicles, reducing greenhouse gas pollution and keeping our air clean.”

Toronto Hydro is teaming up with Toronto startup Hydrostor to launch the world’s first underwater energy storage system. Three kilometres off Toronto Island and located 55 metres underwater, Hydrostor's system is connected to Toronto Hydro's electricity grid, and uses compressed air and the pressure of water to run its system. The technology works by running electricity through a compressor and converting it into compressed air. The compressed air is sent underwater where it is stored in large balloon-like structures, made out of the same type of material used in marine lift bags to raise shipwrecks. When electricity is needed again, the weight of the water pushes the air to the surface through a large pipe and an expander converts the air back into electricity.

“ As this technology is a world first, we’ll be evaluating the system’s versatility during the pilot project under real world operating conditions,” says Jack Simpson, director of generation and capacity planning. “

The technology has the potential to create a new generation of clean energy, as it produces zero emissions and stores electricity during off-peak hours when demand is low and electricity is cheapest. The electricity can then be released again during short-term power outages or high-demand times.

“In these situations, the HydroStor system would be able to release stored energy and provide the grid with an additional resource to help limit peak energy prices, improve power quality and help restore power during an area outage,” says Simpson. 

It will remain there until a two-year pilot study is complete.

Nanoleaf, a Toronto-based green tech startup, has developed the Nanoleaf Smarter Kit, what the company calls “the most energy-efficient light build in the world.”

Currently, Apple is moving into the smart home industry with its HomeKit offering — a framework for developers that allows communication and control for connected accessories in a user’s home — and Nanoleaf has received one of the first seals of approval from Apple to develop their Smarter Kit using the HomeKit.

The Smarter Kit allows users to control the lights in a user’s home with Siri voice commands, set lights in interesting ways depending on the context (such as dimmed lights for a date night) and the ability to control lights with customized names; for example, one could turn off the lights in “Sarah’s room” only.

Nanoleaf CTO Anders Ohrn says that the company chose to integrate Apple HomeKit into their product, instead of making their own app, to remain competitive in the smart home evolution. “By integrating the Smarter Kit with the Apple HomeKit protocol, it’s possible to control the lights with voice commands like ‘set bedroom lights to 20 percent’” says Ohrn. “Too many devices on the market are incompatible with other devices, which force people to buy products from only that manufacturer. HomeKit is an opportunity to be part of something bigger.”

The light also has a unique geometric shape — a design that Ohrn says is not just to look cool. “Merging the worlds of design and engineering has always been an integral part of our creation process,” says Ohrn. “What most people don't know is that the dodecahedron shape is more than just aesthetics, there are also many technical benefits for the user. The shape gives the bulb its own heat dissipation system as well as 360 degrees of equal light distribution without any inefficiencies.”

At the end of last year, Yonge Street Media featured five Toronto startups we thought would make a big splash in 2015. More than half a year after that piece was originally published, one of the companies included in that list, OTI Lumonics, has finally shipped its first product.

OTI’s Aerelight A1 OLED desk lamp can now be purchased for $299 CAD from the company’s website.

Besides being able to claim that it is the world’s first OLED desk lamp, the A1 includes a couple of nifty features not usually present in your everyday lamp. For one, the entirety of its aluminum frame is touch-sensitive; instead of turning the lamp on and off, adjusting the panel’s brightness is done by simply touching the frame. It also supports both the Qi and PMA charging standards, meaning that those that have an Android smartphone can charge it by placing it on the lamp’s base (Apple, unfortunately, does not currently support either of those standards with the iPhone).

Initially envisioned as a way to help the average person understand the organic light-emitting diode technology the company has been working on, Albert Lam, a product manager at OTI Lumonics, says the launch of the Aerelight is a big milestone for him and his colleagues. “We’re really proud to have an product that almost anyone can buy,” he says. “The other thing that’s exciting is that this marks the beginning of many more OLED-enabled products, and we’re excited to be leading that.”

At first blush, the cost of the Aerelight appears expensive, but Lam argues that there’s a lot of value to the product. “Even if you go to Crate & Barrel, a desk lamp there can easily cost you $300, and still all you’re getting is a regular bulb,” he says.

More so than the lamp itself, what’s exciting about this launch is the technology OTI has developed to enable. As mentioned before, the Aerelight is the world’s first OLED lamp. OLEDs are ubiquitous in smartphones and HDTVs. However, they’re just making their way into lighting technology, and the have the potential to completely change every aspect of the field.

