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À l'occasion de sa revue de presse, mercredi, Paul Arcand aborde les affaires non résolues qui ont connu un dénouement en septembre au Québec. Le Service de police de la Ville de Gatineau a notamment annoncé mardi avoir procédé à l'arrestation d'un suspect en lien avec le meurtre de Valérie Leblanc, survenu il y a 14 ans à Gatineau. La jeune femme de 18 ans avait été retrouvée sans vie dans un boisé derrière le Cégep de l'Outaouais. «Depuis ce temps-là, les proches, la famille, se demandaient qui a fait ça. Un homme a finalement été arrêté, Stéphane Rivard, 51 ans, qui fait face à une accusation de meurtre avec préméditation. [...] Comment on a fait pour le trouver? La police se contente de nous dire que de nouvelles informations et de nouvelles techniques d'enquête ont permis d'arrêter le suspect en question.» Deux autres «cold cases», soit celui de Catherine Daviau, tuée en 2008 à Montréal, et de Louis Valentine, assassiné en 2000, ont également été résolus. Autres sujets abordés: Les évènements violents se multiplient au Québec; En prison depuis 33 ans, Daniel Jolivet a possiblement été victime d'une erreur judiciaire; Les immigrants, les syndicats et les médecins: les cibles dans la mire du premier ministre François Legault; Aux États-Unis, Donald Trump aimerait que les soldats américains s'entraînent dans les rues des grandes villes pour contrer la menace intérieure. Voir https://www.cogecomedia.com/vie-privee pour notre politique de vie privée
Hier le Service de Police de la Ville de Gatineau a dévoilé avoir arrêté le meurtrier présumé de Valérie Leblanc. On en parle avec un journaliste qui a fait un podcast sur ce dossier. Entrevue avec Julien Morissette, co-animateur du podcast Synthèses. Regardez aussi cette discussion en vidéo via https://www.qub.ca/videos ou en vous abonnant à QUB télé : https://www.tvaplus.ca/qub ou sur la chaîne YouTube QUB https://www.youtube.com/@qub_radioPour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr
Une cochonne parmi les courges !
C'est au son de la musique de la chanson du film Rocky que François Legault a fait son entrée au congrès de la CAQ hier après-midi à Gatineau. C'est un chef combatif qui s'est adressé à ses troupes dans son discours de clôture du congrès.
LIVRE DE FRANKAujourd'hui dans le podcast, on réagit au discours du premier ministre du Québec François Legault lors du congrès de la dernière chance de la CAQ qui s'est tenu en fin de semaine à Gatineau. Comparaisons avec René Lévesque et Rocky Balboa, prestation low energy : assiste-t-on au début de la fin pour la Coalition Avenir Québec ?DANS LA PARTIE PATREON, on commence avec Joey qui nous fait écouter de nombreux extraits audio de l'entrevue de Mario Dumont à QUB Radio avec la présidente de la FTQ, Magalie Picard, au sujet des cotisations syndicales facultatives pour le financement d'activités politiques. Ensuite, on discute de la création du mouvement LGB International, un regroupement de lesbiennes, gays et bisexuels qui se dissocient du mouvement LGBTQ2+ qu'ils estiment ne plus les représenter et même nuire à leur image. On termine avec Frank qui nous lit le dernier segment de Derrière la porte du journal La Presse.0:00 Intro0:36 Livre de Frank et nos commanditaires3:01 Congres de la CAQ13:28 Un discours low energy19:02 La CAQ à la droite dure…24:48 L'interdiction des véhicules à essence changée27:58 Un narratif du retour de l'ADQ35:21 À venir dans le Patreon
Le débat sur les véhicules zéro émission oppose la vision économique — dépendance au gaz et déficit commercial — à l’approche politique, alors que le gouvernement maintient son objectif de 90 % de voitures électriques d’ici 2035, ce que critique Duhaime. À son caucus de Gatineau, Legault est apparu combatif, mettant de l’avant des priorités comme les coupures, la sécurité, la santé et la défense de la laïcité, malgré des rumeurs internes de vote de confiance fragilisées par l’« effet Maïté ». Le PQ veut aller plus loin que la Charte des valeurs en interdisant les signes religieux ostensibles dès le primaire, ce qui soulève des débats sur la portée et les limites de cette mesure. La rencontre Robitaille-Dutrizac avec Antoine Robitaille et Benoit Dutrizac. Regardez aussi cette discussion en vidéo via https://www.qub.ca/videos ou en vous abonnant à QUB télé : https://www.tvaplus.ca/qub ou sur la chaîne YouTube QUB https://www.youtube.com/@qub_radio Pour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr
Grève à Postes Canada. Grève à la STM. La CAQ à Gatineau. Nouveaux tarifs de Trump. Tour de table entre Isabelle Perron, Alexandre Dubé et Mario Dumont. Regardez aussi cette discussion en vidéo via https://www.qub.ca/videos ou en vous abonnant à QUB télé : https://www.tvaplus.ca/qub ou sur la chaîne YouTube QUB https://www.youtube.com/@qub_radioPour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr
Grève à la STM. Caucus de la CAQ à Gatineau. Point de presse du PQ. Tour de table entre Isabelle Perron, Alexandre Dubé et Mario Dumont. Regardez aussi cette discussion en vidéo via https://www.qub.ca/videos ou en vous abonnant à QUB télé : https://www.tvaplus.ca/qub ou sur la chaîne YouTube QUB https://www.youtube.com/@qub_radio Pour de l'information concernant l'utilisation de vos données personnelles - https://omnystudio.com/policies/listener/fr
Un homme, c’est fier !
ENTRETIEN AVEC ANNE-CLAIRE LAINÉ DU FESTIVAL LONGUEUR D'ONDESEntretien avec Anne-Claire Lainé, directrice générale du Festival Longueur d'ondes (Brest).Avec Anne-Claire LainéAnimation : Jeanne Dompierre (Xn Québec)En partenariat avec l'Ambassade de France au Canada.Cet épisode a été enregistré le 25 avril 2025 au Centre culturel du Vieux-Aylmer (Québec), dans le cadre du volet professionnel de la 9e édition du Festival Transistor.Commanditaire principal du Festival : Amazon MusicPartenaires du Volet professionnel : Culture Outaouais, Compétences Culture, Services Québec et l'Institut français du CanadaTransistor Média, basée à Gatineau (Québec), est une boîte de création, de production et de diffusion d'œuvres audios. En plus de ses balados, l'organisme tient annuellement le Festival Transistor et le Kino-radio.Site web de Transistor : https://transistor.mediaPour découvrir le catalogue de balados : https://transistor.media/baladosPour vous inscrire à l'infolettre mensuelle : https://bit.ly/infolettre-TransistorSuivez Transistor Média· Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/transistormedia· Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/transistormedia/· TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@transistor_media· YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/@transistor_media
DE L'ACCÈS AUX ARCHIVES SONORESLes enjeux liés à la conservation, à l'accès et à la valorisation des archives sonores. Nous discuterons des défis techniques et éthiques autour de l'archivage audio, notamment l'importance de rendre ces ressources accessibles à tous tout en préservant leur intégrité.Avec Brian Virostek, Nicolas Sylvestre et Anne-Claire LainéAnimation : André MartineauEn collaboration avec Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.Cet épisode a été enregistré le 25 avril 2025 au Centre culturel du Vieux-Aylmer (Québec), dans le cadre du volet professionnel de la 9e édition du Festival Transistor.Commanditaire principal du Festival : Amazon MusicPartenaires du Volet professionnel : Culture Outaouais, Compétences Culture, Services Québec et l'Institut français du CanadaTransistor Média, basée à Gatineau (Québec), est une boîte de création, de production et de diffusion d'œuvres audios. En plus de ses balados, l'organisme tient annuellement le Festival Transistor et le Kino-radio.Site web de Transistor : https://transistor.mediaPour découvrir le catalogue de balados : https://transistor.media/baladosPour vous inscrire à l'infolettre mensuelle : https://bit.ly/infolettre-TransistorSuivez Transistor Média· Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/transistormedia· Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/transistormedia/· TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@transistor_media· YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/@transistor_media
DU BON USAGE DE LA VIDÉO DANS LES BALADOSOn explore comment intégrer efficacement la vidéo dans les projets balados. On aborde à la fois les meilleures pratiques en cours au Québec et les opportunités offertes par la vidéo pour enrichir l'expérience des auditeur·trice·s et accroître la découvrabilité des projets.Avec Denis Martel (Stratège numérique) et David Ostigny (Télé-Québec)Animation : Daniel Coutu (Productions Prestigo)Cet épisode a été enregistré le 25 avril 2025 au Centre culturel du Vieux-Aylmer (Québec), dans le cadre du volet professionnel de la 9e édition du Festival Transistor.Commanditaire principal du Festival : Amazon MusicPartenaires du Volet professionnel : Culture Outaouais, Compétences Culture, Services Québec et l'Institut français du CanadaTransistor Média, basée à Gatineau (Québec), est une boîte de création, de production et de diffusion d'œuvres audios. En plus de ses balados, l'organisme tient annuellement le Festival Transistor et le Kino-radio.Site web de Transistor : https://transistor.mediaPour découvrir le catalogue de balados : https://transistor.media/baladosPour vous inscrire à l'infolettre mensuelle : https://bit.ly/infolettre-TransistorSuivez Transistor Média· Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/transistormedia· Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/transistormedia/· TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@transistor_media· YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/@transistor_media
TABLE RONDE SUR LA FORMATION EN BALADOPeu d'institutions, d'écoles de journalisme et d'organismes offrent des formations spécialisées, allant des ateliers d'introduction aux balados jusqu'aux programmes plus approfondis sur la production, le montage, la narration et la monétisation de ces contenus. La professionnalisation du secteur reste donc un enjeu.Avec Stéphanie Verrier et Marine Fleury (INIS), Émilie Fafard-Blais (Cégep de l'Outaouais) et Jean-Michel Berthiaume (UQÀM)Animation : Jean-Denis Scott (La Cité)Cet épisode a été enregistré le 25 avril 2025 au Centre culturel du Vieux-Aylmer (Québec), dans le cadre du volet professionnel de la 9e édition du Festival Transistor.Commanditaire principal du Festival : Amazon MusicPartenaires du Volet professionnel : Culture Outaouais, Compétences Culture, Services Québec et l'Institut français du CanadaTransistor Média, basée à Gatineau (Québec), est une boîte de création, de production et de diffusion d'œuvres audios. En plus de ses balados, l'organisme tient annuellement le Festival Transistor et le Kino-radio.Site web de Transistor : https://transistor.mediaPour découvrir le catalogue de balados : https://transistor.media/baladosPour vous inscrire à l'infolettre mensuelle : https://bit.ly/infolettre-TransistorSuivez Transistor Média· Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/transistormedia· Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/transistormedia/· TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@transistor_media· YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/@transistor_media
L'UTILISATION DE L'INTELLIGENCE ARTIFICIELLE EN BALADOL'IA transforme la production audio : automatisation, voix synthétiques, création musicale. Expert.e.s et créateur.trice.s discutent impacts, éthique (authenticité, droits d'auteur, manipulation) et avenir du balado. Quels défis et opportunités ces technologies posent-elles pour l'expérience auditeur et le travail des professionnel.le.s?Avec Jean-Sébastien Côté (compositeur et créateur) et Chloé Sondervorst (Radio-Canada)Animation : William Maurer (Virage Sonore)Cet épisode a été enregistré le 25 avril 2025 au Centre culturel du Vieux-Aylmer (Québec), dans le cadre du volet professionnel de la 9e édition du Festival Transistor.Commanditaire principal du Festival : Amazon MusicPartenaires du Volet professionnel : Culture Outaouais, Compétences Culture, Services Québec et l'Institut français du CanadaTransistor Média, basée à Gatineau (Québec), est une boîte de création, de production et de diffusion d'œuvres audios. En plus de ses balados, l'organisme tient annuellement le Festival Transistor et le Kino-radio.Site web de Transistor : https://transistor.mediaPour découvrir le catalogue de balados : https://transistor.media/baladosPour vous inscrire à l'infolettre mensuelle : https://bit.ly/infolettre-TransistorSuivez Transistor Média· Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/transistormedia· Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/transistormedia/· TikTok : https://www.tiktok.com/@transistor_media· YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/@transistor_media
Welcome, my friends, to Paranormal Heart podcast, paranormal talk, with heart and soul. I'm your host, Kat Ward. Thank you so much for tuning in.The views and opinions expressed on Paranormal Heart Podcast are not necessarily those of the show host, network or producers. Paranormal Heart Podcast is always respectful and courteous to all involved.Folks, my special guest tonight is from Quebec, Canada, Sabine Blais. Sabine is the founder of the Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization and Organisation Sasquatch Quebec. A lifelong enthusiast of Sasquatch and the paranormal, her curiosity began in childhood through shows like In Search Of and Unsolved Mysteries, and was fueled by the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage. An avid outdoorswoman, she combines her love of nature with her passion for research in the Gatineau Hills. Sabine also practices and teaches energy healing, explores pagan spirituality, and runs a craft business, Le Sasquatch Trading Co. Tonight, Sabine will be discussing not only her humble beginnings with all things paranormal, but the upcoming 1st Annual Gatineau/Ottawa Sasquatch Conference that will be held August 23/ 2025, which I will be attending with a friend. I'm so excited for this.Thank you to my special guest tonight, my amazing audience, and UPRN, 107.7 New Orleans and 105.3 the Gulf Coast. Remember, if you enjoyed the show, please support us by Liking, Subscribing, Sharing and Commenting. Another way to help support the show is by grabbing some swag! If you'd like to pick up your very own Paranormal Heart Podcast mug, just drop me an email at paranormalheart13@gmail.com. Until next time, take care of each other. Much love to you all!
Une envie de caca… pare-chocs à pare-chocs !
Êtes-vous plus cigarette, collation ou conversation ?
Des retenues à profusion, mais pour quel animateur ?
Un « bottle opener » dans une sacoche, rien de plus normal !
Paranormal Heart Podcast Welcomes Dr. Kelly Schutz August 19th, 2025 EP: 47 About Sabine Blais: Sabine Blais is the founder of the Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization and was born in Ottawa, Ontario. At an early age she developed an interest in Sasquatch and the Paranormal in general, and watched Bigfoot episodes of Leonard Nemoy's 'In Search Of' and Unsolved Mysteries during the 1970's and 90's.. She also watched the Patterson-Gimlin footage and read many books on Sasquatch encounters. She is an avid nature lover and enjoys hiking and the outdoors. Later in life she discovered and studied energy healing and nature-based spirituality. She has traveled and lived in Buenos Aires, Argentina from 2006 to 2011.. Upon her return to Québec, Canada she continued practicing and teaching energy healing and pagan spirituality. In 2023, she rekindled her interest in Sasquatch beings and started her own research in the Gatineau Hills in 2024. She is also the founder of the Organisation Sasquatch Québec and runs a small craft business called Le Sasquatch Trading Co. Sabine currently lives in Gatineau, Québec. Links: Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization ECSO-Bigfoot.blogspot.com Organisation Sasquatch Québec OSQ-Bigfoot.blogspot.com Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization Bilingual Bigfoot Organization in Canada - Organisation Bigfoot bilingue au Canada
Welcome, my friends, to Paranormal Heart podcast, paranormal talk, with heart and soul. Tonight's segment is pre-recorded streaming on United Public Radio Network, 107.7 New Orleans and 105.3 the Gulf Coast, YouTube and anyplace you find your favorite podcasts. I'm your host, Kat Ward. Thank you so much for tuning in. The views and opinions expressed on Paranormal Heart Podcast are not necessarily those of the show host, network or producers. Paranormal Heart Podcast is always respectful and courteous to all involved. Folks, my special guest tonight for segment 47 is from Quebec, Canada, Sabine Blais. Sabine is the founder of the Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization and Organisation Sasquatch Quebec. A lifelong enthusiast of Sasquatch and the paranormal, her curiosity began in childhood through shows like In Search Of and Unsolved Mysteries, and was fueled by the famous Patterson-Gimlin footage. An avid outdoorswoman, she combines her love of nature with her passion for research in the Gatineau Hills. Sabine also practices and teaches energy healing, explores pagan spirituality, and runs a craft business, Le Sasquatch Trading Co. Tonight, Sabine will be discussing not only her humble beginnings with all things paranormal, but the upcoming 1st Annual Gatineau/Ottawa Sasquatch Conference that will be held August 23/ 2025, which I will be attending with a friend. I'm so excited for this. Thank you to my special guest tonight, my amazing audience, and UPRN, 107.7 New Orleans and 105.3 the Gulf Coast. Remember, if you enjoyed the show, please support us by Liking, Subscribing, Sharing and Commenting. Another way to help support the show is by grabbing some swag! If you'd like to pick up your very own Paranormal Heart Podcast mug, just drop me an email at paranormalheart13@gmail.com. Until next time, take care of each other. Much love to you all! Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization ECSO-Bigfoot.blogspot.com Organisation Sasquatch Québec OSQ-Bigfoot.blogspot.com Eastern Canada Sasquatch Organization Bilingual Bigfoot Organization in Canada - Organisation Bigfoot bilingue au Canada
JR is joined by Ottawa BlackJacks general manager James Derouin to tee up their playoff game tomorrow vs Scarborough, they discuss playing in Gatineau for the game, they look back at the season and the special season from Javonte Smart.
