There was an article featured by the Green Team – Matthew Van Dongen and Tiffany Mayer in the St Catharines Standard today about RETScreen International. You can email them at: standard@stcatharinesstandard.ca Subject: Green Team
RETScreen International is Renewable Energy and Energy Efficient Technologies. This software program has been used for local water power generators and biomass plants. RETScreen is a federal government software program that evaluates potential renewable energy projects. For sustainable energy worldwide and has over 200,000 users. Greg Leng is the Director of the Natural Resources Canada Program. The software program was created by Greg Leng at the University of Massachusett’s Master’s Thesis and it’s aimed at professional engineers, planners and architects. But it can be used to estimate energy production, building costs and green house --gas savings for projects of any size.
Non- technical homeowners make use of the program too. RETScreen will tell you if you have enough solar energy in your area to justify installing a solar water heater. It will determine how much energy, and money you’ll save and provide a list of product supplies. Larger Product Developers will use the program to cut costs on preliminary research and “screens out the bad projects” quickly.
It was used to determine whether to build a wind farm in Niagara. The question was; Is it worthwhile pursuing this project? In past it might have cost you $50,000 to $100,000 to answer that question. Expert Program will do it for $500 or $1,000. The Program can save millions of dollars for fledgling green energy development projects. Greg Leng said the program has saved about $4 billion over the last decade.
They say that, “Projects associated with RETScreen will keep the equivalent of 20 million tones of carbon dioxide annually out of the environment by 2012.”
It’s a proven money saver – the Federal Government gives out the software for free. “The goal of the program has always been to remove barriers to a much broader implementation of clean energy, not to store them up,” Leng said.
The United Nations, The World Bank and even NASA have all invested in RETScreen over the last decade. The program is available in 35 languages. In St Catharines, Rankin Construction used the program for a “ball park” potential of its proposed hydro power project on the Welland Canal by Engineer Jordan Beckhuis. The company is now finishing the last of the three two-megawatt turbines using canal water to pump out electricity.
This software program is being used in over 170 Universities and Colleges. If you want to check out the program for yourself visit: http://www.retscreen.net/ang/home.php
You can also watch a 2 minute video at: http://www.retscreen.net/ang/video.php
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