“Organic LED is an exciting technology because it is made completely out of carbon-based molecules, which are easily degradable and disposable. We’re using simple dyes that are in everyday clothes and cosmetics,” says Lam. The philosophy of our lighting and designs moving forward, because OLED is such a thin form and it can be any shape and flexible, it’s going to enable designs that weren’t possible before. We’re going to be able to do sculptural designs that weren’t possible before and even redefine what we even consider lighting.”

In the same week that the New Democratic Party won Alberta’s provincial election, signaling a future where the province might move towards something of a post-oil economy, MaRS and Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) announced a new partnership that will see the two organizations work towards supporting the growth of Canada’s growing cleantech industry.  

The goal of the partnership, according to Jon Dogterom, venture services lead with MaRS’s Cleantech and Physical Science team, is help launch high impact cleantech companies that can compete on the global stage. "This partnership is about formalizing our plans to collaborate to help grow high impact globally competitive cleantech companies," he said in a phone interview.

The two organizations will work together to deliver funding, support and programming to select companies.

Dogterom says the two organizations hope to help create a $50-billion Canadian cleantech industry within the next five to ten years. A large percentage of Canada’s existing cleantech industry calls Ontario, and, in particular, Toronto home. Thus, a prosperous cleantech industry likely means an even more prosperous Toronto.    

“The future in job creation goes with where the opportunities are, and cleantech to me is the biggest opportunity,” said Dogterom.

Clean skies and more jobs, not a bad combination by any stretch of the imagination.  

It used to be that it was only feasible to harness portable solar power on a scientific calculator. However, thanks to a major breakthrough by a group of researchers from the University of Toronto, almost any surface, including ones that aren't so smooth and symmetrically shaped, could soon be used to exploit the power of the sun.

It’s all possible thanks to a new manufacturing process called sprayLD. The system allows a light sensitive substance called colloidal quantum dots (CQDs) to be sprayed upon a flexible film that can then be applied to almost any surface. According to the press release that accompanied the announcement, a car roof coated with a film of CQDs could produce enough energy to power three 100-watt lightbulbs.

Illan Kramer, the researcher that led the team that developed the technology, said in a press release, “My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof.”

If such a future does come to pass, it will be because of the manufacturing technology Professor Kramer and his colleagues have developed. In contrast to films created by its predecessor, atomic layer deposition (ALD), films created with sprayLD are fast, easy and inexpensive to produce. In fact, Professor Kramer and his team built their prototype using parts already available and relatively inexpensive. The manufacturing system Kramer and company have developed is so effective that films produced with sprayLD show little to no loss in solar-cell efficiency over their ALD counterparts.

Now this technology just needs to make its way to mobile devices. I can't be the only one who has had enough of their smartphone lasting less than a day.

Source: University of Toronto

Photo courtesy of Marit Mitchell.

Plastics! Plastics! Plastics! It turns out they don't have to be environment destroyers. 

On November 28, the University of Toronto, University of British Columbia and Concordia University announced the formation of the Industrial Biocatalysis Network (IBN). Funded through a $5-million grant by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the partnership will see some of Canada's leading bio-chemical engineers try to find enzymes that produce byproducts that enable the creation of environmentally-friendly chemicals and plastics.

The team is being lead by Professor Elizabeth Edwards, a member of UofT's Faculty of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry. The study is excepted to take five years and will involve several partners from Canada's manufacturing industry.

 Professor Edwards and her colleagues decided to embark on this project after completing a study that saw them sequence thousands of different enzymes. “Rather than doing more sequencing, we decided we wanted to focus on what these enzymes actually do,” she says. “We want to find out what their jobs are and how we can put them to use.”

Part of the reason several universities have partnered on this project is to avoid potential overlap and to increase the speed at which the research team is able to zero in on promising leads. “There are thousands of reactions we could potentially look at... and the goal of this network is to help prioritize what we look at. That’s the value of a network: communication and exchange of information and knowledge,” says Professor Edwards.

With even more evidence that the world is going through a period of significant climate change as a result of human activity, Edwards and her team are all too aware of the importance of their research. “There are more people than twice as many people on the planet than when I was born. The pressures on us to adapt are immense, so much so that I don’t like to think where we’ll be if we don’t,” she says. “Everyone feels this pressure and everyone aspires—and deserves—a great standard of living, so we need to come up with solutions that are different from the ones we've used in the past.”

