In Canada, each province has its own electric utility system, and each system is responsible for meeting the demand of its customer base. Electricity demand in all provinces is highly variable throughout the day, as well as during the year. In order to achieve a good match between electricity demand and generation, a mix of base, intermediate and peaking load power plants is used, which uses different fuel sources. When a renewable energy technology or an energy efficiency measure that results in electricity savings is implemented on a regional, provincial and national scale, the electricity savings reflect in the peak (marginal) electricity generation. Thus, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction due to the reduction in electricity generation corresponds to the fuel used to generate the electricity at the margin. In Canada, the fuel used for marginal electricity generation varies from province to province and from hour to hour. To estimate the reduction in GHG emissions due to reducing electricity generation at the margin, it is necessary to have information on the fuel mix used to generate the marginal electricity for each province on a suitable time scale. With such information, it is possible to estimate a marginal GHG emission intensity factor for each province, which would provide the amount of GHG emissions produced as result of producing 1 kWh of electricity on the margin. However, such information is regarded confidential by most electric utilities and is not made public. In this paper, methodologies are presented to estimate the GHG intensity factors (GHGIFs) for marginal electricity generation for each province of Canada based on the information available in the public domain. The GHGIFs developed for each province are also presented, which are expected to be valid within the next 5-year horizon. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

To explore the opinions and the level of awareness of university students on renewable energy and environment issues in the fields of engineering and economics/business in Canada, Romania, and Turkey, surveys were conducted in several universities in these three countries. The survey results that are presented and discussed here indicate that while there are differences between the three groups, they are small and can be explained by cultural and socioeconomic factors. A larger study with an expanded survey questionnaire applied to a wider spectrum of groups in a larger set of countries would be useful to identify differences and educational needs.

Thermodynamics is a fundamental foundation of all engineering disciplines. A vast majority of engineering undergraduate programmes contain one or more courses on thermodynamics, and many engineers use thermodynamics every day to analyse or design energy systems. However, there is extensive anecdotal evidence as well as a wide range of published literature indicating that students often struggle to understand thermodynamic principles. In an effort to understand students' attitudes and perception of thermodynamics, including their expectations, experience and frustrations, an investigation was conducted. Following a review of the literature on the teaching and learning of thermodynamics in engineering, a survey questionnaire was developed and administered to close to a 1000 students in 17 thermodynamics classes at 13 universities in 7 countries. Survey results were analysed using statistical methods. This paper presents the findings of this investigation.

An energy-efficient, renewable energy-based heating, ventilating, air-conditioning and domestic hot water heating system for houses is proposed and modeled to assess its end-use energy savings potential. The system that consists of a ground heat exchanger, ground source heat pump, in-floor radiant heating, heat recovery ventilation system, photovoltaic generation and net-metered grid storage, is modeled using the open-source building simulation software ESP-r. Potential end-use energy savings of more than 50 percent are found to be attainable when the proposed heating, ventilating and air-conditioning system is compared with a conventional system to heat common energy-efficient homes in four major climatic zones of Canada. The corresponding reduction in greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide equivalent) ranges from 19 percent to close to 90 percent, depending on the types of fuels replaced.

Back in 1981, when I started doing building energy performance simulation for pre-design and energy efficiency retrofit work, building simulation was in its infancy. There were only a handful of building energy simulation programs, with DOE-2, ESP-II, BLAST, TRACE and MERIWHETHER being the most commonly used ones by consultants [1]. These programs required "mainframe" computers, so I used to prepare the input files on a Radio Shack TRS-80, send it over a telephone modem to a company in Toronto that ran the simulation on a mainframe computer overnight and shipped the printed output to me by courier in the morning. Each run had a turn-around time of almost 48 h, and the run-time and courier charges were about $100, almost as much as a day's salary for a young engineer.