L'homme au plus gros pénis, blessé dans la douche à cause de son engin! CKOI ta team - La vedette que t’aurais voulu comme prof au secondaire! Tiktok, kidnapping, descente de police… Une vidéo sème la panique à Gatineau! Debout les caves Roulette: Nic Audet est ben ben jaloux de notre nouveau concours Minute à Val: Sortez vos pelles: On sait quand tombera la première neige! Nic Audet: Quand lancer des haches te calme plus que de la méditation!L’entrée au secondaire va être de plus en plus difficile pour nos jeunes! Cabaret des comiques - Magali Saint-Vincent DÉBAT DU JOUR: Pour ou contre le télétravail Voir https://www.cogecomedia.com/vie-privee pour notre politique de vie privée
From the best of This is Ottawa: In 2018 a boutique hotel called The O'Brien opened to great fanfare in Gatineau Park. The derelict mansion overlooking Meech Lake had been given a multi-million dollar facelift - funded by taxpayers. But the following year, it closed. Robyn Bresnahan investigates.(Originally published September 16, 2024)
BlackJacks president Mark Wacyk joins the program to talk about his first season with the club, to look ahead to their home playoff game in Gatineau, and to share his evaluation of his team
Trois jeunes athlètes d'endurance de l'Outaouais se lancent dans une aventure complètement folle : traverser le Québec en mode triathlon extrême. Benjamin Racine nagera 150 km de Gatineau à Montréal, Annabelle Caron pédalera 1 000 km de Montréal à Matapédia, et Pierrick courra 650 km jusqu'au bout de la Gaspésie, au Parc national Forillon, via le mythique Sentier international des Appalaches (SIA - GRA1). Et tout ça, au profit des Maisons des jeunes de l'Outaouais. Dans cet épisode, on jase de la genèse du projet Sur la ligne, de leurs motivations profondes, de leur vision du sport et de l'écoresponsabilité… mais aussi de la préparation physique et mentale derrière un tel défi, de leurs craintes, des moments de doute, et de ce qu'ils espèrent inspirer chez les jeunes. Une discussion authentique avec trois athlètes de cœur, qui ont les valeurs à la bonne place! Bonne écoute.Pour les suivre et pour faire un don : https://www.lasaga.ca/surlaligneCréditsDesign graphique : David HébertThème musical : Frédérick DesrochesIdée originale, production, recherche et animation : Yannick Vézina© Pas sorti du bois 2025
This week on APTN News InFocus, host Cierra Bettens takes you behind the scenes of APTN's exclusive interview with Prime Minister Mark Carney. Carney recently joined hundreds of First Nations leaders in Gatineau, Que., for a summit on Bill C-5, the One Canadian Economy Act. The new law promises to fast-track development projects, but critics warn it could sideline Indigenous rights and environmental protections. APTN National News Host Dennis Ward travelled to Carney's hometown of Fort Smith, N.W.T., to speak with the prime minister about the bill and his commitments to Indigenous Peoples. Ward joins us from our Winnipeg studio to explain how it all went down. Catch the full interview here. • • • APTN National News, our stories told our way. Visit our website for more: https://aptnnews.ca Hear more APTN News podcasts: https://www.aptnnews.ca/podcasts/
O Centro Espacial da Guiana Francesa (CSG) é a principal porta de acesso da Europa ao Espaço. Mas sozinha a base de lançamento de Kourou não pode garantir a segurança dos voos e precisa de estações de monitoramento de foguetes espaciais espalhadas pelos quatro campos do mundo, como o Centro de Lançamento da Barreira do Inferno, em Natal. O Brasil é um dos parceiros históricos da Agência Espacial Europeia, que está completando 50 anos. Adriana Brandão, enviada especial da RFI a Kourou* De Kourou são lançados os foguetes europeus Ariane 6 e Vega C utilizados para colocar satélites em órbita ou para missões interplanetárias. Os lançamentos são preparados minunciosamente durante meses e até anos antes da data prevista. A segurança dos voos é de responsabilidade do CNES, a agência espacial francesa, proprietária do Centro Espacial da Guiana, que opera em parceria com a empresa Arianespace e a Agência Espacial Europeia (ESA). Jean-Frédéric Alasa, diretor de Operações do CNES, diz que essa é uma cooperação complementar e estreita que começa muito antes de um lançamento. "O diretor de Operações e o responsável de Missão da Arianespace são um binômio. A Arianespace gere o foguete e o diretor de operações a parte relacionada à base de lançamento e à segurança do voo", informa. Ele detalha que a proteção de bens e pessoas e do meio ambiente é uma das missões soberanas do CNES. "Isso significa que quando o foguete decolar, se ele não estiver na trajetória correta, atuaremos, mas nas condições climáticas ideais para evitar que, em caso de queda, os destroços não caiam em áreas habitadas, por exemplo", explica. Monitoramento do voo No último dia 29 de maio, a RFI pôde acompanhar o lançamento de um foguete Vega C, que colocou com sucesso em órbita o satélite Biomass da Agência Espacial Europeia. Assim que o foguete deixa a base de lançamento, ele é monitorado durante toda a sua trajetória. Os satélites podem ser colocados em órbita polar, ou geoestacionária, na linha do Equador. Nos primeiros minutos do voo, o rastreio é feito pelas poderosas antenas parabólicas da estação de Galliot, na Guiana Francesa, que fica a poucos quilômetros da base de lançamento de Kourou. Localizada em uma montanha, o local é protegido, cercado de arame farpado e com entrada restrita para evitar qualquer falha ou vazamento no esquema de segurança dos voos. O brasileiro Cleberson Miranda trabalha na estação há mais de 20 anos. Ele nasceu na Guiana Francesa, mas é filho de brasileiros, e sonhava em integrar a equipe do Centro Espacial de Kourou desde criança. "Nosso trabalho tem que ir até o fim da missão, quer dizer, ou o foguete vai ser desaorbitado ou ele vai ser passivado para ficar em órbita, mas sem perigo", indica o responsável pelo Sistema de Telemetria do CNES. Base da Barreira do Inferno de Natal Em 10 minutos, os foguetes saem dos radares da estação de Galiot, que passa a contar com a ajuda de outras estações terrestres para monitorar os voos que duram em média duas horas. "Quando o voo é para o norte, a gente tem uma estação nas ilhas Bermudas, e quando é para o leste, a próxima estação é a de Natal. A gente tem um acordo com a Agência Espacial Brasileira, a AEB, e com o CLBI, que é o Centro de lançamento da Barreira do inferno". As bases de monitoramento terrestres espalhadas pelos quatro cantos do mundo, como a de Natal, passam a ser o “olho” do Centro Espacial da Guiana, que continua sendo o responsável pela segurança do voo. As antenas dessas bases recuperam a telemetria emitida pelo foguete e enviam para Kourou, que faz o tratamento dos dados. Essas parcerias são indispensáveis. "É essencial. Não podemos lançar sem essas colaborações aí pelo mundo. Depois que o foguete é lançado, temos de monitorá-lo até ele não ser mais um perigo. A autorização de voo só é dada se tiver os meios de monitorar isso durante todo esse tempo", salienta o brasileiro. Além de Natal, o centro espacial da Guiana conta, por exemplo, com a colaboração das bases de Malindi, no Quênia, que pertence à Agência Espacial Italiana, de Gatineau, da Agência Especial do Canadá, ou a New Norcia, localizada na Austrália e que pertence à Agência Espacial Europeia. Parceria histórica Mas a parceira com o Centro de Lançamento da Barreira do Inferno é a mais antiga. O Brasil participa do monitoramento dos foguetes lançados de Kourou desde o início e foi o segundo país a assinar um acordo com a Agência Espacial Europeia em 1977, depois da Índia. A cooperação para a instalação na base brasileira de uma estação de telemetria para o rastreio dos foguetes europeus foi assinada somente dois anos depois da criação da ESA, em 1975. A Barreira do Inferno é o primeiro centro de lançamento de foguetes da América do Sul. Localizada no município de Parnamirim, a cerca de 12 km de Natal, a base da Força Aérea Brasileira foi fundada em 1965, com o objetivo de contribuir para o avanço de tecnologias espaciais brasileiras. O coronel aviador Christiano Haag, diretor do CLBI, ressalta que essa parceria com a ESA também é "muito importante" para o Brasil. "A Agência Espacial Europeia é responsável pela instalação e manutenção dos equipamentos e, mais importante, pela atualização da nossa estação. É ainda disponibilizado um treinamento para os recursos humanos e existe um pagamento financeiro que entra com os cofres públicos", informa o coronel. Fabrizio Fabiani, diretor do programa Vega na Arianespace, lembra que a base de Natal é usada quase sempre nas "missões geoestacionárias" e que essa "parceria histórica com o Brasil é muito importante e robusta". Uma parceria de "sucesso e estratégica" para o desenvolvimento do programa espacial das duas agências, ressalta o coronel Christiano Haag, garantindo que "até hoje nós tivemos 100% de sucesso no rastreio dos foguetes lançados a partir de Kourou". Cleberson Miranda recorda que "a parceria com Natal existe desde o primeiro lançamento de Kourou" e espera que ela "ainda vá continuar um bom tempo". *A viagem foi realizada a convite da Agência Espacial Europeia
Summer rewind: Scott Demark, President and CEO of Zibi Community Utility, joins thinkenergy to discuss how our relationship with energy is changing. With two decades of expertise in clean energy and sustainable development, Scott suggests reimagining traditional energy applications for heating and cooling. He shares how strategic energy distribution can transform urban environments, specifically how district energy systems optimize energy flow between buildings for a greener future. Listen in. Related links ● Scott Demark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-demark-83640473/ ● Zibi Community Utility: https://zibi.ca/ ● Markham District Energy Inc: https://www.markhamdistrictenergy.com/ ● One Planet Living: https://www.bioregional.com/one-planet-living ● Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-cem-leed-ap-8b612114/ ● Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en To subscribe using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinkenergy/id1465129405 To subscribe using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl To subscribe on Libsyn: http://thinkenergy.libsyn.com/ --- Subscribe so you don't miss a video: https://www.youtube.com/user/hydroottawalimited Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydroottawa Stay in the know on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HydroOttawa Keep up with the posts on X: https://twitter.com/thinkenergypod ---- Transcript: Trevor Freeman 00:00 Hi everyone. Well, summer is here, and the think energy team is stepping back a bit to recharge and plan out some content for the next season. We hope all of you get some much needed downtime as well, but we aren't planning on leaving you hanging over the next few months, we will be re releasing some of our favorite episodes from the past year that we think really highlight innovation, sustainability and community. These episodes highlight the changing nature of how we use and manage energy, and the investments needed to expand, modernize and strengthen our grid in response to that. All of this driven by people and our changing needs and relationship to energy as we move forward into a cleaner, more electrified future, the energy transition, as we talk about many times on this show. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll be back with all new content in September. Until then, happy listening. Trevor Freeman 00:55 Welcome to think energy, a podcast that dives into the fast changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at think energy at hydro ottawa.com, Hi everyone. Welcome back one of the overarching aspects of the energy transition that we have talked about several times on this show is the need to change our relationship with energy, to rethink the standard way of doing things when it comes to heating and cooling and transportation, et cetera. This change is being driven by our need to decarbonize and by the ongoing evolution and improvement of technology, more things are becoming available to us as technology improves. On the decarbonization front, we know that electrification, which is switching from fossil fuel combustions to electricity for things like space and water heating, vehicles, et cetera, is one of the most effective strategies. But in order to switch out all the end uses to an electric option, so swapping out furnaces and boilers for heat pumps or electric boilers, switching all gas cars to EVs, et cetera, in order to do that in a way that is affordable and efficient and can be supported by our electricity grid. We need to think about multi strategy approaches, so we can't just continue to have this one way power grid where every home, every business, every warehouse or office tower satisfies all of its energy needs all the time directly from the grid with no adaptability. That isn't the best approach. It's not going to be affordable or efficient. We're not going to be able to do it fast enough. The multi strategy approach takes into account things like distributed energy resources, so solar and storage, et cetera, which we've talked about many times on this show, but it also includes approaches like district energy. So district energy is rethinking how energy flows between adjacent buildings, looking for opportunities to capture excess energy or heat from one source and use that to support another, and that is the focus of today's conversation to help us dive into this topic, I'm really happy to welcome Scott demark to the show. Scott has been a champion of sustainability, clean energy solutions and energy efficiency in the Ottawa real estate and development industry for over 20 years now, he has overseen many high performance development projects, and was one of the driving forces behind the Zibi development in downtown Ottawa, and most applicable for today's conversation the renewable district energy system that provides heating and cooling to the Zibi site. Scott is the president and CEO of the Zibi community utility, as well as a partner at Theia partners. Scott the Mark, welcome to the show. Thanks. Nice to see you. Trevor, so Scott, why don't we start with definitions are always a good place to start. So when we talk about a district energy system, give us a high level overview of what exactly that means. Scott Demark 04:15 Sure a district energy system is, is simply the connection or interconnection of thermal energy sources, thermal energy sinks. And so really, in practical terms, it means, instead of buildings having their own furnace and cooling system, buildings connect to a hydronic loop. A hydronic loop is just pipes filled with water, and then the heat or the cooling is made somewhere else, and that heat or lack of heat cooling is in a pipe. They push the pipe to the building, and then the pipe extracts the heat, or rejects the heat to that loop. And so it's simply an interconnection of. Uh, as it forces in sinks for federal energy. Trevor Freeman 05:03 And I guess one of the important concepts here is that buildings often create heat, not just through a furnace or not just through the things that are meant to create heat, but, you know, server racks, computer server racks, generate a lot of heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. So oftentimes we're cooling buildings to remove heat that's being created in those buildings, and then other buildings nearby need to be heated in order to make that space comfortable. Scott Demark 05:31 Is that fair to say? Yeah, absolutely. Trevor, so, a an office building in the city of Ottawa, big old government office building, you'll see a pretty big plume on the roof in the wintertime. That's not just kind of the flue gas from a boiler, but rather it is actually chillers are running inside to make cooling, and they're just selling that heat to the atmosphere, even on the coldest day of the year. So it's people, you know, people are thermal load. Computers are thermal load, and so is solar gain. You know, January is pretty dark period for us, meaning low angle sun, but by this time in a year, you know, at the end of February, there's a lot of heat in that sun. So a glass building absorbs a lot of sun an office building will lead cooling on the sunny side of that building a lot of the time, even in the dead of Trevor Freeman 06:18 winter, yeah. So a district system, then, is taking advantage of the fact that heat exists, and we don't necessarily need to either burn fossil fuels, or, even if it's a, you know, a clean system, we don't have to expend energy to create heat, or create as much heat if we could move that heat around from where it's kind of naturally occurring to where we need Scott Demark 06:41 it. That's right at the very core of a district energy system. You're going to move heat from a place that it's not wanted to a place that it is wanted. And so in our example of the office building, you know, on the February day with the sun shining in and the computers all running, that building's getting rid of heat. But right next door, say, there's a 20 story condo. Well, that 20 story condo needs heating and it also needs domestic hot water. So year round, domestic hot water represents 30, 35% of the heating load of any residential building, so at all times. So a district energy system allows you to take that heat away from the office building and give it to the residential building, instead of making the heat and and dissipating that heat to the atmosphere in the office building. So, yeah, it's, it's really a way to move, you know, from sources to sinks. That's, that's what a district energy system does well. Trevor Freeman 07:37 So we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but let's dive right into, you know, we talk a lot on the show about the energy transition this, this push to one, move away from fossil fuel combustion to meet our energy needs, and two, shifting from a kind of static, centralized energy system like we have right now, big generators, large transmission lines, et cetera, to more of a two way flow, distributed energy system. What is the role of district energy systems within that transition? How do they help us get closer to that sort of reality that we talk about? Scott Demark 08:15 I think the biggest way that they help is economies of scale. Okay, so by that, I'll explain that. Imagine there's a lot of technology that's been around a long time that is very scalable to the building level, but most of them are fossil fire. Okay, so the the cheapest way to heat a building in Ottawa is to put a gas fired boiler in. That's the cheapest capital cost, first cost, and it's also the cheapest operating cost, is to put a gas boiler in that industry is well established. There's lots of trades who could do it. There's lots of producers who make the boilers. When you start to try and think about the energy transition and think about what you may do to be different, to be lower carbon, or to be zero carbon, those industries are, are just starting right? Those industries don't exist. They don't have the same depth, and so they don't have the same cost structure, and oftentimes they don't scale well down to the building. And therefore a district energy system aggregates a bunch of load, and so you can provide a thermal energy so at scale that becomes affordable. And that is, you know, a very good example of that would be where, you know, you might want to go and and recover heat from some process. And we'll talk about Zibi as the example. But if you want to go recover heat from some process and bring it in, it doesn't make sense to run a pipeline to a source to heat one building. You can't make financial sense of it, but if you're heating 20 buildings, that pipeline, all of a sudden makes sense to take waste heat from somewhere, to move it somewhere else. The other advantage is that truly, district energy systems are agnostic to their inputs and outputs for heat. So once you. Establish that hydronic loop, that interconnection of water pipes between buildings. What the source and what the source is doesn't matter. So you may have, at one point, built a district energy system, and Markham District Energy System is a great example of this. Markham district energy system was built on the concept of using a co generation facility. So they burned natural gas to make electricity. They sold electricity to the grid, and they captured all the waste heat from that generation, and they fed it into a district energy system. Well here we are, 20 plus years later, and they're going to replace that system, that fossil fired system Augment, not fully replaced, but mostly replace that system with a sewer coupled energy recovery and drive those heat recovery chillers to a sewer system. So they're putting a very green solution in place of a former fossil solution. They don't to rip up the pipes. They don't have to change anything in the buildings. They only have to change that central concept now, again, Markham could never do that at a one building scale. They're only that at the community scale. Trevor Freeman 11:08 So you mentioned, I want to pick on something you said there. You talked about a sewer heat energy system. They're pulling heat from the sewer. Just help our listeners understand high level kind of, why is there heat there for us to pull like, what's the what's the source there? Scott Demark 11:26 Yeah, so when we shower, when we flush toilets, all, all of that is introducing heat into a sewer system. So we're collecting heat from everybody's house into the sewer system. The sewer system also sits below the frost line. So call it Earth coupled. You know, it's the earth in Ottawa below the frost line sits around eight, eight and a half c and so at that temperature and the temperature of flushing toilets we we essentially get a sewer temperature in the on the coldest day of the year, but it's around 1010, and a half degrees Celsius. And obviously, for lots of the year, it's much warmer than that. And so I think, you know, a lot of people are kind of familiar with the concept of geo exchange energy, or that. Lot of people call it geothermal. But geo exchange where you might drill down into the earth, and you're taking advantage of that 888, and a half degrees Celsius. So you're exchanging heat. You can reject heat to the earth, or you can absorb heat from the earth. Well, this is the same idea, but you accept or reject from this sewer. But because the sewer is relatively shallow, it is cheaper to access that energy, and because it's warm, and on the coldest day, a couple of degrees make a big difference. Trevor and most of the years so much warmer, you're really in a very good position to extract that heat, and that's all it is. You. You are just accepting or rejecting heat. You don't use the sewage itself. It doesn't come into your building. You have a heat exchanger in between. But that's what you do. Trevor Freeman 12:58 I agree. And we've talked before on the show about the idea that you know, for an