Carleton Sustainability Team Helps Cornwall Tackle Climate Change

As Canadian summers become hotter, the subsidized housing units in Cornwall, Ontario struggle to stay cool with poorly insulated homes and window air conditioners. These same homes are reliant on carbon-emitting natural gas furnaces that are worsening the climate problem.

With more than 100 townhouses needing upgrading, Cornwall turned to students in Carleton’s Sustainable Energy graduate program for help.

“This program is unique in that it’s one of the oldest interdisciplinary programs of its kind that brings together both the policy and technical knowhow needed to develop practical solutions to climate change,” explained Daniel Rosenbloom, the Rosamond Ivey Research Chair in Sustainability Transitions, who led the class. “It marries engineering insights with the policy, social and economic dimensions that equally need to be brought to bear to make those innovations and solutions real, to make them implementable.”

As part of their capstone project, engineering and public policy students collaborated to come up with a plan to retrofit the Cornwall housing project to make it more efficient.

“The problem we wanted to solve was to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions in the [housing project] to match Cornwall’s goal of net zero emissions by 2050,” explained engineering student Akkash Elagampalayam Dhanabal. “We reviewed existing studies and conducted primary technical and policy research to come up with estimations and assumptions about the project.”

Echo Xie and Guy Brodsky, students in the policy section of the program, worked with Akkash on the project.

“We recommended a mass retrofit for all of the social housing units where there is existing electrical capacity, as well as a smaller-sized heat pump retrofit for the units where there isn’t sufficient new capacity available,” said Brodsky. “We also recommended improving the building envelope and including cellular shades and attic insulation to bring heating and cooling loads down.”

In a presentation to Cornwall city council, the group estimated the work would cost about $2.4 million and would offer an 80% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is another step towards getting one of our climate action goals done,” said Cornwall’s environmental services division manager Stephen Romano. “We’re taking the work seriously and want to move forward with it.”

The students worked closely with Jesse Good, the chair of Cornwall’s Environment and Climate Change Committee and an alumnus of the program.

“I wanted to work with these students because I know that they’re capable of developing some really creative outside-the-box solutions, which are grounded and also real-world,” said Goode.

Echo Xie found the real-world collaboration was a valuable learning experience.

“We see the challenges our societal partners are facing and we’re trying to use what we learned in the program to help them solve a problem. That’s one of the reasons I really enjoyed this project.”