The Green Energy Challenge

Every winter semester, we take part in Electri’s Green Energy Challenge, a competition intended to provide students with real life design experience and foster awareness of sustainable design and NECA/CECA in the community. We work with a building in the community to create a building energy retrofit proposal. The proposal includes a lighting retrofit and solar PV system, as well as other retrofits tailored to the building’s needs

  • The 2019 team in Las Vegas
  • Working with Armour Heights children
  • Touring Solar Panels on McCaul St. on U of T campus

Students can learn a lot about sustainable design, building science, project management, solar PV system design, and more. We pride ourselves on having opportunities for everyone, and no prior knowledge or specific program is necessary to join the GEC. All students who join the team will get design experience, not just the executive team. There are also many leadership opportunities for students, as team leads or on the executive team. If we do well in the competition, we also travel to the NECA conference to present our proposal. In 2019, our team traveled to Las Vegas, where we took second place!

If this excites you, get in touch! See our Calendar for important dates, or send us an email at ceca.uoft@gmail.com!

Student Passport Initiative

Another competition run by Electri, the Student Passport project awards $20,000 to the winning team to implement an energy-related design proposal in an international city. The students work to design the project through the fall and submit the proposal in November. We won in 2017, and in January 2019 we finished installing 10 off-grid solar street lights in Xalostoc, Mexico City, Mexico.

  • the railway through the community
  • The Xalostoc community
  • An installed street light

The team for the student passport project is smaller than the GEC, usually only about 7 students. As such, the opportunity to join is usually first extended to the previous year’s team leads, then to the rest of the members.

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Our Events

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GEC Workshops

During the fall semester, we held a series of technical workshops; building energy performance, solar, lighting, project management, where each workshop relates to a subteam in the Green Energy Challenge competition. The workshop are made up of hands-on activities, interactive games, or site visits, student new to the competition can gain more insights to the subteams and find which one fits their interest.

We welcome students from all disciplines to join our workshops for a chance to learn about the sustainable building design process.

  • Solar workshop
  • Project management workshop
  • Lighting workshop

Sustainable Building Design Case Competition

Every year our CECA team host a sustainable building design case competition. Student teams are given the challenge to create a short proposal and present to a panel of judges on the topic of reducing energy usage for a facility in our community. The client facility we choose are community service facilities in the GTA and had worked with in past year’s Electri’s Green Energy Challenge.The panel of judges are industry professionals and professors from the faculty. They give participants constructive feedback on their retrofits and details on the implementation process of those retrofits.

  • 2020 Case Competition
    participants and judges
  • Student team’s presentation

Student teams in previous years had presented innovative retrofits, including a estimated budgeting and implementing plan for the facility, as well as creative ideas on spreading awareness of energy efficient buildings.

Check our calendar for event dates or join our newsletter to receive updates to CECA events!