green energy Archives | Research & Innovation

91��ɫ becomes 17th member of MaRS Innovation

fmaquito — Mon, 09 May 2011 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ has become the latest member of , the commercialization agent for many leading Toronto-based universities, hospitals and research institutes.

“91��ɫ has become one of Canada’s fastest-growing centres for research and innovation,” said Stan Shapson (right), vice-president research & innovation at 91��ɫ. “We typically get 10 to 20 discovery disclosures a year. Joining MaRS Innovation allows us to deliver the most competitive commercialization services to the researchers making these discoveries. We’re confident that membership in MaRS Innovation will boost that number and accelerate the commercialization of 91��ɫ’s most promising research.”

Earlier this year, 91��ɫ launched its office. Based in 91��ɫ Region, Innovation 91��ɫ works with other partner organizations in the Markham Convergence Centre to build upon research partnerships between 91��ɫ researchers and life science and technology companies based in 91��ɫ Region and the Greater Toronto Area. It’s also making 91��ɫ’s research and infrastructure more accessible to industry, government agencies and community partners.

Joining MaRS Innovation will further extend 91��ɫ’s commercialization contacts. In less than two years, MaRS Innovation has assessed more than 400 research disclosures from members such as the University of Toronto and its 10 affiliated teaching hospitals, as well as Ryerson University.

MaRS Innovation has begun to line up investment funding to take the discoveries with the greatest commercial potential to market, creating companies and jobs, and starting industries. In 2011 alone, MaRS Innovation has spurred the creation of five new enterprises based on the groundbreaking discoveries of its members.

“We’re thrilled that 91��ɫ has decided to become one of our members." said Rafi Hofstein, president & CEO of MaRS Innovation. "91��ɫ’s national and international reputation for groundbreaking discoveries is growing quickly, and many of their research initiatives are highly complementary to the technologies that we’ve been helping to commercialize over the past two years.”

To become a member of MaRS Innovation, an academic and research organization must have intellectual property in life sciences (drug discovery, medical devices, diagnostic imaging, etc.), information and communications technologies (ICT), cleantech and digital media.

MaRS Innovation is supported by the Government of Canada through the (NCE) to focus on turning inventions into real commercial opportunities. Both the Province of Ontario’s (MRI) and Ottawa have provided essential financial support for Proof of Principle programs – NCE, through the Centres of Excellence for Commercialization and Research, funded the turning of inventions into real commercial opportunities; and MRI, through Ontario Centres of Excellence, has been supporting MaRS Innovation’s Proof of Principle (PoP) program.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of MaRS Innovation Public Relations department and Media Relations at 91��ɫ University.

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Professor Rod MacRae co-authors study that finds organic farms are more energy efficient

fmaquito — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Organic farms can be more energy efficient than conventional farms that mass produce crops using unsustainable practices, a surprising result from a study co-authored by a 91��ɫ professor.

Researchers analyzed 130 studies to compare the energy use and global warming potential of organic versus conventional farming. They concluded that organic farms were more energy efficient on both a per-hectare and per-product basis, with the exception of fruit farming and poultry production, where data is limited.

“These findings shake up the concept that ‘bigger’ is always better. Higher crop yields, bigger equipment, less genetic diversity, and more fertilizer and pesticides do not equal a more energy-efficient operation,” says Rod MacRae (left), a professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Critics of organic farming commonly argue that lower yields make it unsustainable in the long term. “As population increases and land availability decreases, it’s assumed that an ‘assembly line’ approach to agriculture is the only way to keep up with our food needs. While this is the dominant way of thinking, this logic is also deeply flawed,” MacRae says. “For example, many regions in the global south show better yield performance with organic farming. Even in North America, organic yields are not far behind conventional ones.”

MacRae points out that there is an enormous amount of waste in conventional systems. Significant amounts of edible food are lost at harvest, during processing and distribution, at retail and in consumers’ homes. “By some accounts, up to 40 per cent of what gets farmed never makes it to our mouths, and this adds enormously to energy waste. This can result in the perception that we’re not producing enough food,” he says.

Studies of conventional and organic grain growers in the prairie region showed significant benefits for organic methods, including 50 per cent lower energy use in a 12-year study of forage and grain crop rotations. The absence of nitrogen fertilizer was a main contributor to reduced energy inputs and greater efficiency. Modelling studies of a Canada-wide conversion to organic canola, wheat, soybean and corn concluded we would consume 39 per cent less energy and generate only 77 per cent of the global warming emissions and 17 per cent of ozone-depleting emissions of conventional wheat farming.

Above: Organic cultivation of mixed vegetables

In terms of dairy farming, a study in Atlantic Canada found that an organic, seasonal grazing system was 64 per cent more energy efficient and emitted 29 per cent less greenhouse gases compared with the average of conventional systems. Cows consuming an organic diet may also have a longer lifespan, increasing efficiency and reducing methane emissions when calculated over time.

