Performance Home Design Contest Update

Sun Peaks Resort Municipality is offering an opportunity for the author(s) of the selected Performance Home to have an opportunity to present their design to the Council and the public.

Sun Peaks Resort Corporation donated two ski passes to the authors of the designs best fitting into the Tyrolean style of the Sun Peaks Resort while satisfying the code and the guidelines.

Ascent - TRU Performance Home Design Contest

Ascent Systems Technologies in collaboration with Architecture and Technology Department at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops is announcing a prize for the best design of a performance home for Sun Peaks Resort.

Sun Peaks Resort is a mountain village in the Interior British Columbia, Canada with some of the best snow in North America. Long recognized for some of the best ski conditions in Canada, Sun Peaks Resort attracts a growing number of skiers and snowboarders each winter with its champagne powder and wide variety of terrain. It is also one of the youngest and is the first Mountain Resort Municipality in Canada.

Sun Peaks is rapidly becoming a place of choice for people who want invest in both in some of the finest pieces of real estate and an active lifestyle.  Its mountain conditions however present a challenge for an architect and a builder. Steep elevations with trees, wide range of temperatures, from +25C in summer to -30C in winter, large amount of snowfall, and the absence of "cheap" natural gas all require for a special approach to design and construction. At the same time, it offers a great opportunity to try new ideas ! More than 2000 hours of sunshine a year, clean air void of any industrial pollution ask for utilizing some of the most abundant and non-exhaustible resources - energy of sun.  There are number of technologies and ways to improve energy efficiency of the mountain home.

The best performance home award will be given to the design which will be not only energy efficient, but also functional, have distinct style, be easily accessible, allow for maintainability, expandability and upgrade for future emerging technologies.   If you would like to sponsor students competition, please contact Vladimir: VG@ascentdevelopments.ca

Time to think

Today President Obama made his State of the Union speech, where he highlighted the issues of climate change, energy and the need to foster the research and development in the areas of high tech and clean technologies. Specific emphasis was made on the effort to regain leadership in technology and innovation, which America is loosing. These were very similar points I was trying to make in my last article - only applied to Canada. We are loosing our edge in space technologies (MDA). Our former pride - RIM is a shadow of its former self (do you still remember time when the same Obama did not go anywhere without his Blackberry?) We had a Vancouver-based company, which using their proprietary advanced technology, manufactured probably the best photovoltaic modules in the world, Day4 Energy - they are being squeezed out by the price war. Before that, Burnaby BC-based Ballard, one of the leaders in fuel cell technology, stopped working in this direction.  While China, Taiwan and South Korea are investing heavily in new technologies, Canada is trying to hang on its oil and gas exports, becoming a raw materials supplier to the Asian tigers? And what are we going to do when they will not need them anymore, which will happen inevitably, because they are rapidly increasing their share of alternative energy? You say China will need natural resources for a long time? Not for a long - Russia will supply enough and more than we can bring with the ships - through the pipelines from Siberia, and cheaper than we will ever can afford.

By the way, our praised Canadian banking system turned to be not so great either - almost all Canadian banks have been downgraded by Standard & Poor as well as by Moody's.   

The crisis, which "fell" on our heads in 2007, has crushed many, and stomped a number of promising developments. One of the examples, The Brook, the most advanced real-life residential building in North Vancouver, which was supposed to become a base for the line of the high-performance buildings, did not stand the financial tide, as many other businesses in the area.  At the same time some government and semi-government organizations, have dressed themself in "green" - without a need of being too much concerned about cost-effectiveness or even about the functioning of the technology they spent money on.  

The crisis, which some think is over, in fact is just about to begin.  We need a serious and thorough thinking about what is going on in the world and the global trends, or we are in the danger of becoming a third-world country. Canada has the intellectual resource - the best possible and non-exhaustible  - which can and has to be used to be a leader as it can be.

Sustainable Development Requires Systems Approach

Kamloops Daily News

February 4, 2013

By Vladimir Grebenyuk 

In recent years, issues of pollution, depletion of resources, natural and human-induced disasters, and other environmental and economic problems are becoming of more concern. It is obvious that the only way forward is sustainable development, which is a new way to designing and building cities, transport and energy infrastructure with a view to maximize their overall efficiency while minimizing their environmental impact.
Complex problems such as this can be solved only with a systems approach. There is a lot of information, often contradicting, about global warming, oil peak, “green” technologies, alternative energy and so on that is available from various sources. For non-specialists it is very difficult to navigate in that sea of information and form an educated opinion. It is even more important for authorities, responsible for making decisions that affect our future, to have a specific and unbiased analysis.
Canada needs a comprehensive national strategy on sustainable development.  Relying on oil and gas exports is not sustainable and not in the long-term interests of the nation and the world. It also puts our country in one line with the developing countries. But even some of them already realizing that resource-based economy is a dead end.
Ecuador has made a conscious decision that they will leave huge oil reserves underground and will develop other industries. If a poor central-American country can do it, then why can’t Canada, one of the most developed countries in the world?
We can take advantage of our natural resource — cold temperatures — to house data centres which generate large amount of heat, which could be recycled. At the back of the Sun Peaks fire hall facility there is a room used by Mascon Cable, which has air-conditioning run through the winter! On one side, the energy is used to heat the facility, on another — warm air is wasted outside. 
Financial motivations for the plans to build a gas pipeline through Alberta and B.C. are obvious. But isn’t it shortsighted and unwise from the national and global point of view?
Suppose, the “oil peak” is further in the future and natural gas reserves are bigger than was previously thought. Just look at the erratic history of prices on fossil fuels, often disrupted by acts of terrorism or regional conflicts, increased resistance from environmental groups, factor in a steady rise in alternative energy produced by the U.S., but especially China, where we are hoping to sell our natural gas.
All this will make expected benefits from such a project too short-lived. Adding to the equation is the greenhouse gas emissions, bad international image and backward reliance on resource-based economies.
We should not trade our not-too-distant future for very short financial gains. If we need to plan for use of the fossil fuels in the short term, we must do it wisely, while at the same time plan on moving away from them within a specific time period and with a concrete plan in place.
A comprehensive national strategy has to look beyond few years of the electoral cycle. When President John F. Kennedy announced the plan to put a man on the moon, it was a specific target with a deadline. As a result, Neil Armstrong was able to say, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”
We are now at about the same point in our history. The decision we make today will determine if we will be make a leap over our centuries-old dependency on oil, coal and gas, and give mankind a better, cleaner future.

Vladimir Grebenyuk is a principal systems architect at Ascent Systems Technologies. He lives at Sun Peaks and can be reached at VG@ascentdevelopments.ca