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Weekly Updates"If people really want to go green, they need products that make financial sense and help the environment," says Bill Elliott, owner and president of WSE Technologies based in Saskatoon. "The payback has to be there."
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Helping his customers decide what makes sense and what doesn't is what Elliott's company is all about. WSE develops and sells solar water heating products, LED and solar lighting, wind turbines and commercial heating.
Bill Elliott has been involved in the world of solar energy for almost three decades. "I'd be retired if I wasn't having this much fun," he says. An engineer by trade, Elliott visited northern China while working with another company back in 1988 and saw solar water heating systems operating at -20 C. "What impressed me was the simplicity of the concept and the fact that they'd already been working for nearly 30 years with virtually no maintenance," he remembers. "After that, I started using them to heat hot water at my cabin in northern Saskatchewan."
Elliott saw the need for solar products and information better suited to our northern climate. "I could see what was going on out there and a lot of it just didn't make sense," he recalls. "Many of these products are made in the States, where the climate is more consistent year-round. The temperature extremes we see here mean that energy storage is a much bigger concern for us."
WSE Technologies (the initials stand for "wind," "sun" and "energy") was established in 2007. The Saskatoon office employs eight staff, along with three contract engineers who consult with the company on specific research projects.
In less than two years, WSE has built a network of 40 dealers across Canada, and they have a waiting list of 200 more who want to join the dealer network. "We've grown by about 300 per cent over the last year," Elliott says. He's planning to expand into the U.S. in 2010.
PRODUCTS
Elliott is passionate about the efficiencies of solar water heating, the main product line for his company. Solar evacuated tubes have a vacuum-insulated inner core that retains solar heat collected through a specially coated outer cylinder. "Because the tubes are insulated, the wind and cold Canadian temperatures have minimal effect on the efficiency," Elliott says. "They're great on those minus-60-degree days. Also, because of the cylindrical shape, the sun is perpendicular to the surface of the glass all day. This means that solar water heaters give you maximum output all day long."
Last year, WSE worked with a client to install seven evacuated solar heating panels on a machine shed in a rural area without access to natural gas. Elliott contends that this project was a significant contribution to environmental health, generating 50 million BTU per year, which works out to 7,000 pounds of carbon dioxide each year. "This is equivalent to recycling about 2,200 pounds of waste instead of sending it to a landfill, or removing the emissions of two automobiles on the roads each year," he says.
LED lighting is another green product Elliott is enthusiastic about. "A LED light bulb can last up to 100,000 hours compared to 8,000 hours for compact fluorescent or 1,000 hours for an incandescent," he says. "LED light bulbs also consume less energy, are safer because they run cool and LEDs do not use mercury, which is a concern in our landfills."
"A big part of our business is education," Elliott says. He runs monthly webinars for people interested in how they can use solar energy and what the true costs are. "We had to have some way to answer all the questions that were coming up," he says. "When we started, 15 people joined in; now, we can have up to 300 participate in our webinars."
Being a 'green' company in Saskatchewan makes complete sense to Bill Elliott. "We've got the wind, we've got the sun, and we've got resourceful people," he says. "I just love this stuff."
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