Canadians burn a lot of fuel to keep our buildings warm in winter. WISE researcher Pooneh Maghoul believes a key way to cut heating bills and reduce our carbon emissions lies beneath our feet.

The geotechnical engineer set out to better understand the heating, cooling, freezing and thawing that occurs in the soil surrounding building foundations. These are processes that depend not only on air temperature and heat loss from the building but also on the level of moisture in the soil.

Maghoul…

WISE researcher Jeff Gostick can envision a day when clean, efficient fuel cells replace today’s internal combustion engines. These eco-friendly energy generators run on hydrogen and air. Best of all, they produce no greenhouse gases — only water.

Fuel cells are ideal for consumer vehicle applications, due to their long range and quick refueling times, but lack of a hydrogen refueling infrastructure has delayed their deployment in favor of battery powered vehicles.  This has not been a…

The more carbon dioxide (CO₂) we pump into the atmosphere, the hotter the planet will get. That’s why researchers around the world are looking for ways to transform those emissions into useful resources. One promising approach is to convert them into methane fuel, using a hydrogenation process called the Sabatier reaction.

In theory, it’s simple: just add hydrogen gas to CO₂ in the presence of a catalyst. However, there are technical challenges. Because the process generates a lot of heat,…

More than half of Canada’s 280 remote communities are cut off from centralized electricity grids, relying instead on high-polluting diesel generators. But as the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions grows, more and more of these isolated communities are searching for greener microgrid options that add renewable energy to the mix.

Waterloo engineering professors Kankar Bhattacharya and Claudio Cañizares are helping guide that search. Along with PhD student Bharatkumar Solanki, the WISE…

Each year, a noxious haze blankets much of Indonesia. It’s the result of burning peatlands — the boggy land that covers more than ten per cent of the country. Farmers here have traditionally used slash-and-burn techniques to prepare land for planting, but the level of burning has increased dramatically as large areas are converted to industrial-scale palm oil plantations.

WISE researchers hate to see a valuable resource go up in smoke. So they’ve proposed a better idea: gasification.…

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is an important tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired generating stations. CO₂-scrubbing systems, for example, use solvents to pull carbon dioxide from the flue gas before it’s released into the atmosphere.  

However, because it takes energy to regenerate the solvents used in the process, capturing carbon this way either reduces the power plant’s generating capacity or its efficiency, or both.

That’s why WISE faculty members Ali Elkamel,…

Energy-generating highways are far from science fiction. Waterloo’s Centre for Pavement and Transportation Technology (CPATT) and other groups have already developed prototypes of modular road panels that can produce electricity thanks to embedded solar cells.

But can panels made of sensitive photovoltaic material and tempered glass withstand the impact of 18-wheelers or Toronto’s rush hour traffic?

To find out, WISE researchers Susan Tighe and Andrew Northmore conducted a finite element…

The theory behind time-of-use electricity pricing is simple. Charge more for electricity when demand is highest, and consumers will either reduce the amount they use or shift their consumption to a lower-cost time of day. However, quantifying that impact isn’t so simple.

Yes, you can compare electricity consumption before and after time-of-use pricing is introduced. However, weather changes from year to year, affecting how much people use fans, air conditioners, furnaces and space heaters.…

Power-to-gas systems may offer the energy storage solution the green energy sector has been searching for, allowing grid managers to match supply and demand. The process uses surplus electricity produced by wind and solar power to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

That hydrogen then can be injected into existing natural gas distribution lines — providing customers with cleaner, hydrogen-enriched natural gas — or converted back to electricity when the grid needs it hours, weeks or months.…