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June 26, 2009
Olympic champ Kreek is Power Smart, pushing biodiesel
Rob Klovance
bchydro.com
How do you fill the void after training three times a day, six days a week, 50 weeks a year en route to a men’s eights rowing gold medal for Canada?
If you’re Adam Kreek, you lend your name, talent and energy to as many green and ethical organizations as you can, including Team Power Smart. You embark on a sideline as a public speaker because the nerves, the adrenaline, reminds you of the race day rush. You move with your wife from a float home to the world’s greenest development.
And, oh yeah... you build a reactor that turns waste vegetable oil into biodiesel, and start planning to build a much bigger one in a project with a Vancouver Island First Nation.
Kreek just hates the fact that the waste oil on Vancouver Island is currently being shipped off the island.
“[Biodiesel] is relatively significant,” says Kreek. “It’s not enough to replace all diesel, that’s for sure. But right now it’s a standard type of commodity and it’s used right now for anything from cattle feed to making makeup.
“What we want to do is to try to close that loop of transportation…We want to take all the waste oil on Vancouver Island, process it on Vancouver Island and use it on Vancouver Island.”
So, while the younger teammates on Kreek’s gold medal winning team keep training with a single goal in mind – “They know the exact time and date of the Olympic final in 2012 in London,” he says – Kreek has left the sport, at least for now, to take on new challenges.
And this time around, he’s doing it with a partner who shares his view of the world and his passion for sustainability. Wife Rebecca Sterritt has a Masters in climate change education from Stanford University and, for the past two years, has worked with the BC Climate Action Secretariat.
After living in a float home at Victoria’s Fisherman’s Wharf in which the home's measly 30 amps of current meant you couldn’t operate a toaster and a hair dryer at the same time without blowing a fuse, the natural upgrade was Dockside Green.
The mixed-use development has been rated as the world’s greenest, thanks to everything from biomass heat generation to the recycling of waste water and a pool of shared electric and Smart cars.
“We bought into this development, again putting our money where our mouth is, living what we believe is ethically appropriate for an urban-living Canadian,” he says. “It shows what you can do when you use your brain, when you decide to think big picture, long term and not be scared to try something new.”
A wake-up call in Northern Alberta
Helping Kreek out on his path to a sustainable life and a career in energy technologies was a post high school stint working on an oil rig in Alberta. It was there that he discovered, up close and personal, just how much work goes into extracting oil.
Toss in the growing concern over “peak oil”, and he was sold on a career in geotechnical engineering with an energy focus.
“There is a finite amount of oil, a finite amount of carbon-based fuels to fuel our energy demands, so we’re going to have to find something else,” he said. “On top of that, with global warming and all the problems that come with carbon-based fuels, it’s really important for us to find new alternatives that can produce the energy and the lifestyle we think is necessary for comfort and sustainability of our species, without shooting ourselves, and our planet in the foot.”
So what’s the best choice for powering our cars? Biodiesel? Electric? Hydrogen-powered fuel cell?
“Biodiesel is an interim solution that will be valuable in the next few decades,” he says. “However we do need to move away from a carbon-based economy and find new, innovative ways to generate our power. Electric cars are great, as long as the electricity we use is responsibly produced.”
And that’s where we’re lucky in B.C., thanks to our wealth of clean, renewable hydroelectricity. It gives us more options, but only if we understand that conserving electricity is a necessity to maintaining our position.
“As soon as I heard about Team Power Smart, I wanted to be a member,” said Kreek. “It’s something I believe in. Being a responsible citizen can take on so many different levels and I think that being careful about how we live, and not living beyond our means, is a very important lesson we can all take with us.”
There are other lessons that a man of 28 with a gold medal pedigree picks up along the way. After his rowing eights team fell short of gold at the 2004 Olympic Games, he said he’d never row again competitively. Four years later in Bejing, there he was, rowing to gold.
“I’m no longer one to say I’m done no matter what,” he says, not entirely ruling out 2012 in London. “I’d like to stay on and do some coaching or maybe another Olympic cycle, but I feel there’s so much to see and do in life that I’m eager for a new challenge.”
Rob Klovance is managing editor of bchydro.com.
Source: BC Hydro
