Concordia's status as a Canadian leader in electrification research has been further solidified by collaborations between the Volt-Age program and the university's Next-Generation Cities Institute.
Last year the Volt-Age program, which researches new technologies to decarbonize Canada's building, transportation and energy sectors, received a historic $123 million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF).
"We urgently need to enter a new era of electrification for social and environmental reasons, and Concordia is now very well placed to be a leader in these fields," says Karim Zaghib, CEO of Volt-Age and a Concordia professor of chemical and materials engineering. "And collaborating with the Next-Generation Cities Institute (NGCI) feels like a natural step in many ways."
The NGCI is helmed by Ursula Eicker, the Canada Excellence Research Chair (CERC) in Smart, Sustainable and Resilient Cities and Communities and a Concordia professor in the Department of Building, Civil and Environmental Engineering. The institute brings together a range of specialists who look at how to transform cities into more liveable, environmentally sustainable and carbon-neutral places.
Both Volt-Age and the NGCI, who partner with various cities and universities across the country, are now important pieces of Canada's objective to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
"The Next-Generation Cities Institute and Volt-Age are perfectly aligned in their strategy to decarbonize communities," Eicker says. "The collaboration will elevate our partnerships with municipalities, citizens and the private sector to a new level and accelerate a just energy transition."
In February, Volt-Age announced a first round of funding for 36 research projects for universities across the country, including initiatives at the universities of Toronto, Calgary, Concordia and Dalhousie.
With 16 of the 36 Volt-Age seed-funded projects going to the NGCI, the institute is now taking a leading role in energy transition research.
Each of the 16 NGCI projects was granted $200,000, for a total of $3.2 million.
Living labs and digital twins
NGCI projects of particular relevance to Volt-Age are the Living Labs, for example, at Loyola Campus, in London, Ontario, and the Indigenous community Gull Bay, and the Digital Twins decarbonization initiatives.
The Living Labs are community- or campus-scale projects that focus on integrating renewable technologies, flexible loads and storage in their energy distribution networks.
"The labs are using innovative digital modelling and artificial intelligence to help with the transition to electrification and to optimize communities' existing energy systems," Zaghib explains.
Several Digital Twin seed projects support the smart decarbonization of the built environment: from large-scale retrofit planning for the cities of Toronto and Montreal over decarbonization roadmaps for municipal and private-sector building assets to circular economy analysis to reduce the life cycle of carbon dioxide emissions. To do this, NGCI researchers develop digital twins of built environments to test and prototype scenarios before implementing them in the real world.
The creation of these virtual models allows the researchers to assess what retrofit alternatives will work best for different building types. This is a crucial piece of the puzzle, seeing that buildings contribute up to 18 per cent of Canada's emissions.
"With the increasing amount of publicly available data we can now build realistic 3D models of any city," Eicker adds. "Using a city's digital twin allows to model the carbon emissions of buildings and transport and find the least costly scenario to achieve zero emissions."
Other examples of NGCI's seed-funded projects include the CityPlayer serious gaming initiative, the Carbon Governance and Desjardins Living Labs and Eco-friendly smart construction systems.
"The Volt-Age focus on embedding innovative technologies into communities will deliver much-needed best practice for how to decarbonize our increasingly urban world, but also our remote communities," Eicker summarizes. "I am very excited that the institute will play a major role on accelerating the change toward a sustainable future."