Where livestock is concerned, fewer studies exist and comparisons are more difficult because of dramatic differences in operations from farm to farm, particularly for hogs and poultry. Conventionally raised beef is widely accepted as the least environmentally friendly meat, requiring seven times as many inputs for an equivalent output of calories. Organic beef production is considered to be more efficient because the animals consume more grass and less grain than humans can consume.

The study, “The Carbon and Global Warming Potential Impacts of Organic Farming: Does It Have a Significant Role in an Energy Constrained World?” was published in the journal Sustainability. Its lead author is Professor Derek Lynch, Department of Plant & Animal Sciences, Nova Scotia Agricultural College.

MacRae was also interviewed in about the lack of attention politicians are paying to food policy during the current federal election campaigns.

“None of them really link the food story to health care that well, or to social-policy reform,” said Rod MacRae, a professor at 91��ɫ who is one of Canada’s foremost experts on the subject. “What they’ve done is pick the low-hanging fruit – the things that are more part of the public consciousness right now.”

Still, strong federal leadership in the national food policy process is critical, he said. “The federal role is to act as the animator, the facilitator, and to use its usual package of sticks and carrots to try and get everybody on board.”

By Melissa Hughes, media relations officer.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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IRIS launches book calling for systemic changes to fight climate change

fmaquito — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

It's not enough to plant trees in exchange for carbon emissions in the fight to mitigate climate change, say 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Anders Sandberg and 91��ɫ environmental studies master’s student in their new co-edited book Climate Change – Who’s Carrying the Burden?: The Chilly Climates of the Global Environmental Dilemma.

Nor is it enough to set up a supposed green company in the Global South to offset the spewing emissions of companies in the Global North. Without a substantial system change, an alternative way of living, climate change will continue unabated, says Anders Sandberg. “I don’t see any change, frankly. Carbon emissions are still increasing dramatically.”

When carbon emissions are traded or bought for offsets, such as planting trees, they are done so at the end of the carbon change cycle, rather than at the beginning. A lot of money continues to go into the development of more carbon sources. “From my perspective it’s not very positive,” says Sandberg. Much of the offset purchasing is by large multinationals in the Global South, where they set up green companies to offset pollution in the United States, but by doing so they displace many of the local people and their economic livelihoods.

In the book, the Sandbergs write, “The concept of climate change itself can be an oppressive force…hiding the historical connections of the carbon economy to colonialism, capitalism and rampant and exploitive resource extractions."

“We’re asking people to look at the climate change issues from a broader perspective, which could bring forth more ideas,” says Sandberg.

In , the third volume in the Our Schools/Our Selves book series, 2010, published by the , the Sandbergs look at who is most affected by climate change and the need for systemic change beyond capping and trading carbon emissions.

They don't believe that free markets, new green technologies and international agreements are enough to alleviate climate change. Despite green technologies, levels of consumption will likely remain high. Even if all the cars are electric, there will still be suburbs, roads and gridlock, potentially leading to an increase in the amount of electricity used and the building of more hydroelectric dams, which then affects the environment and the people who use it. “I think we need to look at and imagine other ways of living,” says Anders Sandberg.

Left: Anders Sandberg

Although climate change is a global issue, the solutions are not. What’s needed is a closer look at the origins of climate change and the areas it most impacts, he says. Areas such as the Tar Sands of Alberta, the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, the Canadian north, the coastal regions of Bangladesh and the island states of the Pacific.

“We have to look at the people on the ground who are harmed by this. What we are trying to do is turn the prism from the global to the local. But we’re not just looking at the horror stories; we’re also looking at the hope and resiliency of these communities and whether they might have some answers to the climate change problem.” For one thing, it’s important to understand the vulnerabilities that have built up in these communities, explore their origins, call for reparations from those who are responsible and build on the resiliencies that remain.

One of the contributors to the book, 91��ɫ environmental studies master's student Jelena Vesic (BES Spec. Hon. '08), points to the polar bear as a symbol and a victim of climate change. There is now a threat to First Nations who harvest them because they are considered endangered, yet a closer look reveals that in some regions the polar bear is holding its own. Banning their harvest would affect First Nations communities that have hunted polar bears as part of their culture for centuries. The ban would also affect the local economy and the resiliency that’s built into the particular relationship between the Inuit and the polar bear.

Right: Tor Sandberg

Climate Change – Who’s Carrying the Burden? contains a collection of papers from prominent people such as Stephen Lewis, Canada's former ambassador to the United Nations, who looks at the health impact of global climate change; author and journalist Naomi Klein, who talks about paying the climate debt; and scholar and activist Vandana Shiva on the G8/20 summit and climate change. Green Party of Canada leader Elizabeth May explores shrinking ecological footprints and expanding political ones, while visiting Fulbright scholar at 91��ɫ Professor Noël Sturgeon challenges the family values and environmental practices that are tied to the carbon economy.