air source, heat pump, for example, you don't need a lot of heat energy to extract energy from the air. It can be cold outside, and there is still heat energy in the air that you can pull and use that to heat a building, heat water, whatever. So same concept, except you've got a much warmer source of energy, I guess. Yeah, exactly. And you know, Trevor, when you look at the efficiency curves of those air source heat pumps, you know, they kind of drop off a cliff at minus 20. Minus 22 In fact, you know, five or six years ago, they that that was dropping off at minus 10. So we've come a long way in air source heat pumps. But imagine on that coldest, coldest day of the year, you're still your source is well above zero, and therefore your efficiency. So the amount of electricity you need to put into the heat pump to get out the heat that you need is much lower, so it's a way more efficient heat exchange. Great. Thanks for that, Scott. I know that's a bit of a tangent here, but always cool to talk about different ways that we're coming up with to heat our buildings. So back to district energy, we've talked through some of the benefits of the system. If I'm a building owner and I'm have the decision to connect to a system that's there, or have my own standalone, you know, traditional boiler, whatever the case may be, or even in a clean energy want to heat pump, whatever. What are the benefits of being on a district system versus having my own standalone system for just my building? Scott Demark 14:30 Yeah, so when you're wearing the developers hat, you know they're really looking at it financially, if they have other goals around sustainability. Great that will factor into it, but most of them are making decisions around this financially. So it needs to compete with that. That first cost that we talked about the easiest ways, is boilers, gas fired boilers is the cheapest way. And so they're going to look to see it at how. Does this compare to that? And so I think that's the best way to frame it for you. And so the difference here is that you need to install in your building a cooling system and a heating system. In Ottawa, that cooling system is only used for a few months a year, and it's very expensive. It takes up space, whether you're using a chiller and a cooling tower on the roof, or using a dry cooler, it takes up roof space, and it also takes up interior space. If you do have a cooling tower, you have a lot of maintenance for that. You need to turn it on and turn it off in the spring, on and fall, etc, just to make sure all that happens. And you need to carry the life cycle of that boiler plant you need to bring gas infrastructure into your building. You generally need to put that gas boiler plant high in your building, so, so up near the top, and that's for purposes of venting that properly. Now, that's taking real estate, right? And it's taking real estate on the area that's kind of most advantageous, worth the most money. So you might lose a penthouse to have a boiler and chiller room up there. And you also, of course, lose roof space. And today, we really do try to take advantage of those rooftop patios and things. Amenities are pretty important in buildings. And so when I compare that to district energy at the p1 level p2 level in your building, you're going to have a small room, and I really do mean small where the energy transfer takes place, you'll have some heat exchangers. And small you might have a space, you know, 10 or 12 feet by 15 to 18 feet would be big enough for a 30 story tower. So a small room where you do the heat exchange and then Trevor, you don't have anything in your building for plant that you would normally look after. So when you look at the pro forma for owning your building over the lifetime of it, you don't have to maintain boilers. You don't have to have boiler insurance. You don't have to maintain your chillers. You don't have to have lifecycle replacement on any of these products. You don't need anybody operating, those checking in on the pressure vessels. None of that has to happen. All of that happens on the district energy system. So you're really taking something you own and operate and replacing that with a service. So district energy is a service, and what, what we promised to deliver is the heating you need and the cooling you need. 24/7 you second thing you get is more resilience. And I'll explain that a little bit. Is that in a in a normal building, if you if the engineers looked at it and said you need two boilers to keep your building warm, then you're probably going to install three. And that is kind of this n plus one sort of idea, so that if one boilers goes down, you have a spare and you need to maintain those. You need to pay for that. You need to maintain those, etc. But in district energy system, all that redundancy is done in the background. It's done by us, and we have significantly more redundancy than just n plus one in this example. But overall, you know, if you have 10 buildings on your district energy system, each of those would have had n plus one. We don't have n plus 10 in the plant. And so overall, the cost is lower, I would say, if you look at it globally, except the advantages you do have better than N plus one in the plan, so we have higher resiliency at a lower cost. Trevor Freeman 18:26 So we know there's no such thing as a miracle solution that works in all cases. What are the the best use cases for district energy system? Where does it make a lot of sense. Scott Demark 18:37 Yeah, in terms some, in some ways the easiest thing, spray work doesn't make sense. So, so it doesn't make sense in sprawling low rise development. So the cost of that hydronic loop, those water pipes, is high. They have to fit in the roadway. It's civil work, etc. And so you do need density. That doesn't mean it has to be high rise density. You know, if you look at Paris, France, six stories, district energy, no problem. There's there's lots and lots of customers for that scale of building. It doesn't have to be all high rise, but it does. District energy does not lend itself well to our sprawling style of development. It's much more suited to a downtown setting. It also kind of thrives where there's mixed use, you know, I think the first example we're talking about is office building shedding heat, residential building needing heat, you know, couple that with an industrial building shedding heat. You know, the these various uses, a variety of uses on a district energy system is the best because its biggest advantage is sharing energy, not making energy. And so a disparity of uses is the best place to use that, I think the other, the other thing to think about, and this is harder in Canada than the rest of the world. Is that, you know, it's harder on a retrofit basis, from a cost perspective, than it is in a in a new community where you can put this in as infrastructure, day one, you're going to make a big difference. And I'll, you know, give a shout out to British Columbia and the Greater Vancouver area. So the district, you know, down in the Lower Mainland, they, they kind of made this observation and understood that if they were going to electrify then District Energy gave economies of scale to electrify that load. And they do a variety of things, but one of the things they do is, is kind of district geo exchange systems, so, so big heat pumps coupled to big fields, and then bring heat a bunch of buildings. But these are Greenfield developments Trevor. So as they expand their suburbs, they do need to build the six stories. They very much have kind of density around parks concepts. So now Park becomes a geo field, density around the geo field, but this infrastructure is going in the same time as the water pipes. It's going in at the same time as the roads, the sidewalks, etc, you can dramatically reduce your cost, your first cost related to that hydro loop, if you're putting it in the same time you're doing the rest of the services. Trevor Freeman 21:15 So we're not likely to see, you know, residential neighborhoods with single family homes or multi unit homes, whatever, take advantage of this. But that sort of low rise, mid rise, that's going to be more of a good pick for this. And like you said, kind of development is the time to do this. You mentioned other parts of the world. So district energy systems aren't exactly widespread. In Canada, we're starting to see more of them pop up. What about the rest of the world? Are there places in the world where we see a lot more of this, and they've been doing this for a long time? Scott Demark 21:47 Yeah. So I'd almost say every everywhere in the northern hemisphere, except North America, has done much more of this. And you know, we really look to kind of Scandinavia as the gold standard of this. You look to Sweden, you look to Denmark, you look to Germany. Even there's, there's a lot of great examples of this, and they are typically government owned. So they are often public private partnerships, but they would be various levels of government. So you know, if you, if you went to Copenhagen, you'd see that the municipality is an owner. But then their equivalent of a province or territory is, is actually a big part of it, too. And when they built their infrastructure ages ago, they did not have an easy source of fossil fuels, right? And so they need to think about, how can we do this? How can we share heat? How can we centralize the recovery of heat? How can we make sure we don't waste any and this has just been ingrained in them. So there's massive, massive District Energy loops, interconnecting loops, some owned by municipalities, some of them probably, if you build a factory, part of the concept of your factory, part of the pro forma of your factory is, how much can I sell my waste heat for? And so a factory district might have a sear of industrial partners who own a district energy loop and interfaces with the municipal loop, all sort of sharing energy and dumping it in. And so that's, you know, that's what you would study. That's, that's where we would want to be. And the heart of it is just that, as I said, we've really had, you know, cheap or, you know, really cheap fossil fuels. We've had no price on pollution. And therefore what really hasn't needed to happen here, and we're starting to see the need for that to happen here. Trevor Freeman 23:46 It's an interesting concept to think of, you know, bringing that factory example in, instead of waste heat or heat as a byproduct of your process being a problem that you need to deal with, something, you have to figure out a way to get rid of it becomes almost an asset. It's a it's a, you know, convenient commodity that's being produced regardless, that you can now look to sell and monetize. Scott Demark 24:10 Yeha, you go back to the idea of, like, what are the big benefits of district energy? Is that, like, if that loop exists and somebody knows that one of the things the factory produces is heat, well, that's a commodity I produce, and I can, I can sell it if I have a way to sell it right here, you know, we're going to dissipate it to a river. We may dissipate it to the atmosphere. We're going to get rid of it. Like you said, it's, it's, it's waste in their minds, and in Europe, that is absolutely not waste. Trevor Freeman 24:36 And it coming back to that, you know, question of, where does this make sense? You talked about mixed use, and it's also like the, you know, the temporal mixed use of someone that is producing a lot of heat during the day, when the next door residential building is empty, then when they switch, when the factory closes and the shift is over and everybody comes home from work. So that's when that building needs heat, that's when they want to be then taking that heat two buildings next to each other that both need heat at the same time is not as good a use cases when it's offset like that. Scott Demark 25:10 Yeah, that's true. And lots of District Energy Systems consider kind of surges and storage. I know our system at CB has, has kind of a small storage system related to the domestic hot water peak load. However, you can also think of the kilometers and kilometers and kilometers of pipes full of water as a thermal battery, right? So, so you actually are able to even out those surges you you let the temperature the district energy system rise when that factory is giving all out all kinds of heat, it's rising even above the temperature you have to deliver it at. And then when that heat comes, you can draw down that temperature and let the whole district energy system normalize to its temperature again. So you do have an innate battery in the in the water volume that sits in the district energy system, very cool. Trevor Freeman 26:04 So you've mentioned Zibi a couple of times, and I do want to get into that as much as we're talking about other parts of the world. You know having longer term district energy systems. Zibi, community utility is a great example, right here in Ottawa, where you and I are both based of a district energy system. Before we get into that, can you, just for our listeners that are not familiar with Zibi, give us a high level overview of of what that community is, its location, you know, the goals of the community, and then we'll talk about the energy side of things. Scott Demark 26:34 Sure. So Zibi was formerly Domtar paper mills. It's 34 acres, and it is in downtown Ottawa and downtown Gatineau. About a third of the land masses is islands on the Ontario side, and two thirds of the land mass is on the shore, the north shore of the Ottawa River in Gatineau, both downtown, literally in the shadows of Parliament. It is right downtown. It was industrial for almost 200 years. Those paper mills shut down in the 90s and the early 2000s and my partners and I pursued that to turn it from kind of this industrial wasteland, walled off, fenced off, area that no one could go into. What we're hoping will be kind of the world's most sustainable urban community, and so at build out, it will house, you know, about six, 7000 people. It will be four and a half million square feet, 4.24 point 4, million square feet of development. It is master planned and approved and has built about, I think we're, at 1.1 million square feet. So we're about quarter built out now. 10 buildings are done and connected to the district energy system there. And really, it's, it's an attempt to sort of recover land that was really quite destroyed. You can imagine it was a pretty polluted site. So the giant remediation plan, big infrastructure plan, we modeled this, this overall sustainability concept, over a program called one planet living which has 10 principles of sustainability. So you know, you and I are talking a lot about carbon today, but there's also very important aspects about affordability and social sustainability and lifestyle, and all of those are incorporated into the one planet program, and encourage people to look up one planet living and understand what it is, and look at the commitments that we've made at CV to create a sustainable place. We issue a report every year, kind of our own report card that's reviewed by a third party, that explains where we are on our on our mission to achieve our goal of the world's most sustainable Trevor Freeman 28:57 community. Yeah. And so I do encourage people to look at one planet living. Also have a look at, you know, the Zibi website, and it's got the Master Plan and the vision of what that community will be. And I've been down there, it's already kind of coming along. It's amazing to see the progress compared to who I think you described it well, like a bit of an industrial wasteland at the heart of one of the most beautiful spots in the city. It was really a shame what it used to be. And it's great to see kind of the vision of what it can become. So that's awesome. Scott Demark 29:26 Yeah, and Trevor, especially now that the parks are coming along. You know, we worked really closely with the NCC to integrate the shoreline of ZV to the existing, you know, bike path networks and everything. And, you know, two of the three shoreline parks are now completed and open to the public and and they're stunning. And, you know, so many Ottawa people have not been down there because it's not a place you think about, but it's one of the few places in Ottawa and Gatineau where you can touch the water, you know, like it's, it's, it's stunning. Yeah, very, very cool. Trevor Freeman 29:57 Okay, so the. The the next part of that, of course, is energy. And so there is a district energy system, one of the first kind of, or the most recent big energy. District Energy Systems in Ottawa. Tell us a little bit about how you are moving energy and heating the Zibi site. Scott Demark 30:17 Yeah. So, first I'll say, you know, we, we, we studied different ways to get to net zero. You know, we had, we had a goal of being a zero carbon community. There are low carbon examples, but a zero carbon community is quite a stretch. And even when you look at the Scandinavian examples, the best examples, they're missing their they're missing their energy goals, largely because some of the inputs that are District Energy System remain fossil, but also because they have trouble getting the performance out of the buildings. And so we looked at this. We also know from our experience that getting to zero carbon at the building scale in Ottawa is very, very difficult. Our climate's tough, super humid, super hot summer, very cold, very dry, winter, long winter. So it's difficult at the building scale. It's funny Trevor, because you'd actually have an easier time getting to zero carbon or a passive house standard in affordable housing than you do at market housing, and that's because affordable housing has a long list of people who want to move in and pay rents. You can get some subsidies for capital, and the people who are willing to pay rent are good with smaller windows, thicker walls, smaller units, and pass trust needs, all those kinds of things. So when down at Zibi, you're really selling views. You're competing with people on the outside of Zibi, you're building almost all glass buildings. And so it's really difficult to find a way to get to zero carbon on the building scale. So that moved us to district energy for all the reasons we've talked about today already. And so when we looked at it for Zibi, you really look at the ingredients you have. One of the great things we have is we're split over the border. It's also a curse. But split over the border is really interesting, because you cannot move electricity over that border, but you can move thermal energy over that border. And so for us, in thinking about electrifying thermal energy, we realized that if we did the work in Quebec, where there is clean and affordable electricity, we could we could turn that into heat, and then we could move heat to Ontario. We could move chilled water to Ontario. So that's kind of ingredient, one that we had going for us there. The second is that there used to be three mills. So originally, don't target three mills. They sold one mill. It changed hands a few times, but It now belongs to Kruger. They make tissue there so absorbent things, Kleenexes and toilet paper, absorbent, anything in that tissue process. That's a going concern. So you can see that on our skyline. You can see, on cold days, big plumes of waste heat coming out of it. And so we really saw that as our source, really identified that as our source. And how could we do that? So going back to the economies of scale, is could we send a pipeline from Kruger, about a kilometer away, to Zibi? And so when we were purchasing the land, we were looking at all the interconnections of how the plants used to be realized. There's some old pipelines, some old easements, servitudes, etc. And so when we bought the land, we actually bought all of those servitudes too, including a pipeline across the bridge. Canadian energy regulator licensed across the bridge into Ontario. And so we mixed all these ingredients up, you know, in a pot and came up with our overall scheme. And so that overall scheme is is relatively simple. We built an energy recovery station at Kruger where, just before their effluent water, like when they're finished in their process, goes back to the river. We have a heat exchanger there. We extract heat. We push that heat in a pipe network over to Zibi. At Zibi, we can upgrade that heat using heat recovery chillers to a useful temperature for us, that's about 40 degrees Celsius, and we push that across the bridge to Ontario, all of our buildings in Ontario then have fan coil units. They use that 40 degree heat to heat buildings. The return side of that comes back to Quebec. And then on the Quebec side, we have a loop. And all of our buildings in the Quebec side then use heat pumps so we extract the last bit of heat. So imagine you you've returned from a fan coil, but you're still slightly warm. That slightly warm water is enough to drive a heat pump inside the buildings. And then finally, that goes back to Kruger again, and Kruger heats it back up with their waste heat and comes back. So that's our that's our heating loop. The cooling side is coupled to the Ottawa River. And so instead of us, we. Rejecting heat to the atmosphere through cooling towers. Our coolers are actually coupled to the river. That's a very tight environmental window that you can operate in. So we worked with the Ministry of the Environment climate change in Quebec to get our permit to do it. We can only be six degrees difference to the river, but our efficiency is on average, like on an annual basis, more than double what it would be to a cooling tower for the same load. So we're river coupled, with respect to cooling for the whole development, and we're coupled to Kruger for heating for the whole development. And what that allows us to do is eliminate fossil fuels. Our input is clean Quebec electricity, and our output is heating and cooling. Trevor Freeman 35:44 So none of the buildings, you know, just for our listeners, none of the buildings have any sort of fossil fuel combustion heating equipment. You don't have boilers or anything like that. Furnaces in these in these buildings? Scott Demark 35:54 No boilers, no chillers, no. that's awesome. And Trevor Freeman 35:58 That's awesome. And just for full transparency, I should have mentioned this up front. So the Zibi community utility is a partnership between Zibi and Hydro Ottawa, who our listeners will know that I work for, and this was really kind of a joint venture to figure out a different approach to energy at the Zibi site. Scott Demark 36:16 Yeah, that's right. Trevor, I mean the concept, the concept was born a long time ago now, but the concept was born by talking to hydro Ottawa about how we might approach this whole campus differently. You know, one of hydro Ottawa companies makes electricity, of course, Chaudière Falls, and so that was part of the thinking we thought of, you know, micro grids and islanding this and doing a lot of different things. When Ford came in, and we were not all