Source: University of Toronto

Photo courtesy of Sara Collaton.

Electric vehicles have been on the market for three years in Canada. Enter Plug’n Drive, a not-for-profit whose mission is to accelerate the penetration of those vehicles into the consumer market.

One of the biggest challenges in encouraging potential car buyers to go electric is the so-far limited availability of charging stations: if you’re not sure you’ll be able to power up when and where you need to, an electric car can be a tough sell. Which leads to Plug’n Drive’s latest cause: increasing the number of charging stations in condo buildings.

“Essentially for the past 20 years Toronto has been going through a condo boom,” points out Josh Tzventarny, director of operations for Plug’n Drive, which is incubated at Ryerson’s Centre for Urban Energy. “Now about 30 per cent of Torontonians live in condos—none of which were designed for electric vehicles.”

For the past year or so Plug’n Drive has been working with Canadian Condominium iInstitute and the WWF to make recommendations for updates to the provincial Condominium Act, which is currently up for review and is likely to come before the legislature in the fall. The Condominium Act only enforces what happens after a condo has been built, however; the best Plug’n Drive is hoping for from new legislation is that it will include rules and guidelines for charging stations should a condo board decide it wants to install one.

“Where the real work needs to be done,” Tzventarny goes on, “is probably the building code—and the City of Toronto is starting to do some work around that with its green standards.”

In the meantime, Plug’n Drive is trying to reach out directly to condo owners and condo boards, making the case that retrofitting a building to include charging stations isn’t actually that a daunting prospect. (They issued a guide to installing them this past spring.)

“It’s really just an electrical job,” Tzventarny says. “It’s no different than installing an air conditioner or something like that.”

Plug’n Drive is also starting to field queries from property managers and real estate agents with clients who have electric vehicles, and prioritize charging stations when they go condo shopping—an indication, he believes, that this is "starting to become more and more of an issue."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Josh Tzventarny, Director of Operations, Plug'n Driv

Pop-up shops are often associated with higher-end retail: up-and-coming designers stocking small spaces with collections that get snapped up quickly. Recently, Goodwill and Newcomer Women's Services Toronto (NEW) launched a pop-up shop with a very different vibe: their inventory consists of one-of-a-kind products, created by participants in NEW's green entrepreneurship program, out of materials provided by Goodwill.

The women who created the recycled and repurposed products—marketed under a line dubbed Good as New—were participating in one of NEW's self-employment training programs.

The idea arose when some of the participants expressed a particular interest in sewing, says the program's faciliator, Deepa Premnath, and the products include clothing, jewelry, and other accessories. The program's goal is to help give participants the skills ito start home-based businesses; the pop-up shop's goal, meanwhile, is to spread the word about that program, and also to give the designers a trial run—a chance to market test their products and see how they sell.

"Our goal in general is to connect people to resources around the idea of self-employment," says Premnath. She freely admits, "it is not a panacea for all employment ills, but one possibility" in a volatile employment market, and one that can be particularly accessible for newcomers, who often face disproportionate challenges entering the workforce.

You can find the Good as New pop-up shop at the Goodwill Islington South Community Store (871 Islington Avenue, Etobicoke).

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Deepa Premnath, Program Facilitator, Green Entrepreneurship Program, Newcomer Women's Services Toronto
Photo: Courtesy of Goodwill

Developers interested in making their buildings more sustainable typically face a choice: solar panels or a green roof? There isn't, presumably, room for both.

Some University of Toronto researchers are challenging that assumption. This summer, with the help of many government and private sector partners, they're launching a study looking at whether the two can be combined—at the possibility of installing one roof that uses both vegetation and solar panels. The bonus: if the researchers' hypothesis is correct, they won't just be making dual use of the same space; the cumulative effect of combining the technologies will provide greater environmental benefits than using them separately.

"Solar photo voltaics operate best when they are not overheated," explains Liat Margolis, director of UofT's Green Roof Innovation Testing (GRIT) Lab. "Ideally [the panels] would be in a relatively cool climate, but sunny; conversely when they are overheated their energy production drops. The hypothesis is that ...if the vegetation actually cools the air, that could improve the performance of the solar panels."