The majority of articles, however, are written by junior scholars and graduate students in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies who are passionate about climate justice. They write on a range of topics, including the recent climate-focused conferences in Copenhagen and Cochabamba, climate change-induced migration, Hurricane Katrina, the Niger Delta, the First Nations youth adoption of hip hop music to fight HIV/AIDS. the largest squatter settlement in Europe (the free town of Christiania in Copenhagen) and food policy in the Greater Toronto Area.

The Sandbergs discuss what they see as the dominant story – cap and trade and offsets –and the alternative story that calls for systemic change and climate justice, which emerged at the 15th United Nations conference on climate change they attended last December in Copenhagen.

Anders Sandberg is currently using Climate Change – Who’s Carrying the Burden? in his course – Environmental Studies 1200, Taking Action, Engaging People and the Environment.

The book will be officially launched by 91��ɫ’s (the Sandbergs were part of the institute's delegation to the climate change conference in Copenhagen) on Wednesday, Oct. 20, from 3 to 4:30pm at 305 91��ɫ Lanes, Keele campus.

The themes of the book will also be featured in a session titled “Climate Change, Climate Justice and Human Rights” during 91��ɫ’s Inclusion Day – Dialoguing Across Differences tomorrow.

For more information on the book, visit the website.

By Sandra McLean, YFile writer

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin

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Professor Mark Winfield says Ontario needs new electricity plan to meet demand and develop renewable energy

fmaquito — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Ontario’s electricity system will continue to lurch from crisis to crisis until a long-term strategy focused on environmental and economic sustainability is adopted, concludes a study led by 91��ɫ environmental studies Professor Mark Winfield. It was published in the international journal Energy Policy this month.

The study finds that the conventional approaches to electricity system planning adopted by the Ontario Power Authority (OPA) in the development of its 20-year Integrated Power System Plan (IPSP) have created a situation where the province effectively has no overall plan for the future of its electricity system.

“The fundamental assumptions that underlay the IPSP have been proven wrong by the events of the last two years,” says Winfield, the report’s lead author. “Electricity demand has gone down, rather than up; new nuclear facilities turned out to cost nearly four times what the plan assumed, and the response to the Green Energy Act is proving that there is more potential to develop renewable energy than the OPA assumed. A fundamentally different approach to system planning is needed,” he says.

Left: Mark Winfield

According to the study, co-authored by researchers at the University of Waterloo, the OPA's failure to properly employ a sustainability assessment approach resulted in a plan that was rigid and relied heavily on nuclear power. This would have left the province’s electricity system unable to adapt to the changed circumstances that have defined the past two years.

“A sustainability assessment approach would have emphasized resilience and adaptive capacity in the development of the plan, and put energy conservation and energy sources that have low environmental impacts and can be added to the system in smaller incremental steps first,” says Winfield. "Options like nuclear power that are large, centralized, inflexible, high-risk and high-cost should have been last.”

The report’s authors, along with a team of faculty and graduate students in environmental studies programs at the University of Waterloo and 91��ɫ, undertook to illustrate how the OPA should have elaborated and applied the sustainability criteria and trade-off rules that it had formally embraced. The exercise involved constructing a properly comprehensive, context-specific set of sustainability assessment criteria for energy system planning in Ontario, and applying these criteria in assessments of each of the main components of the IPSP proposal.

The report, titled “Implications of sustainability assessment for electricity system design: The case of the Ontario Power Authority’s integrated power system plan”, was co-authored by Professor Robert B. Gibson and graduate students Tanya Markvart and Kyrke Gaudreau of the University of Waterloo’s Faculty of Environment, and Jennifer Taylor, a graduate student in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Environmental Studies.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Professor Mark Winfield speaks to Globe and Mail about local pushback to Ontario's green energy plans

fmaquito — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Residents of Bala, located about a two hours drive north of Toronto, say they have nothing against hydro power, but fear the $23-million facility and its construction will destroy the tiny town’s main attraction: the falls that lure curious eyeballs and day-tripper cash, :

This is one local battlefield of Ontario’s Green Energy Act, whose subsidy program prioritizes small-scale green-energy projects over larger, dirtier ones. In a matter of months, the province has made itself the best place on the continent to make a business case for green energy.

. . .

The irony is these mini-projects set the stage for hundreds of confrontations with small communities that balk at the prospect of a power plant or wind farm upsetting their delicate equilibrium.

“Going to a system which relies on more distributed sources of generation, lots of smaller facilities as opposed to one big one, the worst consequence is you do exacerbate the potential for these social conflicts,” said 91��ɫ renewable energy policy professor Mark Winfield. “Instead of trying to build one big gas facility in Oakville, you’re potentially building 100 wind turbine sites, each of which has the potential to turn into a little donnybrook. “

. . .

