Solar Energy Community in Alberta Leads the Way

By Chantal Hunter
August 2010

Solar thermal panels on garage rooftops (foreground) and solar domestic hot water panels on the roof of each home.

An innovative undertaking in the town of Okotoks, Alberta, has project partners and community members celebrating a world record. The Drake Landing Solar Community project is the first large-scale seasonal storage system in the world to deliver 80 percent of its community’s space heating requirements from solar energy. With this success, the project — currently in its third year of operation — is well on its way to achieving its goal of providing more than 90 percent of the community’s heating needs from its solar-powered district heating system by its fifth year.

Addressing Seasonal Concerns

A long-standing barrier to solar-heating technology in cold climates has been the sun's noticeable absence during the winter. Short days, low sun angles and cloudy skies are major obstacles.

To address this barrier, Natural Resources Canada’s (NRCan’s) CanmetENERGY and its partners engineered a system that captures the sun's thermal energy, stores it underground and later retrieves it to provide residential space heating. The underground storage can retain enough energy to heat the community's 52 homes and maintain the temperature set by each homeowner. By successfully storing solar energy, this project minimizes the seasonal concerns of solar-heating applications.

CanmetENERGY project leader, Doug McClenahan, provides a tour of the Energy Centre.

Sunny Okotoks an Ideal Location

Okotoks, Alberta, is an ideal location for solar-energy collection as it is one of the top-ten Canadian locations for sunny days per year and receives almost as much solar energy as Italy and Greece. In order to accommodate Canada’s climate and geographic location, where solar radiation is lower during the winter months, Drake Landing Solar Community uses a central district heating system that stores abundant solar energy during summer months and distributes it to each home for space heating needs during winter months.

“The Drake Landing project demonstrates the successful integration of Canadian energy-efficient technologies with the unlimited renewable energy of the sun,” says CanmetENERGY project leader Doug McClenahan. “It’s also giving city officials and urban planners in other cold-climate municipalities an innovative model for solar heating in their own neighbourhoods.”

Aerial view of the 52-home Drake Landing Solar Community.

The Future is Bright

The benefits of this project are far-reaching. By integrating various technologies, the Drake Landing Solar Community has accelerated the development of many of the systems being employed. In addition, participating manufacturers, builders, developers and utilities are gaining valuable knowledge. And by eliminating the major seasonal barrier, this initiative encourages future investments in the production of renewable technologies — a prospect that benefits industry across the country. The project also offers an alternative to conventional fossil fuel-based systems, thus further reducing Canada’s carbon footprint.

To learn more about this project, visit the CanmetENERGY Web site or the Drake Landing Solar Community Web site.

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