the way there yet, and made changes to Green Energy Act, it made it challenging for us to do the electricity side, but we had already well advanced the thermal side, and hydro, you know, hydro makes a good partner in this sort of thing, when a when a developer tells someone, I'd like you to buy a condo, and by the way, I'm also the district energy provider that might put some alarm bells up, but you put a partnership in there with a trusted, long term utility partner and explain that, you know, it is in the in the public interest. They're not going to jack rates or mess with things, and then obviously just hydro has had such a long operating record operating experience that they really brought sort of an operations and long term utility mindset to our district energy system. Trevor Freeman 37:35 So looking at a system like the Zippy community utility or other district energy systems. Is this the kind of thing that can scale up over time? And, you know, I bring this up because you hear people talk about, you know, a network of district energy systems across a city or across a big geographic area. Are these things that can be interconnected and linked, or does it make more sense as standalone district energy systems in those conditions that you talked about earlier. Scott Demark 38:06 Very much the former Trevor like and that's, you know, that's where, you know, places like Copenhagen are today. It's that, you know, there was, there was one district energy system, then there was another, then they got interconnected, then the third got added. And then they use a lot of incineration there in that, in that part of the world, clean incineration for garbage. And so then an incinerator is coming online. And so that incinerators waste heat is going to be fed with a new district energy loop, and some other factory is going to use the primary heat from that, and then the secondary heat is going to come into the dictionary system. Disciplinary system. So these things are absolutely expandable. They're absolutely interconnectable. There are temperature profiles. There's modern, modern thoughts on temperature profiles compared to older systems. Most of the old, old systems were steam, actually, which is not the most efficient thing the world. But that's where they started and so now you can certainly interconnect them. And I think that the example at Zibi is a decent one, because we do have two kinds of systems there. You know, I said we have fan coil units in in the Ontario side, but we have heat pumps on the other side. Well, those two things, they can coexist, right? That's there. Those two systems are operating together. Because the difference, you know, the difference from the customer's perspective in those two markets are different, and the same can be true in different parts of the city or when different sources and sinks are available. So it is not one method of doing district energy systems. What you do is you examine the ingredients you have. I keep saying it, but sources and sinks? How can I look at these sources and sinks in a way that I can interconnect them and make sense? And sometimes that means that a source or a sink might be another district energy system. Trevor Freeman 39:59 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, systems that maybe work in parallel to each other, in cooperation with each other. Again, it's almost that temporal need where there's load high on at one point in time and low on the other point in time. Sharing is a great opportunity. Scott Demark 40:14 Yeah, absolutely great. Trevor Freeman 40:17 Okay, last question for you here, Scott, what is needed, maybe from a regulatory or a policy lens to encourage more implementation of district energy systems. How do we see more of these things happen here in Canada or in Scott Demark 40:32 North America? The best way to put this, the bureaucracy has been slow to move, is, is what I'll say, and I'll use Zibi as that example. When we, when we pitched the district energy system at Zibi, we had to approach the City of Ottawa, and we had to approach the city of Gatineau, the City of Ottawa basically said to us, No, you can't put those in our streets. Engineering just said, no, no, no, no. And so what we did at Zibi is we actually privatized our streets in order to see our vision through, because, because Ottawa wasn't on board, the city of Gatineau said, Hmm, I'm a little worried. I want you to write protocols of how you will access your pipes, not our pipes. I want to understand where liability ends and starts and all of this kind of stuff. And we worked through that detail slowly, methodically, with the city of Gatineau, and we came to a new policy on how district energy could be in a public street and Zibi streets are public on the Gatineau side today. You know, come forward 10 years here, and the City of Ottawa has a working group on how to incorporate District Energy pipes into streets. We've been able to get the City of Ottawa to come around to the idea that we will reject and accept heat from their sewer. You know, hydro Ottawa, wholly owned company of the City of Ottawa, has an active business in district energy. So Trevor, we've come really far, but it's taken a long time. And so if you ask me, How can we, how can accelerate district energy, I think a lot of it has to do with the bureaucracy at municipalities. And you know, we're we see so much interest from the Federation of Canadian municipalities, who was the debt funder for ZCU. We have multiple visits from people all over Canada, coming to study and look at this as an example. And I'm encouraged by that. But it's also, it's also not rocket science. We need to understand that putting a pipe in a street is kind of a just, just a little engineering problem to solve, whereas putting, you know, burning fossil fuels for these new communities and putting in the atmosphere like the genies out of the bottle, right? Like and unfortunately, I think for a lot of bureaucrats, the challenge at the engineering level is that that pipe in the street is of immediate, complex danger to solving that problem, whereas it's everybody's problem that the carbons in the atmosphere. So if we could accelerate that, if we could focus on the acceleration of standards around District Energy pipes and streets, the rights of a district energy company to exist, and not to rant too much, but give you an example, is that a developer is required to put gas infrastructure into a new community, required, and yet you have to fight to get a district energy pipe in the street. So there needs to be a change of mindset there, and, and we're not there yet, but that's where we need to go. Trevor Freeman 43:54 Yeah. Well, the interesting, you know, in 10 years, let's talk again and see how far we come. Hopefully not 10 years. Hopefully it's more like five, to see the kind of change that you've seen in the last decade. But I think that the direction is encouraging. The speed needs a little bit of work. But I'm always encouraged to see, yeah, things are changing or going in the right direction, just slowly. Well, Scott, we always end our interviews with a series of questions to our guests, so as long as you're okay with it, I'll jump right into those. So the first question is, what is a book you've read that you think everybody should read? Scott Demark 44:29 Nexus, which is by Harari. He's the same author that wrote sapiens. Lots of people be familiar with sapiens. And so Nexus is, is really kind of the history of information networks, like, how do we, how do we share and pass information? And kind of a central thesis is that, you know, information is, is neither knowledge nor truth. It is information, and it's talking a lot about in the age of AI. Uh, how are we going to manage to move information into truth or knowledge? And I think it, you know, to be honest, it kind of scared the shit out of me reading it kind of how, how AI is impacting our world and going to impact our world. And what I thought was kind of amazing about it was that he, he really has a pretty strong thesis around the erosion of democracy in this time. And it's, it was, it was really kind of scary because it was published before the 2024 election. And so it's, it's really kind of a, both a fascinating and scary read, and I think really something that everybody should get their head around. Trevor Freeman 45:47 It's, yeah, there's a few of those books recently that I would clear or classify them as kind of dark and scary, but really important or really enlightening in some way. And it kind of helps you, you know, formalize a thought or a concept in your head and realize, hey, here's what's happening, or gives you that kind of the words to speak about it in this kind of fraught time we're in. So same question, but for a movie or a show, is there anything that you think everybody should watch. Scott Demark 46:16 That's harder, I think, generally from watching something, it's for my downtime or own entertainment, and pushing my tastes on the rest of the world, maybe not a great idea. I if I, if I'm, if I'm kind of doing that, I tend to watch cooking shows, actually, Trevor so like, that's awesome. I like ugly, delicious. I love Dave Chang. I like, I like mind of a chef creativity partnership. So those kind of things I'd say more so if there was something to like that, I think somebody else should, should watch or listen to, I have, I have a real love for Malcolm Gladwell podcast, revisionist history. And so if I thought, you know, my watching habits are not going to going to expand anybody's brain, but I do think that Malcolm's perspective on life is really a healthy it's really healthy to step sideways and look at things differently. And I would suggest, if you have never listened to that podcast. Go to Episode One, season one, and start there. It's, it's, it's fantastic. Trevor Freeman 47:26 Yeah, I agree. I'll echo that one. That's one of my favorites. If we were to offer you or not, but if we were to offer you a free round trip flight, anywhere in the world, where would you go? Scott Demark 47:38 That's hard, so much flight guilt. You know. Trevor Freeman 47:42 I know it's a hard assume that there's carbon offset to it. Scott Demark 47:47 It's an electric plane. Trevor Freeman 47:48 That's right, yeah.s Scott Demark 47:49 My family, had a trip planned in 2020 to go to France and Italy. My two boys were kind of at the perfect age to do that. It would have been a really ideal trip. And so I've still never been to either those places. And if I had to pick one, probably Italy, I would really like to see Italy. I think it would be a fantastic place to go. So probably, probably Italy. Trevor Freeman 48:12 My favorite trip that I've ever done with my wife and our six month old at the time was Italy. It was just phenomenal. It was a fantastic trip. Who's someone that you admire? Scott Demark 48:25 I have a lot of people. Actually have a lot of people in this in this particular space, like, what would I work in that have brought me here to pick to pick one, though I'd probably say Peter Busby. So. Peter Busby is a mentor, a friend, now a business partner, but, but not earlier in my career. Peter Busby is a kind of a one of the four fathers, you know, if you will, of green design in Canada. He's an architect, Governor General's Award winning architect, actually. But I think what I what I really, really appreciate about Peter, and always will, is that he was willing to stand up in his peer group and say, Hey, we're not doing this right. And, you know, he did that. He did that in the early 80s, right? Like we're not talking he did it when it cost his business some clients. He did it when professors would speak out against him, and certainly the Canadian Association of architecture was not going to take any blame for the shitty buildings that have been built, right? And he did it, and I remember being at a conference where Peter was getting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian architects Association. And so he's standing up, and people are all super proud of him. They're talking about his big life. And he. He, he, he kind of belittled them all and said, You're not doing enough. We're not doing enough like he's still he's still there. He's still taking the blame for where things are, and that things haven't moved fast enough, and that buildings are a massive part of our carbon problem, and probably one of the easier areas to fix. You know, we're talking about electric planes. Well, that's a that's a lot more difficult than it is to recover energy from a factory to heat a community, right? I admire him. I learned things from him all the time. He's got a great book out at the moment, actually, and, yeah, he'd be right up there on my in my top list, awesome. Trevor Freeman 50:44 What is something about the energy sector or its future that you're particularly excited about? Scott Demark 50:48 You wished you asked me this before the election. I'm feeling a little dark. Trevor, I think there needs to be a price on pollution in the world needs to be a price on pollution in America, in Canada, and I'm worried about that going away. In light of that, I'm not I'm not super excited about different technologies at the moment. I think there are technologies that are helping us, there are technologies that are pushing us forward, but there's no like silver bullet. So, you know, a really interesting thing that's coming is kind of this idea that a small nuclear reactor, okay, very interesting idea. You could see its context in both localized electricity production, but all the heat also really good for district entry, okay, so that's an interesting tech. It obviously comes with complications around security and disposal, if you like, there's our nuclear industry has been allowed to drink like, it's all complicated. So I don't see one silver bullet in technology that I'm like, That's the answer. But what I do see, I'll go back to what we were talking about before is, you know, we had to turn this giant ship of bureaucracy towards new solutions. Okay, that's, that's what we had to do. And now that it's turned and we've got it towards the right course, I'm encouraged by that. I really am. You know, there are champions. And I'll, I'll talk about our city. You know, there's champions in the City of Ottawa who want to see this happen as younger people have graduated into roles and planning and other engineering roles there. They've grown up and gone to school in an age where they understand how critical this climate crisis is, and they're starting to be in positions of power and being in decision making. You know, a lot of my career, we're trying to educate people that there was a problem. Now, the people sitting in those chairs, it, they understand there's a problem, and what can they do about it? And so I am, I am excited that that the there is a next generation sitting in these seats, making decisions, the bureaucracy, the ship is, is almost on course to making this difference. So, so I do think that's encouraging. We have the technology. We really do. It's not rocket science. We just need to get through, you know, the bureaucracy barriers, and we need to find ways to properly finance it. Trevor Freeman 53:22 Great. I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Scott, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate this conversation and shedding a little bit of light, not just on the technical side of district energy systems, but on the broader context, and as you say, the bureaucracy, the what is needed to make these things happen and to keep going in that right direction. So thanks a lot for your time. I really appreciate it. Scott Demark 53:43 Thank you, Trevor, good to see you. Trevor Freeman 53:45 All right. Take care. Trevor Freeman 53:47 Thanks for tuning in to another episode of the think energy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments or an idea for a show or a guest, you can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com.
C’était le lever de rideau du camp de gardienne de la meilleure cerbère de la LPHF, Ann-Renée Desbiens, ce vendredi. De passage aux Amateurs de Sports, Desbiens nous révèle qu’elle n’a pas arrêté de sourire depuis ce matin. Elle nous raconte aussi que cette idée lui est venue lors d’une pratique de la Victoire de Montréal, alors qu’elle était assise sur le banc avec son entraîneur, Olivier Michaud. Avec ses jeunes gardiennes, elle souhaite leur donner de bons trucs, mais aussi de bonnes habitudes afin que ces dernières arrivent à s’améliorer tout en s’amusant! Les amateurs des Alouettes de Montréal en ont eu pour leur argent lors du match de jeudi dernier, au Stade Percival-Molson, alors que les moineaux sont revenus de l’arrière pour l’emporter face aux Argonauts de Toronto. Bruno Heppell, présent sur place, soutient que c’était une soirée absolument exceptionnelle et encourage les québécois et québécoises à se déplacer pour aller voir les matchs restants à domicile. De plus, selon Heppell, le quart-arrière partant des Alouettes, Davis Alexander, est le prochain grand quart-arrière prolifique de la LCF. En date d’aujourd’hui, ce dernier reste tout de même invaincu avec une fiche de 8-0! De plus en plus de québécois s’exilent en Russie pour y amener leurs services en KHL, que ce soit les joueurs ou les entraîneurs. Raphaël-Pier Richer, originaire de Gatineau, est l’un d’eux. L’an dernier, il a accepté l’offre du Traktor Chelyabinsk pour aller assister un autre québécois d’ailleurs, Benoît Groulx. Mené par Groulx et Richer, le Traktor a réussi à atteindre les finales, mais a dû s’avouer vaincu devant le Lokomotiv Yaroslavl d’un certain Alexander Radulov. Richer explique aussi les petits détails de la vie en Russie, comme les nombreux fuseaux horaires présents dans le plus grand pays du monde (10!). Il souligne aussi que les Russes sont des personnes très accueillantes. Les Roses de Montréal étaient de passage dans la Ville Reine, pour y affronter le AFC Toronto, première équipe au classement général. Les Roses l’ont finalement emporté, par la marque de 2-1. Patricia-Ann Beaulieu, chroniqueuse sportif au Réseau Cogeco, s’est réjouie du bon rythme avec lequel l’équipe québécoise a débuté la rencontre. Elle invite d’ailleurs tous les auditeurs à aller voir le magnifique but de Mégane Sauvé, probablement l’un des buts de l’année, selon Beaulieu!Voir https://www.cogecomedia.com/vie-privee pour notre politique de vie privée
Prime Minister Mark Carney met with First Nations leaders this week to get their support for his nation-building plans — but some right-holders left with more questions than answers or outright blasted the meeting. Host Catherine Cullen checks in with Northern and Arctic Affairs Minister Rebecca Chartrand and Regional Chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations Terry Teegee on the sidelines of the summit in Gatineau, Que.Then, ahead of next week's premiers' meeting in Huntsville, Ont., Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe explains why he believes a deal with Trump on tariffs is likely, but he doesn't think “elbows up” is the right way to get there.Plus, as federal data shows inequality is widening and the federal government is going big on military spending and national projects, two economists offer their views on the most pressing priorities for Canadians and whether Ottawa's spending matches their needs.Finally, two Hill watchers weigh in on the uphill path Carney faces on trade and energy projects, as well as the Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre's shift in tone.This episode features the voices of:Rebecca Chartrand, Minister of Northern and Arctic AffairsTerry Teegee, Regional Chief of the British Columbia Assembly of First NationsScott Moe, Premier of SaskatchewanDon Drummond, economist and fellow-in-residence at C.D. Howe InstituteArmine Yalnizyan, economist and Atkinson Fellow On The Future Of WorkersChristopher Nardi, parliamentary reporter for the National PostStephanie Levitz, senior reporter for the Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau
Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks briefly with reporters in Gatineau, Que., as his two-day summit with First Nations leaders continues. The summit brings together First Nations leaders from across the country to discuss Bill C-5, the Liberal government's major projects legislation. There have been concerns from First Nations groups over a lack of consultations regarding the bill, which was speedily passed through Parliament in June. Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers remarks as he convenes the First Nations Major Projects Summit in Gatineau, Que. The two-day summit brings together First Nations leaders from across the country to discuss Bill C-5, the Liberal government's major projects legislation. In Ottawa, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak speaks to the media ahead of the summit between Prime Minister Mark Carney, the Privy Council Office, and Fist Nations leaders. The meeting will focus on the concerns of First Nations groups regarding Bill C-5, the federal government's legislation to fast-track major infrastructure and resource projects. Nepinak is joined by BC regional chief Terry Teegee, Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak grand chief Garrison Settee, and other First Nations leaders. (July 16, 2025) Various Indigenous leaders speak with reporters in Ottawa following the First Nations Major Projects Summit. The two-day summit brought together chiefs from across the country to discuss Bill C-5, the Liberal government's major projects legislation. In attendance are chiefs Kyra Wilson (Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs), Garrison Settee (Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak), Brian Hardlotte (Prince Albert Grand Council), Marcel Head (Shoal Lake Cree Nation), Fabian Head (Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations), Angela Levasseur (Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation), and Kelsey Jacko (Cold Lake First Nations). Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/policy-and-rights--3339563/support.
Our lead story: day two of this week's federal meeting with chiefs in Gatineau, QC, as the Liberal government follows up with First Nations on Bill C-5, the new law meant to fast track major economic projects.
C-5 summit in Gatineau could set the the tone of government-Indigenous relations — for the rest of Mark Carney's time as Prime Minister. Brazil's Congress passes bill that drastically weakens the country's environmental safeguards. Canada's largest federal public sector union disputes Pierre Poilievre's account of why he lost his riding in the last election. United States senate passes President Donald Trump's recessions package, paving way for cuts to foreign aid and public broadcasting. Wildfire evacuees in Manitoba waiting for when they can return home. New report by Canadian Institute for Health Information finds more Canadians getting hurt by e-scooters. "Pretty Little Baby" singer Connie Francis dies at 87.
