This is a highlight from the Building Priorities Briefing.

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Transcript

Ann Duffy:
It really stems back from the bid phase, where the bid committee at the time really conceived of a plan to deliver a proposal that would allow for great games and an excellent elite athletic experience for sport competition for the Winter and Paralympic Games, but also to be convened in a way that legacies are sensible long after the games for the communities that will inherit these venues after 2010.

So right from the outset, there was a vision to use things like the Canadian Green Building Council LEED standard at a Silver level for the new venues, of which there were nine new venues, where we would look for design and innovation and technologies that were available and that we were fairly confident in, in terms of influencing the actual site and building architectural designs.

So, all of our venues have a strong focus on energy efficiency. Since we have several venues that have ice facilities, we've looked for closed-loop opportunities where we use the waste heat from the refrigeration plant for the Richmond oval speed skating track, the Vancouver Olympic/Paralympic center for curling, the UBC Thunderbird Arena for hockey and sledge hockey, and the Sliding Center up at Whistler for the Skeleton/Luge venues, to use the waste heat from those plants to heat either the rest of the building facility or adjacent buildings on the site. Which is an example of how we've hopefully designed the venues right in the first place, and then integrated innovations so that when they operate long after the games they're more cost-effective and consume less energy than if we hadn't invested in those technologies.

Denis:
An interesting example is the Vancouver Olympic Village, an entire neighborhood that will be LEED certified.

Ann:
That's right. In fact, both the athlete villages, one in the resort municipality of Whistler for the outdoor venues, outdoor sports, and for the athletes here in the city for the indoor sports, will be residing in newly-built athlete villages that, of course, become legacies for residential and multi-use accommodation and light business post-Games.

And in both cases, both sites were used in the past. In one case, one was a landfill. It's now a decommissioned landfill in Whistler. And in Vancouver, the southeast False Creek area has been remediated industrial lands from former shipyard works, and we're piloting the Canadian Green Building Council LEED neighborhood design guideline for multiples of buildings.

And really some of the strategies there are to look at how do you orient the development in a way that makes sense given local transportation and other city services and mobility and recreational opportunities. And within the athletes' village, for example, in the city of Vancouver, there will be not only LEED Silver but also Gold and Platinum buildings where we're testing out some emerging technologies, again particularly around low- footprint, energy-efficient heating and cooling and lighting services.

Denis Du Bois:
After the games, those venues will become what VANOC calls "legacies" as the cities that own them transform them into community centers, housing, retail shops and training facilities.

Another legacy of this Olympics will be hundreds of pages of documentation. VANOC has published a sustainability report each year, with a detailed account of its plans and accomplishments.

It contributed to a Sustainability Toolkit to help future planners make their events green. That documentation may end up being VANOC's largest contribution to the advancement of sustainability practices. It's online at vancouver2010.com/sustainability.

Most of those emerging energy efficiency technologies Ann Duffy mentioned actually are proven, although not all at this scale. To talk more about that I'd like to welcome Stephen Lacey, host of the "Inside Renewable Energy podcast" and reporter for "Renewable Energy World" magazine.

Denis:
Stephen, welcome back to the briefing.

Stephen Lacey:
Thanks for having me...

Denis:
Let's talk first about the Olympic Village.

Stephen:
You know, I'm fascinated with the energy systems they're putting in. And you've got district heating for the Village. They're going to use the heat from sewer pipes by using some sort of heat exchanger. They're also going to use slab hydronic systems where you put water pipes under the floor and use them to heat and cool the building. The convention center there, I read, is going to use a seawater heating and cooling system; where they use a heat pump to step up and down the water temperature of the ocean and use that to heat or cool a building. And of course, many of the buildings have solar electric systems as well.

So looking at the roundup here of building techniques and energy technologies, it's really an interesting mix and match.

Denis:
This closed-loop concept of capturing waste heat and using it someplace nearby seems to be a recurring theme.

Stephen:
Almost every main building is using some sort of waste recovery system. You know, I think technologies like solar, they're the cool, hip, sexy technologies, but capturing waste heat offers such an incredible potential to reduce energy use. In one of the stadiums where they're going to be doing curling, they're using the waste heat from refrigeration to heat the swimming pool and provide domestic hot water. In the skating rinks, they're going to be doing the same thing, providing space heating and hot water.

Then, I mentioned that sewage system. They're using the waste heat from the sewage system in the Olympic Village for space heating and hot water. They're actually doing that in Vancouver and in Whistler for the Paralympic Village. It just goes to show you how much energy is wasted in normal buildings and what a basic tweak can do to increase the energy-efficiency of a building.

I honestly haven't seen the cost of these heat recovery systems, but I'd be willing to bet that it will be paid back fairly quickly, given that many of these are new buildings. It will cost less than a retrofit, and they're sucking back as much waste heat as possible. These projects are really common sense and, I think, very, very cool. I'm excited to see how they perform over the coming years.

Denis:
You keep your finger on the pulse of the renewable energy industry. What does this say to you about the state of clean energy?

Stephen:
Well, we're taking some big steps here. And we heard a lot of talk about making the Chinese Olympic Games greener, and now we've got Vancouver trying to up Beijing, and London is talking about doing more with on-site renewables and sustainable building techniques. I think what this says is that everyone is thinking about energy issues. This is on people's minds. A while back, people were criticizing Olympic organizers for not going far enough to reduce the Games' carbon footprint. This was coming from public officials, from athletes, and from citizens.

It's clear that people care about this. When you create such public projects and show people that these technologies work and that they're cost-effective and that citizens are demanding them, it goes a long way to move this industry forward.

It says to me that this is no longer a fringe industry. It says that it's no longer about small experimentation. It's a necessary business decision in order to reduce operating costs, address all these environmental problems that we have before us, and that are associated with the built environment; of course, to enhance public relations efforts as more and more people demand renewables.

We do have a long way to go, but projects like this really do give me hope that people are paying attention and that our industry truly is moving forward in a positive way.