After years of discussions and planning, the Xstrata Nickel Sustainable Energy Centre has officially opened its doors on Jan. 31.

The new centre will be home to cutting-edge applied research and education for students in the Energy Systems Technology and Environmental Monitoring and Impact Assessment programs at Cambrian College.

The 9,000-square-foot facility is located directly on school grounds.

“It really allows our graduates to have that value-added opportunity when they go out into the workforce,” said Sylvia Barnard, president of Cambrian College. “They'll be able to talk about real life experience, with real life companies doing real research that's applied to the workplace and to the market place.”

Xstrata Nickel, Cambrian's partner in the project, contributed $2 million to the project. The College also received support from FedNor and the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation (NOHFC) to build the Centre.

“What's going on here is some really interesting applications of sustainable energy technologies applied to buildings and elsewhere,” said Marc Boissonneault, vice-president of Xstrata Nickel, Sudbury operations. “We've always been interested in education, with the Sudbury area in particular, and we saw this as a field that's going to be a growing importance going forward.”

The Centre was built to exceed the Canada Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy ad Environmental Design (LEED) gold Standards, rather than taking a standard building approach and adding green elements to its design.

In fact, Cambrian College is the first college across Ontario to get the status of LEED gold. It will be tested to ensure it meets national benchmarks in energy efficiency and sustainable design.

“This is a very positive development that we're anxious to see how the programs here evolve and how they continue to attract increasing numbers of students,” said Boissonneault. “We're going to be interested in where it takes them, and we're going to be watching close and supporting where we can.”

John Hood was the Dean of Technology for Cambrian College and was the person who initially came up with the original concept of what was then supposed to be a Living Building.

“It turned out to be a LEED gold building, so the concept has changed a little bit, but it's still one of the first of its kind,” he said.

Now the director of the Renewable Resource Recovery Corporation, his company holds a patent on photovoltaic panels specifically designed and used for outside walls, rather than roofs.
The Xstrata Nickel Energy Centre is powered by 18 of them.

During the winter months, the panels will gather no snow and will continue to generate a lot of electricity from the sun, which is very low in the sky.

“In the summer time, one of the problems with them is they're only 20 per cent efficient,” said Hood. ”The other 80 per cent of energy goes to heat which you don't want. What that heat does in the summer time, is it reduces the efficiency of panels.”

Renewable Resource Recovery has put a heat extraction system embedded into the walls behind the panels, and pulls the heat so the panels don't lose efficiency.

“We're probably pulling more heat energy from behind these panels then you'd get from electrical energy,” he added. “This is all new stuff. Nobody has this data yet, but we figure we're going to pull more heat energy out.”

Sudbury MPP and Minister of Northern Development and Mines, Rick Bartolucci said that the entire centre is a first in Ontario.

“All the contractors, the supplies, the services, and the construction of this building, were purchased in Northern Ontario,” he said. “So we can certainly say that this is the first Sustainable Energy Centre anywhere that was built by the North for the world.

“And that's something that we should be very, very proud of.“

Patrick Demers is a reporter for Northern Ontario Business 

Posted by Mark Gentili