Ce que 70% des jeunes de la génération Z traînent toujours avec eux à la Question impossible // Les no-show… Pour ou contre imposer une pénalité dans les restos? // On jase à Alicia Moffet qui sera de passage au Bluesfest // Comment se rafraîchir ces jours-ci à Gatineau? // On fait le tour de nos réseaux sociaux // On joue à Hitster // On envoie une auditrice chanceuse en mode VIP aux Grands feux du Casino Lac-Leamy // On joue à La liste d’épicerie en folie //
A northern Alberta First Nations leader is raising concerns about a proposed $16-billion carbon capture project, warning his community could pursue legal action if the federal government fails to properly consult Indigenous groups.In an interview on West of Centre Short, Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation Chief Allan Adam said his community has not received credible information about the environmental risks of the Pathways Alliance project — particularly the injection of carbon into underground salt plains.Adam also criticized the Carney government's Bill C-5, which aims to fast-track infrastructure projects deemed to be in the national interest. He's so opposed to the bill, he's opted not to attend the prime minister's meeting with fellow chiefs in Gatineau this week.At the heart of Adam's concerns is a long-standing call for revenue sharing. He said that unless First Nations are offered a more equitable stake in resource development, especially on Treaty land, conflict and legal challenges will continue.Host: Rob Brown | Producer & editor: Falice Chin | Guest: Allan Adam
Elias Makos is joined by Andrew Caddell, a town councillor in Kamouraska, and President of the Task Force on Linguistic policy and Neil Drabkin, is a lawyer who served as federal prosecutor and a political commentator who was a chief of staff in the Harper government on The Big 5. Over the past 11 years, more than 17,500 foreigners with criminal records have been cleared to enter Canada. Five years after protestors brought down the statue of John A. Macdonald in Dominion Square/Place du Canada, the city of Montreal has still not begun restoration work on it. The Legault government is launching a pilot project which will last 12 months, allowing stores in Laval, Gatineau and Saint-Georges-de-Beauce to stay open until 8 PM on weekends instead of 5PM.
Les propos exprimés dans ce podcast relèvent d'expériences et d'opinions personnelles dans un but de divertissement et ne substituent pas les conseils d'un.e sexologue ou autre professionnel de la santé. Cette semaine sur le podcast, on vous sort notre show à thématique bachelorette party enregistré le 19 janvier dernier à Gatineau avec Alice & Gabrielle Marion. Au programme: - Un cours de pole dance par Alice - Un F*ck, Marry, Kill extra SPICY - Un vérité ou conséquences version Pole dance - Des témoignages d'histoires de bachelorette - Le désormais célèbre segment "Connais-tu ton Sexe Oral" Pour suivre Alice https://www.instagram.com/lustforalie/ Pour suivre Gabrielle: https://www.instagram.com/it5g4b/ Le podcast est présenté par Éros et Compagnie Utiliser le code promo : SEXEORAL pour 15% de rabais sur https://www.erosetcompagnie.com/ Les jouets dont les filles parlent: https://www.erosetcompagnie.com/page/podcast Pour collaborations: partenariats@studiosf.ca Pour toutes questions: sexeoral@studiosf.ca Pour suivre les filles sur Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sexeoralpodcast Pour contacter les filles directement, écrivez-nous sur Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexeoral.podcast/
This episode of Burn It All Down was recorded in front of a live audience on May 26, 2025, at the North American Society for Sports History's annual conference, which took place at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau.We're back, one more time, for another one-off live show. We are not resuming weekly shows at this point. If you are interested to bringing BIAD to your location for a live show, please contact us through our website: https://www.burnitalldownpod.com/EPISODE SUMMARY:This week, Shireen, Lindsay, Amira, Brenda, and Jessica talk about sports in this moment of upheaval. They discuss athlete activism (or the lack thereof), what we can learn about right now from what has come before, what all of these means on an international level, and how sports intersects and affects the so-called “culture wars” directly.And, as always, you'll hear the Burn Pile and Torchbearers, starring Nikola Čorbová, the first woman to finish the brutal 138-mile Himalaya XTRI triathlon.EPISODE NOTES: We want to thank Dr. Russell Field and everyone at NASSH for bringing us together for this live show. This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. For show notes, transcripts, and more info about BIAD, check out our website: http://www.burnitalldownpod.comNOTE: We will have a transcript for this episode available on our site as soon as we can, though not as quickly as we used to. We are not the well-oiled machine we used to be; things take more time these days.For BIAD merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/burn-it-all-downFind us on Blueskey: https://bsky.app/profile/burnitalldownpod.com; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BurnItAllDownPod/; and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnitalldownpod/.
Les propos exprimés dans ce podcast relèvent d'expériences et d'opinions personnelles dans un but de divertissement et ne substituent pas les conseils d'un.e sexologue ou autre professionnel de la santé. Cette semaine sur le podcast, on vous sort notre show sur le thème de la nostalgie enregistré le 18 janvier dernier à Gatineau avec nulle autre que Zoé Duval et Pascal de Blois comme invité(e)s. Du premier kick au secondaire jusqu'aux fantasmes de jeunesse en passant par les scènes de films qui ont éveillé leur sexualité… on ne censure rien! Au programme: - Les premiers crushs (réels et célèbres) - Le bal, les robes de princesse et les faux chums en plastique - Le moment exact de l'éveil sexuel - Un jeu “Connais-tu ton/ta BFF” - Les discussions les plus franches sur la sexualité : porn, relations ouvertes, trip à trois, pet de noun… - Et oui, un potin ou deux (ou dix) Pour suivre Zoé: https://www.instagram.com/zozoduval/ Pour suivre Pascale: https://www.instagram.com/pascaledeblois/ Le podcast est présenté par Éros et Compagnie Utiliser le code promo : SEXEORAL pour 15% de rabais sur https://www.erosetcompagnie.com/ Les jouets dont les filles parlent: https://www.erosetcompagnie.com/page/podcast Le podcast est présenté par Oxio. Pour plus d'informations: https://oxio.ca/ Code promo pour essayer Oxio gratuitement pendant un mois: SEXEORAL L'épisode de cette semaine est présenté par Dose Juice. Pour plus d'informations rendez-vous sur https://go.dosejuice.com/sexeoral 20% de rabais sur votre première commande en ligne avec le code : SEXEORAL ---- Pour collaborations: partenariats@studiosf.ca Pour toutes questions: sexeoral@studiosf.ca Pour suivre les filles sur Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/sexeoralpodcast Pour contacter les filles directement, écrivez-nous sur Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sexeoral.podcast/
Elias Makos is joined by Dan Delmar, Co-founder of the content marketing firm TNKR Media and co-host of the podcast Inspiring Entrepreneurs Canada, and Justine McIntyre, Strategic consultant and former city councillor. Prime Minister Mark Carney has arrived in Washington for a meeting with Donald Trump who’s “not sure what he wants to talk about” but guesses it’s about “making a deal” he uttered to reporters in the Oval office Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is promising a separation referendum in 2026 if enough signatures are gathered on a petition After encouraging the public to snitch on their neighbours, police in Gatineau have handed out five tickets for driving with non-Quebec licence plates Tales from the Quebec business world: Le Panier Bleu is up for grabs!
This episode of Burn It All Down was recorded in front of a live audience at Bowling Green State University on March 27, 2025.We're back...for a single live show. If you have not heard the show itself, you can find it on your feed now. This is the Q+A with the live audience that followed. We are not resuming weekly shows at this point, but we do have another live show scheduled at the end of May in Gatineau, Canada (more on that to come). If you are interested in bringing BIAD to your location for a live show, please contact us through our website: https://www.burnitalldownpod.com/EPISODE NOTES: We want to thank Dr. Vikki Krane, the Social Justice through Sport and Exercise Psychology Symposium, Amy J. Kolk, and everyone else at BGSU for bringing us back together for a live show. A special shout out to Phil Beskid for recording all of our audio. This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. For show notes, transcripts, and more info about BIAD, check out our website: http://www.burnitalldownpod.comNOTE: We will have a transcript for this episode available on our site as soon as we can, though not as quickly as we used to. We are not the well-oiled machine we used to be; things take more time these days.For BIAD merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/burn-it-all-downFind us on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/burnitalldownpod.com; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BurnItAllDownPod/; and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnitalldownpod/
This episode of Burn It All Down was recorded in front of a live audience at Bowling Green State University on March 27, 2025.We're back...for a single live show. We are not resuming weekly shows at this point, but we do have another live show scheduled at the end of May in Gatineau, Canada (more on that to come). If you are interested in bringing BIAD to your location for a live show, please contact us through our website: https://www.burnitalldownpod.com/EPISODE SUMMARY:This week, Shireen, Lindsay, Amira, Brenda, and Jessica talk about sports at, what feels like, the end of the world. They discuss the dissonance and relationship between all the good that is happening within sports and the brutal societal attack on trans people's civil rights, especially on trans girls and women in sports, the rollback of diversity/equity/inclusion on college campuses as athletes begin to secure more labor rights, and the United States' horrific isolationist and nationalist movements as the US, Mexico, and Canada get ready to host some of the world's biggest international sporting events.And, as always, you'll hear the Burn Pile and Torchbearers, starring, well, us.EPISODE NOTES: We want to thank Dr. Vikki Krane, the Social Justice through Sport and Exercise Psychology Symposium, Amy J. Kolk, and everyone else at BGSU for bringing us back together for a live show. A special shout out to Phil Beskid for recording all of our audio. This episode was produced by Martin Kessler. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. For show notes, transcripts, and more info about BIAD, check out our website: http://www.burnitalldownpod.comNOTE: We will have a transcript for this episode available on our site as soon as we can, though not as quickly as we used to. We are not the well-oiled machine we used to be; things take more time these days.For BIAD merchandise: https://teespring.com/stores/burn-it-all-downFind us on Blueskey: https://bsky.app/profile/burnitalldownpod.com; Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BurnItAllDownPod/; and Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/burnitalldownpod/
An April Fools Prank Goes Awry.By SilverFoxMullet - Listen to the Podcast at Steamy Stories .Spring break was just that, a break. My leg, actually.When I went home to Ottawa for spring break, I met up with a few of my old high school buds, and we took a day trip to the Quebec side for some skiing at one of the nearby hills, north of Ottawa. Mid afternoon, I hit a patch of ice and went down hard. It was quite a day for falls, as the hills were pretty icy this late in the season. I tried to get up, but my right ankle hurt like a bitch. None of my friends had stopped, as we were all falling a lot today, they just assumed I would get up and follow them."Aw fuck!" I groaned. I lay there in the snow for a few minutes, until someone slid to a stop next to me."Hey, are you all right?" the guy asks."No, I hurt my ankle. Fuck.""Don't move it, I'll find the ski patrol. Hang on." He skied away to get help.30 seconds later another guy stopped. Same question. "Hey are you all right?""I think I sprained my ankle. There was a guy here a minute ago, he said he'd send the ski patrol."The guy turned and looked around, then waved and yelled "Ici! Over here! Vien! Here they are."Two guys in red jackets stopped and asked what's wrong. This other guy said "Good luck!" to me, and skied away, as I recounted the fall and my symptoms. The ski patrol guys were great, they radioed for a stretcher and 20 minutes later they're loading me into an ambulance. The rest of the day was a lot of waiting, x-rays, and paperwork. The local hospital had a seasonal trauma unit for all the ski injuries, and they're used to dealing with the inter-provincial healthcare.I called my Dad, who said he'd fetch me from the hospital, then called my buddies who were still in the chalet'. He told them to go home without me. They commiserated and said they'd drop by my house tomorrow and see how I was doing.I eventually got a cast on my right leg. It spanned from my toes to my mid-thigh. I was issued a pair of crutches, and a whole ream of instructions (in both French and English of course) about what to do and what not to do. My Dad showed up somewhere during this tedious process and reassured me everything would be fine.We got home really late, after stopping at a pharmacy for pain meds, and stopping for takeout, damn I was hungry by then. I was asleep in minutes after I took one of those pills after getting home.Next morning, I had to take another pill, damn leg was throbbing like mad. I had to learn how to negotiate using the toilet with crutches, fuck, that's pain in the arse. Then I had to figure out how to shower. They gave me a shower bag for the cast but I couldn't get the damn thing on by myself. Mom was trying to be motherly (naturally) but I was way too embarrassed to be seen naked in front of her. My Dad was a trooper, he helped me with all the bathroom stuff, and I got my shower OK.I wasn't going to be able to drive for a while, so my folks said they'd drive me back to school in Toronto. I could come home by bus and get my car once I was able to drive. Great."Actually, if I could have my car on campus, one of my buddies could drive me around. None of the other guys have a car." Not that my rattly old car was much of a ride, but it got us from A to B."OK" my Dad says, "Your mother can drive you there, and I'll follow in your car, then we'll drive back together.""Awesome, sounds like a plan!"The rest of the day my parents helped me work out how to deal with the cast and crutches and take care of personal stuff by myself, like getting dressed, showering, shaving (yeah, ever try to balance on one foot to shave? fuckin hell), and using the toilet. My mom went shopping and bought me a bunch of baggy sweat pants, something that would go over my cast.My old friends dropped by with some hard coolers the next day, thinking it would cheer me up; but I had to pass on those due to the meds I was on. They laughed at me and drank it all, themselves. We all had a good laugh about my predicament, and they wished me luck at college. Gonna need it, eh?Then it was time to head back to school. I'd been texting and calling my buddies at school, told them the whole idiot story of my misadventures. They laughed at me big time, and of course they worried about their ride, what was gonna happen to my car? I told them about the arrangements and they were happy that it would still be available.The drive to school was really tedious, seemed to last forever, because it was so fricking uncomfortable to sit there with that stiff cast on. They got me and my stuff into my room in the dorm, and said their good-byes. I was so happy that I was on the first floor! No stairs here but there were stairs all over campus. Sure, there's elevators everywhere but I didn't know where most of them were.First order of business, I gotta pee after that road trip. I used the big accessible stall in the bathroom, that was great. Grab bars, lots of room, it really was made for this kind of thing. Easier than the bathroom at home, that's for sure.I was the butt of a lot of jokes and shit for the first few days, but otherwise it was fine. Down in the dining hall I spotted someone else who'd had a fun spring break. There was a girl with her whole arm in a cast, like from shoulder to wrist, with the elbow bent at 90 degrees. I wondered what happened to her. Skiing too I supposed. My buddies said we'd make a great couple and told me to go ask her out. No way, dudes, not gonna happen. I can't talk to girls, I always get freaked out and clam up.The end of March rolled around, and I still had weeks to go before getting my cast off. There was a party on Saturday night, and I was weaning off the strong meds by now so I could have a few drinks. My floor mates were getting me drinks, too; so I ended up having a few more than I would normally have. I was feeling buzzed by the end of the night.One of the guys suddenly showed up with a wheelchair. "Robbo! we got you some wheels, man!""Where'd you steal that from?" I asked, a little dubious about the idea of them scamming someone's chair."No No, totally not stolen, we got it for you from the Red Cross. It's legit, dude!""All right! Let's check out my new ride then!" I hopped over and settled into the chair. They adjusted the footrest out for me and one of them took my crutches, and they started wheeling me away. "Where we goin?" I asked."It's a surprise." says one of them, and then pull a pillowcase down over my head so I can't see where we're going. When I try to pull the covering off, they stopped me, and then the started grabbing my arms & duct taping them to the chair's armrests. We were outside by now, and I started yelling, until they taped the pillowcase tight against my mouth, to muff my yelling. Now I was getting pissed, but there's not much I could do, except literally ride this out.They laughed and giggled and make goofy jokes as they wheeled me around campus. EventuallyI had no idea where I am, and it suddenly strikes me that it was now April 1st. The alcoholic buzz is wearing off fast under the rush of my adrenaline and anger, and I wondered what kind of demented nightmare game they've come up with.I heard more laughing, girls this time, and they make whispered comments back and forth with the guys. I'm now in a building, but I had no clue where. My chair was pushed around some more, bumping into stuff, and then a body is dumped in my lap, then they yanked the duct tape off the pillowcase and I can again my mouth. The room is pitch black. The giggling and laughing is cut off by the slamming of a door, and everything goes quiet.I think there's a girl in my lap, or a small, really nice smelling guy with long hair. She's quiescent, asleep or passed out, pressed against my chest."Hey. Hey, wake up." I said.No response, she's just sitting there, draped over my lap. She's warm and breathing, so it's not a manikin or something. I wondered if she's okay.I started to shift a bit, can't use my arms because they're taped down, but I try to shake her awake with my rocking shoulders. It didn't work, and now I'm afraid that if I move too much she'll fall off onto the floor."Hey, uh, miss, wake up." louder. She's out of it. I turn my head to the side so I'm not yelling in her ear and holler "Hey, enough crap, let me out of here!" Silence reigns. Well, fuck. Now what?'Now what'. Then the fire alarm starts blaring. It startles the heck out of me, but still isn't enough to wake the girl. I heard loud commotion in the halls for about 30 seconds, but then suddenly there is silence. Fuck, this is getting serious. What if it's a real fire? No, no way, it's April 1st now, gotta be a prank. I'll just wait for her to wake up, and we'll get out of here. My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I began to see faint outlines of what is probably a maintenance closet or storage room.The alarm rings for an annoyingly long time. 15 minutes I guess, I dunno, but it seems interminable. And I need to pee now. When the alarm finally stops the need to pee gets more insistent. I shifted uncomfortably under the weight of my passenger. Her hip is pressed up against my groin, adding to the struggle of my urge to piss.More time passes, and damn, I gotta go bad, now. I'm gonna wet myself, and her too, if I don't get out of here right now. I've tried speaking to her, yelling, shaking her, and then there was another alarm that went on and on. She just isn't gonna wake up. Did those morons drug her or something?I'm desperate now. "Come on, sleeping beauty, wake up!" Sleeping beauty? Yeah, fine, I'll try that before I piss all over her. I think a girl would be slightly less angry about a stolen kiss than wet pants. So I seek her mouth. There was a little light coming in under the door, but suddenly that light went out, and only a faint intermittent light glowed. Oh, crap! That would be the emergency exit lighting. I eventually bumped my faced against her nose, then lowered a bit and kissed her, probably a little too hard for a wakeup smooch, cause I'm dyin' here, gotta pee, gotta pee, gotta pee.She's got nice soft lips, really quite kissable, and I kinda wished she was awake and under different circumstances. I kissed her again, even harder. No response. I try again, this time I let my tongue do the talking, and I push into her mouth. Helluva way to experience my own first ‘tongue-kiss'. Finally, she stirred & turned into the kiss.Surprised, I pull back, and say "Oh thank god you're awake, help me up!"She startled, yelping at me, "Who are you?!""Help me, please, I'm gonna piss my pants! Untie me!"In the dim red glow of an exit sign I finally saw her face. She's kinda cute, not particularly pretty, and she has a cast on her right