Renewable energy technologies for Canadian remote communities

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In Canada 84% of our energy comes from fossil fuels; for isolated and remote communities, fossil fuels mostly provide all their energy needs. Energy drivers--greenhouse gases that lead to climate change, peak oil, environmental emissions, long term energy security and sustainability--require our society to develop technologies that are cost effective to harness renewable energy to substantially increase the percentage of renewable energy in our Canadian energy mix. The overall research is directed towards developing novel technologies that can effectively address transportation, heat, and electricity needs from renewable sources to increase the renewable energy ratio in Canada. The focus of this Discovery research program is designed to address the energy needs of remote communities by developing distributed technologies using renewable energy. A new technological approach will be investigated for remote communities by using solar, biomass and organic residues resources. By using an indirectly fired mircroturbine and water spray it is theoretically possible to develop an energy system that will follow the remote community electric load and utilize intermittent solar, biomass from nearby areas, and biogas produced from organic wastes. Anaerobic digestion in cold climates will be simulated by first developing a detail model for the chemical degradation. This model is intended to be used to minimize both heating and electrical power requirements for digesters operating in cold remote climates. The approach will then be to take thermodynamic advantages when injecting water before and after the recouperator in an indirect-fired mircroturbine using the newly developed Hybrid Brayton cycle when fired with biomass or biogas. This cycle will then be adapted to integrate to a solar dish to produce power from solar energy with biogas to supplement the cycle when the sun isolation value is too low. The value of the proposed research program is to allow remote communities in cold climates to become self-reliant and sustainable by reducing fossil fuel they consume and base their economy on the use of local renewable energy instead.