It doesn’t help that there’s no clear picture of what Ontario’s future energy needs are: Demand is waning, or at least not growing as quickly as predicted, thanks to the recession and successful, aggressive energy-conservation programs. Capricious natural gas prices that haven’t been rising as much as planned combine with costs (and risks) of long-term nuclear commitments that skyrocketed higher than hypothesized means predicting the province’s energy load decades into the future is a mug’s game.

This makes it far more difficult to weigh the benefits against the costs of projects like Bala Falls, Prof. Winfield says.

“Developing Bala Falls maybe means we don’t have to build a gas or nuclear plant – then you might look at it differently. ... [But] there’s no overall context or plan in which each of these individual projects are evolving; there’s no framework to determine whether you need it or not.”

The complete article is .

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91��ɫ welcomes Professor Janusz Kozinski, Faculty of Science & Engineering's new dean

fmaquito — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:00:00 +0000

91��ɫ has appointed Janusz Kozinski as dean of the Faculty of Science & Engineering.

Kozinski will begin a five-year term at 91��ɫ on July 1. He has been dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan since 2007, but spent much of his career at McGill University.

A widely acknowledged expert in sustainable energy systems and immune building concepts (focused on anti-bioterrorism), Kozinski has created and led multidisciplinary teams throughout his career, linking research on energy, environmental issues, public health and security.

“I’m looking forward to welcoming Dean Kozinski to our Faculty of Science & Engineering,” said President & Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. “His research achievements and leadership skills will help to ensure that students receive an excellent education and will enhance 91��ɫ’s reputation for innovation.”

Right: Janusz Kozinski

Educated in Poland, Kozinski earned master of engineering and PhD degrees from AGH University of Science & Technology in Krakow, and did post-doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) before joining McGill University’s Faculty of Engineering in 1994.

He was appointed associate vice-principal (research & international relations) at McGill in 2005. He has also completed the Oxford Advanced Management & Leadership Programme at Oxford University's Saïd Business School and the Executive Education Crisis Leadership in Higher Education program at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Kozinski’s research includes projects related to sustainable energy systems, the next generation of nuclear reactors, environmental impact of energy technology, greenhouse gas mitigation, and many other topics, including Mars exploration.

In 2006, he was named International Chair in Bioenergy for the Institute for Advanced Studies and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France. While at the CNRS in 2002-2003, Kozinski researched how to mix metals from Mars’ crust and CO2 from its atmosphere to generate enough energy for a return trip from Mars − a project that took him to space on a series of zero-gravity parabolic flights organized by the European Space Agency.

“Being asked to lead a Faculty that includes both scientific research and engineering expertise, at a major university in Canada, is a unique opportunity,” said Kozinski. “I would characterize 91��ɫ as ‘i-squared’ − a very interdisciplinary and very international university. Those are among the key things that are going to be the driving force in science and engineering in the 21st century.”

Kozinski will succeed Interim Dean Walter Tholen. "I want to thank Interim Dean Tholen for his outstanding leadership and efforts during this past year," said Shoukri.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Passings: Chemistry Professor Michael Pollard showed great promise as a researcher

fmaquito — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Michael Pollard, a chemistry professor in the Faculty of Science & Engineering, died suddenly of an aneurysm on Saturday, Feb. 27, in Toronto. He was just 36.

Left: Professor Michael M. Pollard

In Prof. Pollard's honour, 91��ɫ's flag will be lowered to half-mast at sunrise on Friday, March 5, until sunset on Saturday, March 6.

Although he was the Department of Chemistry’s most recent addition, joining the faculty in July 2008, Prof. Pollard had quickly become an integral part of the 91��ɫ community with substantial contributions to teaching, research and department life.

He was passionate about all his undertakings, from scientific inquiry to rock climbing, and possessed a natural curiosity that extended well beyond his chosen field.

A native of Ottawa, Ont., Prof. Pollard attended Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., where he obtained an honours bachelor of science degree. He earned his PhD from the University of Alberta and conducted research at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands as a post-doctoral fellow and research assistant.

In his independent work at 91��ɫ, Prof. Pollard had developed a promising research program in advanced organic materials with a focus on green energy. His ultimate goal was to develop an organic solar cell that could be painted on, effectively allowing us to harness energy from almost any surface.

Visitations for Prof. Pollard will be held on Friday, March 5, from 2 to 4pm and 7 to 9pm, and Saturday, March 6, from 2 to 4pm, at the , 580 Eagleson Rd., Kanata, Ont., telephone 613-591-6580. A funeral service for Prof. Pollard will take place on Saturday at 4pm. A reception will follow the service.

In lieu of flowers, donations to the or would be appreciated.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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