Our Innovation team actively tests technology for residential, commercial, and industrial customers. Innovative products that deliver on their potential may eventually be included in our incentive programs.
Our innovation group identifies and tests new products
In the search for products that can help accelerate energy efficiency and electrification in B.C., Tim Mosley's team is open to a wide variety of ideas. He invites Alliance members to share any new products they find promising and intriguing.
"We spend most of our time looking for new technologies or new products or services that we can add to our programs," Mosley told members gathered for April's Alliance breakfast meeting in Surrey. "We're looking for new innovations that do things better, faster, quicker. We look at residential, commercial, and industrial products and services, at things that can help with our energy efficiency or our capacity programs, our solar programs, and electric vehicles as well."
Mosley kicked things off by introducing the innovation group, a team of researchers, testers, and IT specialists. Their work includes meetings with research partners, customers, vendors, and associations, but their focus is testing identified products. The work includes high-level research by our subsidiary Powertech Labs, detailed technical analysis, lab testing, and customer site demonstrations and trials.
Among the products currently being tested are energy management systems that help customers avoid costly service upgrades, solar equipment that combines thermal and photovoltaic technologies for better performance in low-sunlight conditions, and new types of heat pumps. These include two types that don't require full outdoor units: through-the-wall heat pumps, and saddle-mounted heat pumps.
"We spend a lot of time looking at technologies, at new products and services, kind of kicking the tires to see, does it work?," says Mosley. "Does it do what it's supposed to do? Does it perform as the customer, vendor, or installer expects?"
Products that deliver on increased energy efficiencies or provide capacity-related benefits may become candidates for our incentive programs.
Innovation team seeks residential, commercial, and industrial demonstrations
Mosley's team regularly manages residential installations that demonstrate new energy management devices. But they face hurdles in securing commercial and industrial trials, which can be difficult to find despite the BC Hydro funding available for demonstration projects.
Currently the team is seeking sites for rooftop solar installations including new forms of solar and solar photovoltaic thermal (PVT), along with suitable installation sites for passive cooling technologies and rooftop micro wind generation. In the industrial sector, large format, high temperature, thermal storage sites are on their radar for future demonstration projects.
If you're aware of a suitable site, please reach out. Current opportunities include:
- Roof top microwind
- Rooftop vertical solar
- Rooftop solar PVT
- Three-in-one heat pumps for industrial thermal storage
- Passive cooling technologies
- Learning hot water tanks
- Electrostatic air filters
- Ultracapacitors
"If you have any new ideas for innovation, know any innovative vendors, or if you're aware of any customers who've got a problem that they want solving, get in touch with the Alliance and they'll feed it through to us," says Mosley. "Not everything will end up in a physical trial or demonstration, but I'm sure you have ideas we haven't seen before so, we would love to hear about them."
And if you have questions about a new technology, send those along too. There's a chance the innovations team is already researching or testing it.