Would you believe a city of solar-powered skyscrapers?

Calgary-based Enmax is proposing a city of solar-powered skyscrapers feeding the grid.
The power company is receiving public money in hopes of eventually increasing the renewable energy used and created in the downtown core. Enmax says its engineers have developed a way to fix a problem faced by many cities and tap into an enormous potential market that could include solar panels topping skyscrapers. Many big cities use specialized secondary networks to supply reliable power to urban communities. Right now, those specialized power grids are locked down to usually only send power one way. Any home or business on that secondary grid that produces its own energy with solar panels or co-generation machines needs special controls to send any excess power back into the grid. Those controls stop their power generators from feeding electricity at any time, a defense that helps the grid stay reliable. But Enmax says the cost of those protections is beyond their scope, so they're rarely used. Instead, that green energy is often wasted.

Renewable energy jobs provide new opportunities for Alberta workers

Enmax wants to make it affordable to install renewable energy generators and feed that power into the grid — while giving customers credit on their power bills, which is being done already on more generalized residential grids. The company plans to test the new tech over the coming four years, with the help of $1.4 million from the federal government's green infrastructure program for the project.
"What this is going to allow customers to do is to be able to generate electricity on their buildings in a downtown core, use what they need but if they have excess, then they can put it back onto the grid," Enmax president and CEO Gianna Manes said Tuesday.
"We can't do that with our technology today."
The corporation will seek a customer in Calgary's downtown area to test out its technology for a pilot project that's expected to wrap up in 2022. The goal after that will be to introduce it commercially, the company said.
At a press conference held in Calgary on Tuesday, Canada's Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Amarjeet Sohi hailed the proposal as ecologically sound and "the next generation" of electricity production.
"This problem isn't limited to Calgary. Most North American cities are experiencing the same issue, which is why we believe Enmax's approach is the future of electricity in Canada," Sohi told reporters.
"Next generation technology that can safely unlock the potential for clean, local electricity sources, taking us one step closer to [the] low-carbon economy that Canadians told us they want."

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