arm. It's the girl I saw in the dining hall a few times."Hurry!" I pleaded.She struggled off me, and stood. “Where the hell did you take me!” she demanded.I told her that we were both abducted by campus hooligans and locked in some storage room, but I didn't know which building. Then I said; “But I gotta pee right now and my leg is in a cast, and I'm bound to this wheelchair.She felt the tape on my wrists. It's slow going for her to undo the tape with her one weak hand, the way she's pulling at it, she's obviously not left handed.I'm not gonna make it, and I looked around. We're in a janitor's room or something. I spotted a stack of small waste baskets. "Quick, grab one of those buckets and put it between my legs."She's quick on the uptake, I'll give her that, and she grabbed the bucket for me. "Pull my pants down, hurry.""What? No!" she protested."Arrrrggghhh. Please, I'm gonna wet myself." I grind out through my clenched teeth.She reached out with that uncoordinated left hand of hers and fumbles with my sweat pants. I squirmed to lift my hips a bit to help, and the elastic waistband slipped down, exposing my tight briefs."You gotta help. Pull me out, aim for the bucket. Please?"I can see she's not happy with the situation, and she's fighting with her distaste at touching a man, a total stranger at that, in such a bizarre circumstance. But she perseveres, and that delicate hand fishes in my shorts for my cock. She paused momentarily as she made contact, then pulled my cock free. She picked up the empty bucket and aimed my ‘hose' toward the container.I groaned as I let loose. Oh god, finally! The relief was incredible. The poor girl was acting shocked as she dutifully aimed me at the bucket, and she even nudged the bucket a bit closer. I pissed on and on, holy fuck there was so much, and eventually I ran dry.Her disposition is no longer shocked, but instead she appeared to be curious."Oh thank you, you saved me so much embarrassment. You can put me back in there now. Thanks."She hesitated, and timidly tried to one-handedly stuff my cock back through the fly, and after a couple of clumsy tries I'm all set. And of course now my cock was growing fast in her hand, as I no longer had to pee, but there's a wonderful-smelling girl handling that most sensitive part of my anatomy. Something that's never happened before.That last drop of pee evidently got on her hand, and she looked a bit frantic now, "Ew" she says."Just wipe it on my sweats, it's OK." I told her, and she rubbed her hand on my inner thigh. That doesn't help with my ever increasing boner of course.She looked up at me, and her brow wrinkled. "Do you smell smoke?" she asked.It's my turn to be startled, and I looked toward the door. Oh Fuck, there's smoke coming in under the door! That alarm was real! Why wasn't it still going off? "Quick, help me get this tape off!" She started trying to pull up my sweats, but I say "No, leave that, just get me undone!"She started working on the tape on my left arm, and it took a few minutes to get me free. Working together, my right arm is unstuck in less than a minute. "Check the door." I told her as I looked around the room. No other doors, just shelves, a big sink, a floor pan for filling and emptying mop buckets, and stacks of boxes and stuff.She tried the light switch but it doesn't work. Great, my idiot friends probably unscrewed the light bulb. Then she tried the door. "It's locked!" she says."From the outside? Why the fuck would it be set up to lock people in? Sorry. I swear when I get nervous.""Is there really a fire, do you think?""I guess so, there was an alarm that went off when you were out cold.""What do we do?" She started frantically searching her pockets and said; "I can't find my phone!""I didn't even bring mine to the party. No pockets."The smell of smoke got stronger. I wheeled up next to the sink, and ran some water. Grabbing a package of paper towels, I ripped it open and dumped them in the sink. "Here, block up the crack under the door with these!"I handed her wads of soggy paper, and she knelt down to stuff them under the door. The smoke stoped coming in, thank goodness. But now the room is black. "Now what?" she said.I shrugged, "I guess we wait and hope.""I'm scared." she said in a small voice."Come here, sit on my lap here. Oh, uh, maybe pull up my pants first." She helped me with that and sat on me. I think the gravity of the situation is now hitting her pretty hard, I know it's got me freaked out. She burrowed into my neck and wraps her good arm wraps around me. "We're OK for now." I tell her.I smelled her hair again, as she's crushed against me. Damn that feels nice. Shit, I don't even know her name. "I'm Robert by the way. Robert Green.""Suzanne. Suzanne Shelton.", she informed me."I'd say pleased to meet you Suzanne, but under these circumstances, maybe the sentiment should be I'm ecstatic to meet you. If I was by myself I would have pissed my pants and suffocated."She giggled, my goofy sense of humour somehow helped in this situation. "I'm glad to meet you too, Robert.""So how did you get here?""I don't know, I was at the dorm party and felt dizzy, then you were kissing me." She blushed again."Sorry about that, I tried to wake you for like 20 minutes, but you were really out of it. I finally thought I would try the sleeping beauty trick, and it worked. Did you drink something someone else gave you?""Oh. Shit.” She seemed to recall. “I think so. One of my floor mates gave me a coke. It must have been spiked? I had to take some of my pain meds for my arm earlier tonight, it was bothering me. I keep trying to do too much with it all the time.""Oh, yeah, you don't want to mix booze or anything with that stuff, I know! Sorry about the pee episode. I really was going to wet my pants in another few seconds. Wet both our pants."She blushed and giggled. "I never saw a guy like that, like your, thing, before.""Wow. Okay, well, I never had a girl touch my co-, um, thing, before.""It changed when I was putting it away. Was that, um, like...'"Yeah, well, when a pretty girl touches me like that, I'm bound to get aroused."Her eyes went wide at that statement. "Oh" she said. She paused a few seconds, then put her head back on my shoulder. There was that scent again. "So. Um, you think I'm pretty?""Well, yeah, of course. You're what I think my grandpa would call 'fetching'"She giggled again. Damn, that sounds nice, and she smells really nice. Little Robert stirred down below. I heard a sharp intake of breath. Uh Oh. She felt that. I may have just ruined what might have been a moment."Am I pretty enough to make you, uh, aroused, then?""Oh, Suzanne, I am so embarrassed. Please, don't be offended, it's just circumstances, you know?"She pulled back again and looked at the door. Still no smoke. Then she looked at me with a sad smile, saying "I didn't think so." Suzanne started to get up, and I realized where our wires had crossed.I put my arms around her and said " Oh, no no. You're very pretty, and definitely arousing."She looked surprised, but settled back down on my lap. "Oh." she said. "Thank you."Just then we heard a muffled sound of footsteps outside the door. We both yelled, and I grabbed a mop handle and rapped it against the door. The door opened, and a cloud of smoke poured in. A firefighter stood there, looking surprised behind his breathing apparatus. He hollered for help, and we were soon moved briskly from the building.I was parked in my wheelchair next to the ambulance, where Suzanne was sitting on a gurney. We both had been given oxygen and been checked over for injuries. We told campus security about how we came to be there, and they got really grim. I named names, because I could've died there, we both could've died. It was a prank, but it went sideways pretty fast when that fire broke out. Cops came over and Suzanne also named a couple of girls who she thought were in on it too. Now we were finally cleared to go."Can I walk you back to the dorms?" I asked.She laughed, "Don't you mean wheel me? You can't walk.""Can too, if I had my crutches. My idiot friends left me with this chair.""Okay, then, let's go." She beamed.Off we went. She couldn't push me with just one hand, and I was crap at navigating that chair, but we eventually got back to the residence. We chatted amiably along the way, getting to know each other. She was really easy to talk to, unlike most girls I've tried to talk to. Maybe that was it, I wasn't chatting her up.She was 18, a biology major, living in in the next dorm over. I told her I was in second year Computer Science, in the nearby dorm, so I had a single room.I told her how I broke my leg, skiing near Gatineau, and the really long day I had as a result. "How did you break your arm?""Skating. I'm usually a good skater but sometimes you just fall wrong. I spent most of that same day in the ER, just like you. It's really hard to get dressed and shower and stuff with this thing.""I know, believe me, I know all about it."We were both so fired up on adrenaline after our ordeal there was no way we could sleep. "Would you like to, uh, come over to my room, for a bit? After all this, I'm not tired, and I'd be bored doing just nothing. We could talk for a while." Oh, nice, I thought, smooth man, very smooth. NOT.She blushed, and it must've been a good one, to be visible in the dim light along the sidewalk. "I, uh, yeah. Yes. Yes I will." she stated with a bravado she didn't appear to have.I smiled up at her. "I promise to behave, Okay?""What if I don't want you to behave?" she smirked."Then you're going to have to make your wishes known, in no uncertain terms. I don't do the pushy guy thing very well.""I want to go to your room with you," she declared.To be continued.By SilverFoxMullet for Literotica
Scott Demark, President and CEO of Zibi Community Utility, joins thinkenergy to discuss how our relationship with energy is changing. With two decades of expertise in clean energy and sustainable development, Scott suggests reimagining traditional energy applications for heating and cooling. He shares how strategic energy distribution can transform urban environments, specifically how district energy systems optimize energy flow between buildings for a greener future. Listen in. Related links Scott Demark on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-demark-83640473/ Zibi Community Utility: https://zibi.ca/ Markham District Energy Inc: https://www.markhamdistrictenergy.com/ One Planet Living: https://www.bioregional.com/one-planet-living Trevor Freeman on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trevor-freeman-p-eng-cem-leed-ap-8b612114/ Hydro Ottawa: https://hydroottawa.com/en To subscribe using Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thinkenergy/id1465129405 To subscribe using Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl https://open.spotify.com/show/7wFz7rdR8Gq3f2WOafjxpl To subscribe on Libsyn: http://thinkenergy.libsyn.com/ --- Subscribe so you don't miss a video: https://www.youtube.com/user/hydroottawalimited Follow along on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hydroottawa Stay in the know on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HydroOttawa Transcript: Trevor Freeman 00:07 Welcome to thinkenergy, a podcast that dives into the fast, changing world of energy through conversations with industry leaders, innovators and people on the front lines of the energy transition. Join me, Trevor Freeman, as I explore the traditional, unconventional and up and coming facets of the energy industry. If you have any thoughts, feedback or ideas for topics we should cover, please reach out to us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com Speaker 1 00:29 Hi everyone. Welcome back. One of the overarching aspects of the energy transition that we have talked about several times on this show is the need to change our relationship with energy, to rethink the standard way of doing things when it comes to heating and cooling and transportation, etc. This change is being driven by our need to decarbonize and by the ongoing evolution and improvement of technology. More things are becoming available to us as technology improves on the decarbonization front, we know that electrification, which is switching from fossil fuel combustions to electricity for things like space and water heating vehicles, etc, is one of the most effective strategies. But in order to switch out all the end uses to an electric option, so swapping out furnaces and boilers for heat pumps or electric boilers, switching all gas cars to EVs, etc. In order to do that in a way that is affordable and efficient and can be supported by our electricity grid, we need to think about multi strategy approaches, so we can't just continue to have this one way power grid where every home, every business, every warehouse or office tower satisfies all of its energy needs all the time directly from the grid with no adaptability. That isn't the best approach. It's not going to be affordable or efficient. We're not going to be able to do it fast enough. The multi strategy approach takes into account things like distributed energy resources, so solar and storage, etc, which we've talked about many times on this show, but it also includes approaches like district energy. So, district energy is rethinking how energy flows between adjacent buildings, looking for opportunities to capture excess energy or heat from one source and use that to support another. And that is the focus of today's conversation. To help us dive into this topic, I'm really happy to welcome Scott Demark to the show. Scott has been a champion of sustainability, clean energy solutions and energy efficiency in the Ottawa real estate and development industry for over 20 years now, he has overseen many high-performance development projects and was one of the driving forces behind the Zibi development in downtown Ottawa, and most applicable for today's conversation the renewable district energy system that provides heating and cooling to the Zibi site. Scott is the president and CEO of the Zibi community utility, as well as a partner at Thea partners. Scott Demark, welcome to the show. Scott Demark 03:15 Thanks. Nice to see you. Trevor, Trevor Freeman 03:17 So, Scott, why don't we start with definitions are always a good place to start. So, when we talk about a district energy system, give us a high-level overview of what exactly that means. Scott Demark 03:27 Sure, a district energy system is, is simply the connection, or interconnection of thermal energy sources, thermal energy sinks. And so really, in practical terms. It means, instead of buildings having their own furnace and cooling system, buildings connect to a hydronic loop. A hydronic loop is just pipes filled with water, and then the heat or the cooling is made somewhere else, and that heat or lack of heat cooling is in a pipe. They push the pipe to the building, and then the pipe extracts the heat or rejects the heat to that loop. And so it's simply an interconnection of us as sources and sinks for federal energy. Trevor Freeman 04:14 And I guess one of the important concepts here is that buildings often create heat, not just through a furnace or not just through the things that are meant to create heat, but, you know, server racks, computer server racks, generate a lot of heat, and that heat has to go somewhere. So oftentimes we're cooling buildings to remove heat that's being created in those buildings, and then other buildings nearby need to be heated in order to make that space comfortable. Is that fair to say? Scott Demark 04:42 Yeah, absolutely. Trevor, so, an office building in the city of Ottawa, big old government office building, you'll see a pretty big plume on the roof in the winter time. That's not just kind of the flue gas from a boiler, but rather it is actually chillers are. running inside to make cooling, and they're just selling that heat to the atmosphere, even on the coldest day of the year. So, it's people, you know, people are thermal load. Computers are thermal load, and so is solar gain. You know, January is pretty dark period for us, meaning low angle sun. But by this time in a year, you know, or at the end of February, there's a lot of heat in that sun. So, a glass building absorbs a lot of sun. An office building will need cooling on the sunny side of that building a lot of the time, even in the dead of winter. Trevor Freeman 05:31 Yeah. So, a district system, then, is taking advantage of the fact that heat exists, and we don't necessarily need to either burn fossil fuels or even if it's a, you know, a clean system, we don't have to expend energy to create heat, or create as much heat if we could move that heat around from where it's kind of naturally occurring to where we need it. Scott Demark 05:54 That's right at the very core of a district energy system. You're going to move heat from a place that it's not wanted to a place that it is wanted. And so in our example of the office building, you know, on the February day with the sun shining in and the computers all running, that building's getting rid of heat. But right next door, say there's a 20-story condo. Well, that 20 story condo needs heating and it also needs domestic hot water. So, year-round, domestic hot water represents 30, 35% of the heating load of any residential building, so at all times. So, a district energy system allows you to take that heat away from the office building and give it to the residential building, instead of making the heat and dissipating that heat to the atmosphere in the office building. So, yeah, it's, it's really a way to move, you know, from sources to sinks. That's, that's what a district energy system does well. Trevor Freeman 06:48 So we've kind of touched on this a little bit, but let's dive right into, you know, we talk a lot on the show about the energy transition. This, this push to, one, move away from fossil fuel combustion to meet our energy needs. And two, shifting from a kind of static, centralized energy system like we have right now, big generators, large transmission lines, etc., to more of a two-way flow, distributed energy system. What is the role of district energy systems within that transition. How do they help us get closer to that sort of reality that we talk about? Scott Demark 07:27 I think the biggest way that they help is economies of scale. Okay, so by that, I'll explain that. Imagine there's a lot of technology that's been around a long time that is very scalable to the building level, but most of them are fossil fire. Okay, so the cheapest way to heat a building in Ottawa is to put a gas fired boiler in. That's the cheapest capital cost, first cost, and it's also the cheapest operating cost, is to put a gas boiler in. That industry is well established. There's lots of trades who could do it. There's lots of producers who make the boilers. When you start to try and think about the energy transition and think about what you may do to be different, to be lower carbon, or to be zero carbon, those industries are just starting right. Those industries don't exist. They don't have the same depth, and so they don't have the same cost structure, and often times they don't scale well down to the building. And therefore, a district energy system aggregates a bunch of load, and so you can provide a thermal energy so at scale that becomes affordable. And that is, you know, a very good example of that would be where, you know, you might want to go and recover heat from some process, and we'll talk about Zibi as the example. But if he wanted to go recover heat from some process and bring it in, it doesn't make sense to run a pipeline to a source to heat one building. You can't make financial sense of it, but if you're heating 20 buildings, that pipeline, all of a sudden, makes sense to take waste heat from somewhere, to move it somewhere else. The other advantage is that truly district energy systems are agnostic to their inputs and outputs for heat. So, once you've established that hydronic loop, that interconnection of water pipes between buildings, what the source and what the sources, doesn't matter. So, you may have at one point built a district energy system, and Markham District Energy System is a great example of this market District Energy System was built on the concept of using a co-generation facility. So they burned natural gas to make electricity, they sold electricity to the grid, and they captured all the waste heat from that generation, and they fed it into a district energy system. Well, here we are, 20 plus years later, and, they're going to replace that system, that fossil fired system Augment, not fully replaced, but mostly replace that system with a sewer coupled energy recovery and drive those heat recovery chillers to a sewer system. So, they're putting a very green solution in place of a former fossil solution. They don't have to rip up the pipes, they don't have to change anything in the buildings. They only have to change that central concept. Now, again, Markham could never do that at a one building scale. They're only that at the community scale. Trevor Freeman 10:21 So, you mentioned, I want to pick on something you said there. You talked about a sewer heat energy system. They're pulling heat from the sewer. Just help our listeners understand high level kind of, why is there heat there for us to pull? Like, what's the what's the source there? Scott Demark 10:38 Yeah. So, when we shower, when we flush toilets, all of that is introducing heat into a sewer system. So, we're collecting heat from everybody's house into the sewer system. The sewer system also sits below the frost line. So, call it Earth coupled. You know it's the earth in Ottawa below the frost line sits around eight, eight and a half c and so at that temperature and the temperature of flushing toilets, we essentially get a sewer temperature in the on the coldest day of the year, that's around 10 10, and a half degree Celsius. And obviously, for lots of the year, it's much warmer than that. And so I think, you know, a lot of people are kind of familiar with the concept of geo exchange energy, or that. Lot of people call it geothermal, but you exchange where you might drill down into the earth, and you're taking advantage of that eight, eight and a half degrees, I'll see. So, you're