82 | Business World Magazine |
December 2013
Partnered with this long-term development
is a self-sustainability initiative that focuses on
retrofitting existing buildings with environ-
mentally sound technology, whether in the
form of LED lights or solar heating. Duncan
is quick to point out that they’re not merely
changing the light bulbs, though. Rather, the
more than 280 buildings that are owned by the
HRM are individually audited as to what ret-
rofits would best suit the particular building.
Once the retrofit has taken place, the build-
ing’s energy savings are then monitored, pro-
viding a clear, calculable, cost-benefit analysis.
This bipartite system – municipal growth
matched equally with environmental sustain-
ability – is an indication of the kind of pro-
gressive thinking that characterizes Haligo-
nian development. For example, the Alderney
5 GeoThermal vault is, according to Duncan,
the first large-scale application of geothermal
seasonal cold-energy storage that doesn’t use
a heat pump or refrigeration cycle anywhere
in the world. Funded by a joint initiative be-
tween the HRM, provincial government, and
federal government’s Technology Early Action
Measures (TEAM) program, the geothermal
vault harvests cold energy from seawater dur-
ing the winter months. The seawater is then
chilled in an underground rock mass, and the
stored thermal energy later used (in warmer
