A partnership between Lakeland Generation and Georgian College is helping to develop renewable skills through a microgrid pilot project in Parry Sound.
“The field of renewable energy and clean tech is certainly growing at a significant rate and we are definitely part of it,” said Scott McCrindle, a professor in Georgian’s Computer Studies academic area who led the collaborative effort to account the emissions from the SPEEDIER project.
The SPEEDIER project comprises the installation of a mix of solar, batteries and other distributed energy resources for a handful of households and businesses in Parry Sound.
The microgrid, which is interconnected to the local utility grid, helps reduce emissions by generating solar energy and storing this energy when the provincial electricity generation mix is cleaner.
For Georgian College's research team, the goal is to determine existing emission scenarios that would be negated by deploying each of the microgrid assets onto the Parry Sound electricity grid.
The primary contribution of the college was to produce an internationally recognized greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting and reporting methodology suitable for the project.
Once the methodology was developed, and validated by a third party audit, the college helped to estimate the potential GHG emission reductions and then track them over a five-year period.
McCrindle told BarrieToday that some preliminary data visualization is already available on the SPEEDIER website (www.speedier.ca) and that the work is still ongoing.
“Now the students are working toward developing an even more interactive and immersive experience that can drill down into some of the finer points.”
McCrindle said the idea is to get a firm understanding of what kind of impact distributed energy resources have when ‘the rubber hits the road.’
Properly reporting greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly important given Canada's climate targets and the upcoming national cap-and-trade system — which will allow clean energy projects to sell carbon credits to companies that want to offset their carbon emissions.
“If you want to engage the carbon market, you have to have the way you calculate your greenhouse gas savings be validated by a third party,” said McCrindle.
The collaboration work has involved Georgian students from different programs, including the Research Analyst and Big Data Analytics programs.
“There's all kinds of ways in which students can take part in this.”
McCrindle noted that students looking forward to a career in the renewable industry benefit from taking part in this project because it provides them with boots-on-the-ground experience.
At the same time, he said, the college provided students with all kinds of resources to carry out the project, including an on-campus microgrid system to track data and analyze usage.
“Partnerships like Lakeland and Georgian College give students the opportunity to apply the knowledge they have gained through their curriculum to solve real world problems.”
The climate crisis is a big problem and it's going to take a lot of people to solve, he added.
“We're on the precipice of deploying renewables in the province, and certainly in Canada, on a much larger scale.”
McCrindle mentioned that Georgian College has other renewable demonstration projects on the go, which are really valuable for student learning and also for engaging with industry.
“We're always looking to talk with industry partners to work with them, to learn what they're doing, and see how we can help.”