Basically: because green roofs create a cooling effect through the evaporation they facilitate, they will keep the solar panels above cooler, and thereby—so the theory goes—keep those panels working more efficiently.

The GRIT Lab is running the experiment on the roof of 230 College Street; it includes 40 solar panels installed two and four feet above a layer of vegetation. The study is still in the early stages: Margolis says they anticipate about a year of calibration and testing, and hope to begin collecting data next spring. They'll gather results for three growing seasons, to have a data sample that accounts for variations in the weather. (This summer's cool temperatures would likely yield different results than a much hotter summer might, for instance.)

The basic benefit of solar panels—energy generation—can be appealing over the long term, but since even the best solar panels are only about 18 per cent efficient, it can take eight to 10 years to reap the financial rewards of installing them.

Green roofs, meanwhile, provide other environmental benefits, such as stormwater management, and the reduction of flooding and erosion. This too is a tough sell, though: while these are genuine environmental concerns, they are generally managed by municipal governments rather than building owners. However, Margolis says, "I think water performance will become more and more of a factor as the public becomes more aware of the issue."

As we experience more major storm events, in other words, the incentive to use green roofs to mitigate storm effects will grow. The ultimate hope is that the combination of the two technologies will create a better business case for installing them both, and make it easier for developers to pursue environmentally friendlier projects by allowing them to see the financial impact of doing so more quickly.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Liat Margolis, director, Green Roof Innovation Testing Lab
Photo: Courtesy of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design.

Found in 2012, the Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund (YSI) has been offering micro-loans, as well as non-financial resources, to help support social entrepreneurs as they develop their ventures. An impact investment fund, YSI focuses on what's called a triple bottom line: ventures that generate social and environmental returns, as well as financial ones.

YSI is currently accepting applications for a new round of potential investment recipients; the deadline to submit applications is nearing. However, you have until February 28 to make your case.

One previous recipient provides a case study for the kinds of projects YSI aims to support: a Toronto organic farm called Fresh City Farms. The farm grows and delivers pesticide-free produce to Torontonians, but was facing several barriers to growth. They received a $10,000 loan from YSI in 2013, which enabled them to both improve their packaging and develop a new online ordering system to reduce costs and improve their customers' experience.

In order to be eligible, YSI applicants must be between 18 and 25, and must already be operating a social enterprise, either not-for-profit or profit. Successful applicants will receive between $1,000 and $10,000 in investment, along with mentorship and other forms of support.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Syeda Zaki, Finance Director, Youth Social Innovation Capital Fund

Like many municipalities, ones in Ontario are starting to play a larger role in energy production and distribution. One local company, PowerStream, is owned by three such municipalities together: Barrie, Markham, and Vaughan. And like many of these smaller companies, the focus is increasingly on using smart grid technology and renewable energy sources to lower the environmental burdens of providing power. A few weeks ago, PowerStream unveiled a new micro grid demonstration project in an attempt to further explore those possibilities.

Smart grid technology is essentially a way of fine-tuning the collection and distribution of power across a network, by working with real-time, fine-grained information about energy demands, sending power to where it is most needed and in some cases bringing power sources on- and off-line dynamically, to meet changing demands. PowerStream's micro grid works in the same way, but on a much smaller scale than the provincial power system—it's scaled to meet local needs, ideally with local, renewable power sources. It also latches into the provincial grid, drawing power from it when needed, and sending power to the grid if it's producing more than it requires.

PowerStream's micro grid demonstration project is installed at its head office in Vaughan. John Mulrooney, director of smart grid technologies for PowerStream, explains the project in a video guide as: "a two-phase initiative that will evaluate the micro grid's effectiveness as an alternative energy supplier for PowerStream's head office. It will test the ability to utilize different power sources and storage while delivering safe, reliable service."

In the first phase, power—coming from solar panels, wind turbines, and natural gas generator, and stored in three different types of batteries—will be used to provide electricity for the building's  lighting, a/c system, and refrigeration, plus charging stations for their electric vehicles. The goal in this first phase is to test how well the system operates when it's disconnected from the provincial grid. The second phase will see new sources of power generation added into the mix; the goal at that point will be to test the grid's ability to feed power into the provincial network.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: PowerStream

This summer, MaRS Discovery District announced a new program: an accelerator for socially-oriented businesses, called Impact 8. It's a bootcamp of sorts: eight participants were chosen for an eight-week crash course in everything from marketing to investor relations. That first cohort, chosen from more than 150 applicants, recently completed the program.

