Around the same time Dr. Soontorn was putting the finishing touches on his Bio-Solar Home, ground was broken on a new residential community in a town called Okotoks, just south of my hometown, Calgary, with the intent of revolutionizing the typical North American suburban tract house. The development – Drake Landing – was in several respects the most ambitious sustainable-housing project anyone had ever mounted in Canada. The dwellings that would make up this new neighbourhood were being outfitted with all manner of green trappings, from wood frames made of sustainably harvested lumber to top-of-the-line insulation and ultra-efficient appliances and solar hot water heaters. The truly pioneering aspect, though, was the solar thermal district heating system, the first of its kind in North America: a network of garage-mounted solar panels, linked by insulated pipe to a storage facility at the edge of the community, that would trap the heat energy of the area’s three-hundred-plus annual days of sunshine to provide the 52 houses with all their heating needs. Seventy to 80% of the average Canadian home’s greenhouse gas emissions come from heating – mainly from the individual oil- or gas-fed furnaces in most Canadian basements – and Drake Landing’s solar thermal system promised to erase 100% of those emissions in one giant leap. The technology was far from brand new – it was more or less identical, for example, to the much larger district heating system I’d seen littered in sheep droppings on the Danish island of Aerø – but this was nevertheless a potentially huge innovation for North American space heating and a powerful new weapon in the battle against climate change in my home and native land.
Not that anyone talked about it in those terms. A sizeable consortium of organizations large and small, public and private – the Calgary-based developer and builder, the municipality it was located in, one of the province’s largest energy distributors, even the Canadian government – had slapped their logos with apparent pride upon the “Coming Soon” placard at the entrance to the new subdivision, but I was hard-pressed to find even a mango seed’s worth of Dr. Soontorn’s infectious enthusiasm for the task. Drake Landing was, at its core, a run-of-the-mill suburban-style housing development, and pains had been taken to emphasize the nothing-to-see-here veneer. The builder had even insisted that the solar thermal panels be placed on the tops of back-alley garages, where they were less likely to freak out your average prairie home buyer, rather than on outsized south-facing roofs as initially planned. Standard-issue floor plans and starterhome prices from the low $220s, free five-foot white vinyl fences out front – as much as humanly possible, Drake Landing was to be just another pocket of everyday suburbia.
Maybe this was all for the best. Maybe the best way to introduce Canadians (especially the legendarily conservative-minded ones who inhabit small-town Alberta) to sustainable homes was to make them pointedly bland. After all, this was a demonstration project, and who in their right mind would want to dump their life savings into a demonstration project? This was $19.1 million in government grants and R&D money, feasibility studies and test runs and a final assessment report at the end, and for all that the municipal government of Okotoks still had to go and set up a not-for-profit corporation to assume all the risk before they could convince the energy company to sign on to manage the solar thermal system.
Like the rest of the southern Alberta prairie, Okotoks is endowed with a climate of almost desert-like aridness. As development encroaches and climate change shrinks the glaciers in the mountains to the west, the health of the region’s aquifers grows ever more precarious with each passing year. And so the main reason Drake Landing was built in Okotoks wasn’t the ample sunshine so much as the dearth of water – or, more precisely, the presence of a local government that had chosen to account for this problem. While many of the other small towns on Calgary’s fringe have gone for quick-buck breakneck suburban development, the municipal government in Okotoks decided, based on intensive consultations with local residents in the mid-1990s, to chart a different path. It christened itself “Sustainable Okotoks” and introduced a comprehensive new planning regime that included not just zealous water management but a host of other energy-efficiency and zoning guidelines besides. Out of these came, among other things, a small boom in solar energy, and it was this nascent local expertise that brought the town to the attention of the federal government when it went looking for a partner for its solar thermal demonstration project.
By rejecting business-as-usual suburbia, Okotoks had become a hotspot for solar-energy innovation, the handpicked site for a pioneering solar thermal system – which was doing its damnedest to don the guise of grey suburbia. U
Excerpted from The Geography of Hope by Chris Turner. Copyright © 2007 Chris Turner. Published by Random House Canada. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
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Category: Life
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I (and my partner) built that Earthship between 1999-2002 – it is in Taos, NM. We left because of the prevalence of sociopaths in the community. The Earthship was fun but flawed and the community was a living hell! We lost our entire investment and 3 years of our life. I am now getting ready to build a home out of shipping containers – it’s some sort of disease.