exchanging heat, you can reject heat to the earth, or you can absorb heat from the earth. Well, this is the same idea, but you accept or reject from the sewer. But because the sewer is relatively shallow, it is cheaper to access that energy, and because it's warm, and on the coldest day, a couple of degrees make a big difference, Trevor, and most of the year so much warmer, you're really in a very good position to extract that heat, and that's all it is. You are just accepting or rejecting heat. You don't use the sewage itself. It doesn't come into your building. You have a heat exchanger in between. But that's, that's what you do. Trevor Freeman 12:10 Yeah, great. And I, we've talked before on the show about the idea that, you know, for a air source, heat pump, for example, you don't need a lot of heat energy to extract energy from the air. It can be cold outside, and there is still heat energy in the air that you can pull and use that to heat a building, heat water, whatever. So same concept, except you've got a much warmer source of energy, I guess. Scott Demark 12:34 Yeah, exactly. And you know, Trevor, when you look at the efficiency curves of those air source heat pumps, you know, they kind of drop off a cliff at minus 20. Minus 22 in fact. You know, five or six years ago, they that that was dropping off at minus 10. So, we've come a long way in air source heat pumps. But imagine on that coldest, coldest day of the year, you're still your source is well above zero, and therefore your efficiency. So, the amount of electricity you need to put into the heat pump to get out the heat that you need is much lower, so it's a way more efficient heat exchange. Trevor Freeman 13:07 Great. Thanks for that, Scott. I know that's a bit of a tangent here, but always cool to talk about different ways that we're coming up with to heat our buildings. So back to district energy. We've talked through some of the benefits of the system. If I'm a building owner and I'm have the decision to connect to a system that's there, or have my own standalone, you know, traditional boiler, whatever the case may be, or even in a clean energy one, a heat pump, whatever. What are the benefits of being on a district system versus having my own standalone system for just my building. Scott Demark 13:42 Yeah, so when you're wearing the developer's hat, you know they're really looking at it financially. If they have other goals around sustainability, great, that will factor into it. But most of them are making decisions around this financially. So, it needs to compete with that. That first cost that we talked about the easiest ways, is boilers, gas fired boilers is the cheapest way. And so, they're going to look to see it at how. How does this compare to that? And so, I think that's the best way to frame it for you. And so, the difference here is that you need to install in your building a cooling system and a heating system. In Ottawa, that cooling system is only used for a few months a year, and it's very expensive. It takes up space, whether you're using a chiller and a cooling tower on the roof or using a dry cooler, it takes up roof space, and it also takes up interior space. If you do have a cooling tower, you have a lot of maintenance for that. You need to turn it on and turn it off in the spring, on and fall, etc., just to make sure all that happens and you need to carry the life cycle of that boiler plant. You need to bring gas infrastructure into your building. You generally need to put that gas boiler plant high in your building. So up near the top, and that's for purposes of venting that properly. Now that's taking real estate, right? And it's taking real estate on the area that's kind of most advantageous, worth the most money. So you might lose a penthouse to have a boiler and chiller room up there. And you also, of course, lose roof space. And today, we really do try to take advantage of those rooftop, patios and things, amenities are pretty important in buildings. And so, when I compare that to district energy at the p1 level, p2 level in your building, you're going to have a small room, and I really do mean small where the energy transfer takes place, you'll have some heat exchangers. And small, you might have a space, you know, 10 or 12 feet by 15 to 18 feet would be big enough for a 30-story tower, so a small room where you do the heat exchange and then Trevor, you don't have anything in your building for plants that you would normally look after. So, when you look at the pro forma for owning your building over the lifetime of it. You don't have to maintain boilers. You don't have to have boiler insurance. You don't have to maintain your chillers. You don't have to have life cycle replacement on any of these products. You don't need anybody operating those checking in on the pressure vessels. None of that has to happen. All of that happens on the district energy system. So, you're really taking something you own and operate, and replacing that with a service. So, district energy is a service, and what, what we promised to deliver is the heating you need and the cooling you need. 24/7. The second thing you get is more resilience, and I'll explain that a little bit. Is that in a in a normal building, if you if the engineers looked at it and said, you need two boilers to keep your building warm, then you're probably going to install three. And that is kind of this, and plus one sort of idea, so that if one boiler goes down, you have a spare. And you need to maintain those. You need to pay for that. You need to maintain those, etc. But in district energy system, all that redundancy is done in the background. It's done by us, and we have significantly more redundancy than just n plus one in this example. But overall, you know, if you have 10 buildings on your district energy system, each of those would have had n plus one. We don't have n plus 10 in the plant. And so overall, the cost is lower, I would say, if you look at it globally, except the advantages you do have better than N plus one in the plant. So, we have higher resiliency at a lower cost. Trevor Freeman 17:39 So, we know there's no such thing as a miracle solution that works in all cases. What are the best use cases for district energy system? Where does it make a lot of sense? Scott Demark 17:50 Yeah, in terms some, in some ways the easiest things, Pretty work. Doesn't make sense. So, so it doesn't make sense in sprawling low rise development. So, the cost of that hydronic loop those water pipes is high. They have to fit in the roadway. It's civil work, etc. And so, you do need density. That doesn't mean it has to be high rise density. You know, if you look at Paris, France, six stories district energy, no problem. There's, there's lots and lots of customers for that scale of building. It doesn't have to be all high rise, but it does, District Energy does not lend itself well to our sprawling style of development. It's much more suited to a downtown setting. It also kind of thrives where there's mixed use. You know, I think the first example we were talking about is office building shedding heat, residential building needing heat. You know, couple that with an industrial building shedding heat. You know, these various uses, a variety of uses on a district energy system, is the best, because its biggest advantage is sharing energy, not making energy. And so, a disparity of uses is the best place to use that. I think the other, the other thing to think about, and this is harder in Canada than the rest of the world, is that, you know, it's harder on a retrofit basis, from a cost perspective, than it is in a in a new community where you can put this in as infrastructure. Day one, you're going to make a big difference. And I'll, you know, give a shout out to British Columbia in the Greater Vancouver area. So, the district, you know, down in the Lower Mainland, they, they kind of made this observation and understood that if they were going to electrify, then District Energy gave economies of scale to electrify that load. And they do a variety of things, but one of the things they do is, is kind of district you exchange system so, so big heat pumps coupled to big fields, and then spring heat made a bunch of buildings. But these are green field developments Trevor. So, as they expand their suburbs. They do need to build the six stories. They very much have kind of density around parks concept. So now Park becomes a geo field. Density around the geo field, but this infrastructure is going in the same time as the water pipes. It's going in at the same time as the roads, the sidewalks, etc. You can dramatically reduce your cost, your first cost related to that hydro loop, if you're putting it in the same time you're doing the rest of the services. Trevor Freeman 20:27 So, we're not likely to see, you know, residential neighborhoods with single family homes or multi-unit homes, whatever, take advantage of this. But that sort of low rise, mid rise, that's going to be more of a good pick for this. And like you said, kind of development is the time to do this. You mentioned other parts of the world. So, district energy systems aren't exactly widespread. In Canada, we're starting to see more of them pop up. What about the rest of the world? Are there places in the world where we see a lot more of this, and they've been doing this for a long time? Scott Demark 21:00 Yeah. So, I'd almost say every, everywhere in the northern hemisphere, except North America, has done much more of this. And, you know, we really look to kind of Scandinavia as the gold standard of this. You look to Sweden, you look to Denmark, you look to Germany, even. There's, there's a lot of great examples of this, and they are typically government owned. So, they are often public private partnerships, but they would be various levels of government. So, you know, if you, if you went to Copenhagen, you'd see that the municipality is an owner. But then their equivalent of a province or territory is actually a big part of it, too. And when they built their infrastructure ages ago, they did not have an easy source of fossil fuels, right? And so, they need to think about, how can we do this? How can we share heat? How can we centralize the recovery of heat? How can we make sure we don't waste any and this has just been ingrained in them. So there's massive, massive District Energy loops, interconnecting loops, some owned by municipalities. Someone probably, if you build the factory, part of the concept of your factory, part of the pro forma of your factory is, how much can I sell my waste heat for? And so, a factory district might have a sear of industrial partners who own a district energy loop and interfaces with the municipal loop all sort of sharing energy and dumping it in. And so that's, you know, that's what you would study. That's, that's where we would want to be, and the heart of it is, just as I said, we've really had, you know, cheap or, you know, really cheap fossil fuels. We've had no price on pollution. And therefore, it really hasn't needed to happen here. And we're starting to see the need for that to happen here. Trevor Freeman 22:58 It's an interesting concept to think of, you know, bringing that factory example in, instead of waste heat or heat as a byproduct of your process being a problem that you need to deal with, something you have to figure out a way to get rid of. It becomes almost an asset. It's a it's a, you know, convenient commodity that's being produced regardless, that you can now look to sell and monetize? Scott Demark 23:21 Yeah, you go back to the idea of, like, what are the big benefits of district energy? Is that, like, if that loop exists and somebody knows that one of the things the factory produces is heat, well, that's a commodity I produce, and I can, I can sell it, if I have a way to sell it right here. You know, we're going to dissipate it to a river. We may dissipate it to the atmosphere. We're going to get rid of it. Like you said, it's, it's, it's waste in their minds and in Europe, that is absolutely not waste. Trevor Freeman 23:49 And it coming back to that, you know, question of, where does this make sense? You talked about mixed use. And it's also like the, you know, the temporal mix use of someone that is producing a lot of heat during the day when the next-door residential building is empty, then when they switch, when the factory closes and the shift is over and everybody comes home from work, that's when that building needs heat. That's when they want to be then taking that heat to buildings next to each other that both need heat at the same time is not as good a use cases when it's offset like that. Scott Demark 24:23 Yeah, that's true. And unless lots of District Energy Systems consider kind of surges in storage, I know our system at CB has, has kind of a small storage system related to the domestic hot water peak load. However, you can also think of the kilometers and kilometers and kilometers of pipes full of water as a thermal battery, right? So, so you actually are able to even out those surges. You let the temperature; the district energy system rise. When that factory is giving all out all kinds of heat, it's rising even above the temperature. You have to deliver it at, and then when that peak comes, you can draw down that temperature and let the whole district energy system normalize to its temperature again. So you do have an innate battery in the in the water volume that sits in the district energy system Trevor Freeman 25:15 Very cool. So you've mentioned Zibi a couple times, and I do want to get into that as much as we're talking about other parts of the world, you know, having longer term district energy systems. Zibi, community utility is a great example, right here in Ottawa, where you and I are both based of a district energy system. Before we get into that, can you, just for our listeners that are not familiar with Zibi, give us a high level overview of what that community is its location, you know, the goals of the community. And then we'll talk about the energy side of things. Scott Demark 25:46 Sure. So Zibi was formerly Domtar paper mills. It's 34 acres, and it is in downtown Ottawa and downtown Gatineau. About a third of the land mass is islands on the Ontario side, and two thirds the land mass is on the shore, the north shore of the Ottawa River in Gatineau, both downtown, literally in the shadows of Parliament. It is right downtown. It was industrial for almost 200 years. Those paper mills shut down in the 90s and the early 2000s and my partners and I pursued that to turn it from kind of this industrial wasteland, walled off, fenced off, area that no one could go into, what we're hoping will be kind of the world's most Sustainable Urban Community, and so at build out, it will house, you know, about six, 7000 people. It will be four and a half million square feet, 4.24 point 4 million square feet of development. It is master planned and approved, and has built about, I think we're, at 1.1 million square feet, so we're about quarter built out. Now. 10 buildings are done and connected to the district energy system there. And really, it's, it's an attempt to sort of recover land that was really quite destroyed. You can imagine it was a pretty polluted site. So, the giant remediation plan, big infrastructure plan. We modeled this, this overall sustainability concept, over a program called one planet living which has 10 principles of sustainability. So, you know, you and I are talking a lot about carbon today, but there's also very important aspects about affordability and social sustainability and lifestyle, and all of those are incorporated into the one planet program, and encourage people to look up one planet living and understand what it is and look at the commitments that we've made at Zibi to create a sustainable place. We issue a report every year, kind of our own report card that's reviewed by a third party that explains where we are on our on our mission to achieve our goal of the world's most sustainable community. Speaker 1 28:09 Yeah. And so I do encourage people to look at one planet living also. Have a look at, you know, the Zibi website, and it's got the Master Plan and the vision of what that community will be. And I've been down there, it's already kind of coming along. It's amazing. It's amazing to see the progress compared to who I think you described it well, like a bit of an industrial wasteland at the heart of one of the most beautiful spots in the city. It was really a shame what it used to be. And it's great to see kind of the vision of what it can become. So that's awesome, Scott Demark 28:38 Yeah, and Trevor, especially now that the parks are coming along. You know, we worked really closely with the NCC to integrate the shoreline of Zibi to the existing, you know, bike path networks and everything. And, you know, two of the three shoreline parks are now completed and open to the public and they're stunning. And you know, so many Ottawa people have not been down there because it's not a place you think about, but it's one of the few places in Ottawa and Gatineau where you can touch the water, you know, like it's, it's, it's stunning, Trevor Freeman 29:08 yeah, very, very cool. Okay, so the next part of that, of course, is energy. And so there is a district energy system, one of the first kind of, or the most recent big energy, District Energy Systems in Ottawa. Tell us a little bit about how you are moving energy and heating the Zibi site. Scott Demark 29:29 Yeah. So first, I'll say, you know, we, we, we studied different, uh, ways to get to net zero. You know, we had, we had a goal of being a zero carbon community. There are low carbon examples, but a zero carbon community is quite a stretch. And even when you look at the Scandinavian examples, the best examples, they're missing their energy goals, largely because some of the inputs that are District Energy System remain false so, but also because they have trouble getting them. Performance out of the buildings. And so we looked at this. We also know from our experience that getting to zero carbon at the building scale in Ottawa is very, very difficult. Our climate is tough, super humid, super hot. Summer, very cold, very dry, winter, long winter. So, it's difficult at the building scale. It's funny Trevor, because you'd actually have an easier time getting to zero carbon or a passive house standard in affordable housing than you do at market housing. And that's because affordable housing has a long list of people who want to move in and pay rents. You can get some subsidies for capital and the people who are willing to pay rent are good with smaller windows, thicker walls, smaller units and passthroughs, needs all those kinds of things. So when down at Zibi, you're really selling views, you're competing with people on the outside of Zibi, you're building almost all glass buildings. And so it's really difficult to find a way to get to zero carbon on the building scale. So that moved us to district energy for all the reasons we've talked about today already. And so, when we looked at it for Zibi, you really look at the ingredients you have. One of the great things we have is we're split over the border. It's also a curse, but split over the border is really interesting, because you cannot move electricity over that border, but you can move thermal energy over that border. And so, for us, in thinking about electrifying thermal energy, we realized that if we did the work in Quebec, where there is clean and affordable electricity, we could we could turn that into heat, and then we could move heat to Ontario. We could move chilled water to Ontario. So that's kind of ingredient, one that we had going for us there. The second is that there used to be three mills. So originally Domtar three mills, they sold one mill. It changed hands a few times, but it now belongs to Kruger. They make tissue there so absorbent things, Kleenexes and toilet paper, absorbent, anything in that tissue process that's a going concern. So, you can see that in our skyline. You can see, on cold days, big plumes of waste heat coming out of it. And so, we really saw that as our source, really identified that as our source. And how could we do that? So, going back to the economies of scale, is, could we send a pipeline from Kruger, about a kilometer away, to Zibi? And so, when we were purchasing the land, we were looking at all the interconnections of how the plants used to be realized. There are some old pipelines, some old easements, servitudes, etc. And so, when we bought the land, we actually bought all of those servitudes to including a pipeline across the bridge, Canadian energy regulator licensed across the bridge into Ontario. And so, we mixed all these ingredients up, you know, in a pot, and came up with our overall scheme. And so that overall scheme is relatively simple. We built an energy recovery station at Kruger, where just before their effluent water, like when they're finished in their process, goes back to the river. We have a heat exchanger there. We extract heat. We push that heat in a pipe network over to Zibi. At Zibi, we can upgrade that heat using heat recovery chillers, to a useful temperature for us, that's about 40 degrees Celsius, and we push that across the bridge to Ontario, all of our buildings in Ontario, then have thin coil units. They use that 40-degree heat to heat buildings. The return side of that comes back to Quebec, and then on the Quebec side, we have a loop and all of our buildings in the Quebec side, then use heat pumps so we extract the last bit of heat. So, imagine you you've returned from a fan coil, but you're still slightly warm. That slightly warm water is enough to drive a heat pump inside the buildings. And then finally, that goes back to Kruger again, and Kruger heats it back up with their waste heat comes back. So that's our that's our heating loop. The cooling side is coupled to the Ottawa River. And so instead of us rejecting heat to the atmosphere through cooling towers, our coolers are actually coupled to the river. That's a very tight environmental window that you can operate in. So, we worked with the minister the environment climate change in Quebec to get our permit to do it. We can