They celebrated in style, opening the TSX on December 5, and spending the day explaining their enterprises and pitching venture capitalists.

"One of the biggest roadblocks to getting my venture off the ground," says Gavin Armstrong, president of The Lucky Iron Fish Project, "was trying to really narrow down the business plan—hone in on the value proposition, who your customers are, and how you're going to deliver." As an Impact 8 participant, Armstrong got one-on-one time with experts who were able to walk him through the practical elements of pulling his project together more adeptly.

"The most critical thing is mentorship," Armstrong says about why he wanted to join Impact 8. He'd been working on Lucky Iron Fish on his own for a year prior to participating, but as a newbie entrepreneur the program "helped lay some of the first-time learning tools: financial fitness, marketing communications, intellectual property, trademarking…"

The Lucky Iron Fish, if you're wondering, is actually an iron fish—one that people can toss into a pot of whatever they are cooking, which will then absorb some of the iron, and help alleviate anemia. Armstrong is right now focused on Cambodia, a nation with significant rates of iron deficiency.

The entrepreneurs who joined Impact 8 all knew going in that they wanted to make a difference through their work—their projects must have social or environmental benefits in order to be eligible. It's the business side of thing that wasn't always as clear. "I didn't know how to make a sustainable business plan," Armstrong says frankly. "I was hemorrhaging money."

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Gavin Armstrong, CEO of The Lucky Iron Fish Project and Impact 8 participant

Here's something we could all use less of: gridlock. A political lightening rod and increasing limit on daily routines in Toronto, traffic congestion eats up our time, not to mention reserves of patience and good humour. Now one UofT student thinks she's found a way to help tame congestion, by getting the lights at individual intersections to communicate directly with one another.

Samah El-Tantawy was inspired by the awful state of the roads both here in Toronto and in Cairo, where she grew up. Her traffic-management system formed the core of her graduate work (El-Tantawy earned her PhD in civil engineering in 2012), and is based on innovations in artificial intelligence research.

Right now, El-Tantawy explains, there are three types of traffic-management systems operating in Toronto:

• Set times for light changes, based on prior calculations using historical records; these are optimized, but don't adapt to the circumstances of any given moment.
• Actuated controls: detectors under the pavement which send calls to traffic lights, so those lights can change based on immediate conditions. The shortcoming with these is that they are operating "as if blind," El-Tantaway says. Since they only have inputs from vehicles in one direction, they don't work based on the state of the intersection or road network as a whole.
• Adaptive controls that are optimized in real time, based on traffic approaching an intersection; this system exists at about 300 intersections in Toronto. The main limitation with this system is that it works via a centralized command system, and thus requires a substantial communications network. (Any failure in that centralized system has, correspondingly, a huge impact on the whole network.)

The system El-Tantawy has developed is based on individualized intersection control, and comes with lower capital costs and risks of interruption compared to the adaptive control system. As she explains it, "each intersection sends and receives information from its neighbours, and each of the neighbours do this in a cascading fashion." Essentially, the lights at each intersection communicate with the ones at the connecting intersections, and this allows the lights at each intersection to change based on what those neighbouring lights are doing.

Unlike scheduled cascading traffic lights (where you hit a series of greens in a row if traffic conditions allow you to pace yourself just right), this system includes real-time responses to changing traffic conditions. "Each one decides for itself," El-Tantawy says, "but it considers what decisions what might be taken by the neighbours by having a model for each neighbour, and that model is built based on receiving information every second. They are actually deciding simultaneously."

According to El-Tantawy's simulation models, her traffic management system—called Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning for Integrated Network of Adaptive Traffic Signal Controllers (or MARLIN-ATSC)—can reduce delays by up to 40 per cent, and yield a 15-25 per cent savings in travel time. It can also have environmental knock-off effects—up to a 30 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions, since vehicles are spending less time on the road and travelling more efficiently when they do.

City of Toronto staff are aware of El-Tantawy's work, and she's hoping it will eventually be implemented in some intersections here. She needs to conduct field tests first, however, and is currently looking for quieter areas suitable for pilot projects next summer.

Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Samah El-Tantawy