I know everybody thinks its ridiculously expensive to even imagine this taking place in Northern Ontario where we have six or seven months of cold weather.
But, when I read this article on sidewalk heating for St. Johns, it got me thinking about how it could be economically implemented in our Northern Ontario communities.
Sudbury is the perfect place for this to be implemented. Our city has both the Reykjavik-, Iceland- and Holland-, Michigan-like resources in its area for us to take advantage of.
Our city has a lot of deep level mining, which currently is literally venting millions of BTUs of heat into the atmosphere to cool their lower levels at a great cost to them. And the deeper they go, the more it costs and the more heat that is vented and wasted. This is one huge source of essentially endless heat that could be taken advantage of with the right investments by at least three of our major Northern communities.
And as far as I know, Sudbury still has a Natural Gas generating station downtown on Elgin Street. I do know that back in the '80s and '90s, a city plan to supply heat to downtown buildings from that plant fell apart and was scrapped.
But this doesn't mean that it couldn't be an identical solution like Holland, Mich., for our city.
We even likely have other resources like garbage at the cities disposal, that could be used much more effectively with a project like this, which the city would reap the benefit from.
I think that if the right people sat down and looked at this seriously with the tremendous pile of data and resources that would be available here in Sudbury, we could implement, at least, both of these concepts quite easily in numerous locations. Yes it would cost the initial investments, but the payoff would be huge.
Sudbury, Timmins and Kirkland Lake are riddled with Drift tunnels that could be used to deliver this heat to the required locations in different manners, as required.
How to implement it, is what we need to think seriously about, because just wasting it as we do now does nothing but add to the costs of living here. And we all pay dearly for that privilege.
I can only imagine how Lively or Copper Cliff would be redeveloped and advertised with the implementation of this in their communities. But I do know, there would be a lot of people shopping there and likely living quite nearby to take advantage of this feature if it was in service for the six or seven winter months every year. Just like what has happened in Holland, Michigan.
Sudbury could become one of the most sought-after locations in the north while saving millions from the road and sidewalk maintenance budgets.
Dennis McLeod
Sudbury