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Current Affairs | Kids' Page | UHCA Contacts |
| IMAGINE a gigantic
vacuum cleaner, powered by a 747 jet engine. Do you think it would be noisy?
If it was sitting on the grasslands behind the current Physical Plant building, would you be able to hear it from your house? Imagine a gas-fired power plant big enough to heat the main campus -- which the University tells us is as big as downtown, although perhaps not as dense -- plus the Foothills Hospital site. Every six hours, it would emit enough water vapour, CO2, carbon monoxide, and carcinogenic products of incomplete combustion, to fill McMahon Stadium. Do you want to breathe that? Would you want your children and grandchildren to breathe it? In winter, the water vapour plume would
create icy conditions on roads within a 3 km radius. That just about reaches
to 16th Avenue, Highway 1.
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UHCA committee of engineers has reviewed the University of Calgary's options
for a new power plant to heat the West, South and Main Campus, with capacity
to co-generate 50 MW of electricity from the steam heat that would otherwise
be wasted. Their conclusion: good idea, wrong location.
Routing the electricity generated by such a plant to power University buildings would be complicated and expensive. More likely, the U of C would continue to get power from Enmax, but then sell electricity from the co-generation plant back into the electrical grid.
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The University says it is in the very early stages of evaluating different options for what it identifies on the site plans as an "Energy Centre". Take a look at these pictures. This kind of installation, we submit, belongs on industrial land. Or take a look at the University of Ottawa's installation, 50.01% owned by TransAlta Power. TAP is a branch of TransAlta Utilities, the very company that Calgary Health Region chair Jim Dinning, also chairs. What a coincidence! UHCA takes the position that such a facility
would be inappropriate in any residential area, but especially inappropriate
on land designated for "academic" purposes.
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