only be six degrees difference to the river, but our efficiency is, on average, like on an annual basis, more than double what it would be to a cooling tower for the same load. So, we're river coupled with respect to cooling for the whole development, and we're coupled to Kruger for heating for the whole development. And what that allows us to do is eliminate fossil fuels. Our input is clean Quebec electricity, and our output is heating and cooling. Trevor Freeman 34:56 So, none of the buildings, you know, just for our listeners, none of the buildings have any. sort of fossil fuel combustion heating equipment. You don't have boilers or anything like that, furnaces in these in these buildings, Scott Demark 35:06 no boilers, no chillers, no Trevor Freeman 35:09 that's awesome. And just for full transparency, I should have mentioned this up front. So, the zibi community utility is a partnership between Zibi and Hydro Ottawa, who our listeners will know that I work for, and this was really kind of a joint venture to figure out a different approach to energy at the city site. Scott Demark 35:28 Yeah, that's right, Trevor. I mean the concept, was born a long time ago now, but the concept was born by talking to Hydro Ottawa about how we might approach this whole campus differently. You know, one of hydro Ottawa's companies makes electricity, of course, Chaudiere Falls, and so that was part of the thinking we thought of, you know, micro grids and islanding this and doing a lot of different things. When Ford came in, and we were not all the way there yet and made changes the Green Energy Act. It made it challenging for us to do the electricity side, but we had already well advanced the thermal side, and hydro, you know, hydro makes a good partner in this sort of thing. When a when a developer tells someone, I'd like you to buy a condo, and by the way, I'm also the district energy provider that might put some alarm bells up, but you put a partnership in there with a trusted, long term utility partner, and explain that, you know, it is in the in the public interest, they're not going to jack rates or mess with things. And then obviously, just, you know, hydro had such a long operating record operating experience that they really brought sort of an operations and long-term utility mindset to our district energy system. Trevor Freeman 36:45 So, looking at a system like the Zibi community utility or other district energy systems, is this the kind of thing that can scale up over time? And, you know, I bring this up because you hear people talk about, you know, a network of district energy systems across a city or across a big geographic area. Are these things that can be interconnected and linked, or does it make more sense as standalone district energy systems in those conditions that you talked about earlier? Scott Demark 37:17 Very much the former Trevor like, and that's, you know, that's where, you know, places like Copenhagen are today. It's that, you know, there was, there was one district energy system, then there was another, then they got interconnected, then the third got added. And then they use a lot of incineration there, in that, in that part of the world, clean incineration for garbage. And so then an incinerator is coming online, and so that incinerators waste heat is going to be fed with a new district energy loop, and some other factory is going to use the primary heat from that, and then the secondary heat is going to come into the dictionary system. So, these things are absolutely expandable. They're absolutely interconnectable. There are temperature profiles. There's modern, modern thoughts on temperature profiles compared to older systems. Most of the old, old systems were steam, actually, which is not the most efficient thing the world, but that's where they started and so now you can certainly interconnect them. And I think that the example at Zibi is a decent one, because we do have two kinds of systems there. You know, I said we have fan coil units in in the Ontario side, but we have heat pumps on the other side. Well, those two things, they can coexist, right? That's there. Those two systems are, are operating together. Because the difference, you know, the difference, from the customer's perspective, in those two markets are different, and the same can be true in different parts of the city or when different sources and sinks are available. So, it is not one method of doing district energy systems. What you do is you examine the ingredients you have. I keep saying it, but sources and sinks. How can I look at these sources and sinks in a way that I can interconnect them and make sense? And sometimes that means that a source or a sink might be another district energy system, Trevor Freeman 39:12 Yeah, systems that maybe work in parallel to each other, in cooperation with each other. Again, it's almost that temporal need where there's load high on at one point in time and low on the other point in time. Sharing is a great opportunity. Scott Demark 39:26 Yeah, absolutely Trevor Freeman 39:27 great. Okay, last question for you here, Scott, what is needed, maybe from a regulatory or a policy lens to encourage more implementation of district energy systems. How do we see more of these things happen here in Canada or North America? Scott Demark 39:45 The best way to put this, the bureaucracy has been slow to move is, is what I'll say. And I'll use Zibi as that example. When we when we pitch the district energy system. At Zibi, we had to approach the City of Ottawa, and we had to approach the city at Gatineau, the City of Ottawa basically said to us, no, you can't put those in our streets. Engineering just said, no, no, no, no. And so, what we did at Zibi is we actually privatized our streets in order to see our vision through, because, because Ottawa wasn't on board, the city of Gatineau said, Hmm, I'm a little worried. I want you to write protocols of how you will access your pipes and not our pipes. I want to understand where liability ends and starts and all of this kind of stuff. And we worked through that detail slowly, methodically with the city of Gatineau, and we came to a new policy on how district energy could be in a public street and Zb streets are public on the Gatineau side today, you know, come forward 10 years here, and the City of Ottawa has a working group on how to incorporate District Energy pipes into streets. We've been able to get the City of Ottawa to come around to the idea that we will reject and accept heat from their sewer. You know, Hydro Ottawa, wholly owned company of the City of Ottawa, has an active business in district energy. So Trevor, we've come really far, but it's taken a long time. And so, if you ask me, How can we, how can we accelerate district energy, I think a lot of it has to do with the bureaucracy at municipalities. And you know, we're we see so much interest from the Federation of Canadian municipalities, who was the debt funder for zcu. We have multiple visits from people all over Canada, coming to study and look at this as an example. And I'm encouraged by that. But it's also, it's also not rocket science. We need to understand that putting a pipe in a street is kind of a just, just a little engineering problem to solve, whereas putting, you know, burning fossil fuels for these new communities and putting it in the atmosphere, like the genies out of the bottle, right, like, and unfortunately, I think, for a lot of bureaucrats, the challenge at the engineering level is that that pipe in the street is of immediate, complex danger to solving that problem, whereas it's everybody's problem that the that the carbons in the atmosphere. So, if we could accelerate that, if we could focus on the acceleration of standards around District Energy pipes and streets, the rights of a district energy company to exist, and not to rant too much, but give you an example, is that a developer is required to put gas infrastructure into a new community, required, and yet you have to fight to get a district energy pipe in the street. So there needs to be a change of mindset there, and, and, and we're not there yet, but that's where we need to go. Trevor Freeman 43:07 Yeah, well, it'll be interesting. You know, in 10 years, let's talk again and see how far we come. Hopefully not 10 years. Hopefully it's more like five, to see the kind of change that you've seen in the last decade. But I think that the direction is encouraging, the speed needs a little bit of work, but I'm always encouraged to see, yeah, things are changing or going in the right direction, just slowly. Well, Scott, we always end our interviews with a series of questions to our guests, so as long as you're okay with it, I'll jump right into those. So, the first question is, what is a book you've read that you think everybody should read? Scott Demark 43:41 Nexus? Which is by Harare. He's the same author that wrote sapiens. Lots of people be familiar with sapiens. And so, Nexus is, is really kind of the history of information that works like, how do we, how do we share and pass information? And kind of a central thesis is that, you know, information is, is neither knowledge nor truth. It is information, and it's talking a lot about, in the age of AI, how are we going to manage to move information into truth or knowledge? And I think it, you know, to be honest, it kind of scared the shit out of me reading it kind of how, how AI is impacting our world and going to impact our world. And what I thought was kind of amazing about it was that he really has a pretty strong thesis around the erosion of democracy in this time. And it's, it was, it was really kind of scary because it was published before the 2024, election. And so it's, it's really kind of both a fascinating and scary read. And I think really something that everybody should get their head around. Trevor Freeman 44:59 Yeah, there's a few of those books recently that I I would clear or classify them as kind of dark and scary, but really important or really enlightening in some way. And it kind of helps you, you know, formalize a thought or a concept in your head and realize, hey, here's what's happening, or gives you that kind of the words to speak about it in this kind of fraught time we're in. So same question. But for a movie or a show, is there anything that you think everybody should watch Scott Demark 45:29 That's harder. I think generally, if I'm watching something, it's for my downtime or own entertainment, and pushing my tastes on the rest of the world, maybe not a great idea. I if I, if I'm, if I'm kind of doing that, I tend to watch cooking shows, actually, Trevor. So, like, that's awesome. I like ugly, delicious. I love David Chang. I like, I like, mind of a chef, creativity behind a chef. So those kinds of things, I'd say more. So, if there was something to like that. I think somebody else should, should watch or listen to I have, I have a real love for Malcolm Gladwell podcast, revisionist history. And so if I thought, you know, my watching habits are not going to going to expand anybody's brain. But I do think that Malcolm's perspective on life is, is really a healthy it's really healthy to step sideways and look at things differently. And I would suggest, if you have never listened to that podcast, go to Episode One, season one, and start there. It's, it's, it's fantastic. Trevor Freeman 46:39 Yeah, I agree. I'll echo that one. That's one of my favorites. If we were to offer you or not, but if we were to offer you a free round-trip flight, anywhere in the world, where would you go? Scott Demark 46:50 That's hard. So much flight guilt, you know, I know it's a hard assume that there's carbon offset to it. It's an electric plane. Trevor Freeman 47:00 That's right, yeah, Scott Demark 47:01 the we, my family, had a trip planned in 2020 to go to France and Italy. My two boys were kind of at the perfect age to do that. It would have been a really ideal trip. And so, I've still never been to either of those places. And if I had to pick one, probably Italy, I would really like to see Italy, mafuti. I think it would be a fantastic place to go. So probably, probably Italy. Trevor Freeman 47:25 My favorite trip that I've ever done with my wife and our six-month-old at the time was Italy. It was just phenomenal. It was a fantastic trip. Who's someone that you admire? Scott Demark 47:36 I have a lot of people, actually, a lot of people in this, in this particular space, like, what would I work in that have brought me here to pick one, though I'd probably say Peter Busby. So, Peter Busby is a mentor, a friend, now a business partner, but, but not earlier in my career. Peter Busby is a kind of a, one of the four fathers, you know, if you will, of green design in Canada. He's an architect, Governor General's Award-winning architect, actually. But I think what I, what I really, appreciate about Peter, and always will, is that he was willing to stand up in his peer group and say, hey, we're not doing this right. And, you know, he did that. He did that in the early 80s, right? Like we're not talking he did it when it cost his business some clients. He did it when professors would speak out against him, and certainly the Canadian Association of architecture was not going to take any blame for the shitty buildings that have been built, right? And he did it. And I remember being at a conference where Peter was getting a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian architects Association, and so he's standing up, and people are all super proud of him. They're talking about his big life. And he kind of belittled them all and said, you're not doing enough. We're not doing enough like he's still he's still there. He's still taking the blame for where things are, and that things haven't moved fast enough, and that buildings are a massive part of our carbon problem, and probably one of the easier areas to fix. You know, we're talking about electric planes. Well, that's a that's a lot more difficult than it is to recover energy from a factory to heat a community, right? I admire him. I learn things from him all the time. He's got a great book out at the moment, actually, and, yeah, he'd be right up there on my in my top list, Trevor Freeman 49:54 Awesome. What is something about the energy sector or its future that you're particularly excited about? Scott Demark 50:00 I wish you asked me this before the election. I I'm feeling a little dark. Trevor, I think there needs to be a price on pollution in the world. Needs to be a price on pollution in America, in Canada, and I'm worried about that going away. in light of that, I'm not, I'm not super excited about different technologies at the moment. I think there are technologies that are helping us, there are technologies that are pushing us forward, but there's no like silver bullet. So, you know, a really interesting thing that's coming is kind of this idea that a small nuclear reactor, okay, very interesting idea. You could see its context in both localized electricity production, but all the heat also really good for district entry, okay, so that's an interesting tech. It obviously comes with complications around security and disposal, if you like. There's our nuclear industry has been allowed to drink like it's all complicated. So, I don't see one silver bullet in technology that I'm like, That's the answer. But what I do see, I'll go back to what we were talking about before, is, you know, we had to turn this giant ship of bureaucracy towards new solutions. Okay, that's, that's what we had to do. And now that it's turned and we've got it towards the right course, I'm encouraged by that. I really am. You know, there are champions, and I'll talk about our city. You know, there's champions in the City of Ottawa who want to see this happen as younger people have graduated into roles and planning and other engineering roles there. They've grown up and gone to school in an age where they understand how critical this climate crisis is, and they're starting to be in positions of power and being in decision making. You know, a lot of my career, we're trying to educate people that there was a problem. Now, the people sitting in those chairs, it they understand there's a problem, and what can they do about it? And so I am, I am excited that that the there is a next generation sitting in these seats, making decisions. The bureaucracy the ship is, is almost on course to making this difference. So I do think that's encouraging. We have the technology. We really do. It's not rocket science. We just need to get through the bureaucracy barriers, and we need to find ways to properly finance it. Trevor Freeman 52:34 Right? I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Scott, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate this conversation and shedding a little bit of light, not just on the technical side of district energy systems, but on the broader context, and as you say, the bureaucracy, the the what is needed to make these things happen and to keep going in that right direction. So thanks a lot for your time. I really appreciate it. Scott Demark 52:56 Thank you, Trevor, good to see you. Trevor Freeman 52:57 All right. Take care. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of The thinkenergy podcast. Don't forget to subscribe. Wherever you listen to podcasts, and it would be great if you could leave us a review. It really helps to spread the word. As always, we would love to hear from you, whether it's feedback, comments or an idea for a show or a guest, you can always reach us at thinkenergy@hydroottawa.com
Stéphane Berthomet revient sur les Rendez-vous Radio-Canada OHdio, une journée dédiée à la baladodiffusion qui a réuni plus de 300 passionnés à Montréal. Il mentionne aussi la création de l'Association du balado indépendant du Québec (ABIQ), qui organisera une rencontre en avril à Gatineau.
Les Canadiens vont-ils continuer longtemps avec la formule 11 attaquants et une pincée de Michael Pezzetta? Pourquoi ignore-t-on Rafaël Harvey-Pinard, Alex Barré-Boulet et d'autres joueurs présents avec le Rocket de Laval? Stéphane Waite s'interroge. Les Sénateurs d'Ottawa vont disputer deux matchs préparatoires à Québec et le gardien des Capitals Logan Thompson signe un contrat de longue durée avec l'équipe. Ce sont quelques-uns des sujets de ce nouvel épisode de Sortie de zone avec l'animateur Jérémie Rainville et Stéphane Waite du 98.5 FM, ainsi que Guillaume Lefrançois et Alexandre Pratt de La Presse. Le sommaire Bloc 1 2:14 - Encore un lent départ du Tricolore départ face aux Devils. Est-ce la régression à venir que Alexandre Pratt suggérait? 9:45 - Est-ce que les Canadiens peuvent poursuivre avec la formule 11 attaquants et un peu de Michael Pezzetta? 22:50 - S'il y avait un match des séries éliminatoires demain pour les Canadiens, qui serait votre gardien partant? Bloc 2 28:50 - Cole Caufield avec son 25e but est en chemin pour... ? Nick Suzuki a 50 points en 49 matchs. Il est en voie de récolter... ? 33:40 - Mikko Rantanen s'en va en Caroline. Est-ce que l’Avalanche du Colorado gagne vraiment en économisant? Bloc 3 41:00 - Les Sénateurs d'Ottawa seront à Québec pour affronter les Devils et les Canadiens lors de matchs préparatoires en septembre. Est-ce plus payant Québec que de développer le marché de Gatineau? 49:30 - Le gardien Logan Thompson signe un nouveau contrat avec les Capitals de Washington. 50:55 - Alex Pietrangelo déclare forfait pour la Coupe des 4 nations: Qui le remplacera? Ekblad, Bouchard, Matheson?Voir https://www.cogecomedia.com/vie-privee pour notre politique de vie privée
In July 2024, I went to Ottawa and Gatineau to tour several museums. The first museum I visited was The Canadian Museum of History. It was a transformative experience. Support: patreon.com/canadaehx Merch: https://www.ohcanadashop.com/collections/canadian-history-ehx Donate: buymeacoffee.com/craigu Donate: canadaehx.com (Click Donate) E-mail: craig@canadaehx.com Twitter: twitter.com/craigbaird Threads: https://www.threads.net/@cdnhistoryehx Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cdnhistoryehx YouTube: youtube.com/c/canadianhistoryehx Want to send me something? Craig Baird PO Box 2384 Stony Plain PO Main, Alberta T7Z1X8 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Alors que rien ne l'y prédestinait, Lionel Bonnaure vit à l'étranger depuis une dizaine d'années et revient tout juste des Jeux Olympiques et Paralympiques de Paris où son équipe a remporté la médaille d'argent. Tout commence par quelques années en Australie lorsque cet ingénieur fonctionnaire pour l'Académie de Aix-Marseille est approché par une entreprise de logiciels. Le début de l'aventure à l'étranger signe en fait le début d'une nouvelle vie dans laquelle chaque nouveauté rime avec exaltation.Quelques années passent et son entreprise est rachetée par un géant américain. Lionel Bonnaure décide alors d'accepter le parachute doré qui lui est proposé. Lui et sa femme Marielle rentrent alors en France, et s'ils reprennent leur vie d'avant, l'envie de repartir se rappelle vite à eux. C'est sans compter sur un appel surprise : l'équipe de Volley Canada vient de recruter un nouvel entraîneur et celui-ci invite Lionel à le suivre dans cette folle aventure. A quel titre ? En tant qu'analyste de la performance. Qu'à cela ne tienne, voilà l'excitation professionnelle qui manquait au quotidien de l'ingénieur à l'accent chantant.Le voilà désormais installé à Gatineau avec sa femme et leurs filles. Au cours des dernières années en poste, Lionel a accompagné plusieurs équipes : les femmes, les hommes, le volley "classique" et le volley assis. C'est d'ailleurs cette dernière discipline paralympique qui l'amènera en août dernier à Paris. Mais cette histoire-là, il la raconte encore mieux que nous avec toutes les émotions dans la voix. French Expat est un podcast de French Morning qui raconte les parcours de vie des Français établis hors de France. Retrouvez-le sur toutes les plateformes d'écoute : Spotify, Apple Podcast, Deezer, Google Podcast, Podcast Addict, Amazon Music. Cet épisode est raconté, produit et réalisé par Anne-Fleur Andrle, habillé et mixé par Alice Krief.Retrouvez nos partenaires et sponsors : https://linktr.ee/FrenchExpat Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.