Innovator journeys: Green Heat
Video / July 12, 2025
Transcript
The Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces is researching “green heat” - a high-efficiency, low-emissions heating that doesn’t require a major retrofit to a building and could save millions of dollars.
We were looking for something that is innovative, but we didn’t have what we were shopping for.
We do a major upgrade to the building, which is extremely costly, or you find a way to get that heat energy and do it without emitting a lot of greenhouse gases. And that's, that's what this test pilot and challenge is all about, to deliver a low carbon energy system.
The Innovation for Defence Excellence and Security program, or IDEaS, is funding a Test Drive that will assess the effectiveness and costs of operating a large scale low-emissions energy generation and storage system for heating an existing building at Canadian Forces Base Kingston.
The solution is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90 per cent without doing invasive works within the building.
L'équipement utilisé est déjà prouvé. Donc, ça minimise les risques, mais c'est la manière que notre partenaire de conception, FVB, a vraiment vu avec le concept, est de mettre tous les différents équipements ensemble pour faire un système qui est innovateur.
(The equipment used is already tested. So, it minimizes the risk, but that's the way our design partner, FVB, really approached the concept, is to put all the different equipment together and make a system that's innovative.)
This IDEaS Test Drive acquired an advanced prototype solution so that the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces can assess the readiness of the product in the real world for a military audience.
IDEaS does provide that opportunity to design the low-carbon technology solution, build it and then operate and monitor it for the two-year period so we can tweak it, learn from it, and then be able to apply this to other projects.
This melting is due to heat loss between the heating plant and the main buildin This Test Drive will evaluate the integrated solution of geothermal and heat pump technologies. If successful, this patch of grass will be covered in snow within three seasons, demonstrating that lack of heat loss and increased efficiency associated with the low-emissions energy generation that we’re going for.
The results of this Test Drive will help inform future decisions for the National Defence infrastructure portfolio and support the broader Greening Government Strategy to reach net-zero emissions from the Government of Canada by 2050.