Grant: College and Community Innovation Program

By 2015, 80 percent of the cleantech technologies used in Ontario are to be created in Ontario, for the benefit of our local/regional innovation-driven jobs, skills development and prosperity, and our environment. Most of this business-and-technology development is taking place within relatively new companies with 40 percent of that in the GTA, where Centennial College is located. Given the province's status as the largest (with Alberta) emitter of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the country, Ontario's most aggressive green-policy plans to reduce GHGs focus on renewable energy: solar and wind; biofuels; and hydrogen fuel cells; among other emerging energy areas. Major programs under Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC) are also boosting the cleantech economy countrywide. Under the NSERC-IE-funded program over five years, Centennial's proposed program, Building Regional R&D Capacity in Emerging Technologies for a Carbon-Constrained Economy, will focus strategically on renewable energy and partner Centennial College's Energy Institute (CEI) and the college's business and marketing divisions with local SMEs and corporations to accelerate our industry partners' innovations to market. CEI faculty members, with students in engineering systems, ICT and the environmental sciences, will work with regional, committed small -and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Projects range from demonstration, testing and analyses of hybrid-powered (wind and solar) grid-tied (and off-grid) municipal streetlighting; to testing/validating two methods for producing electricity from bio-hydrogen; to maximizing energy output, minimizing cost of solar thermal technologies to heat water and to heat & cool spaces. The CEI will support development of a major corporation's photovoltaics (PVs) business, through advancing effective automation processes for PV manufacturing, and reliability testing on the PV modules. Other projects include testing and demonstration for electric-vehicle charging stations, and development of bioenergy systems. The NSERC project series will also, therefore, train highly qualified personnel (HQP), the students at Centennial; and greatly increase the college's applied-research capacity in