What the Drake Landing neighbourhood was, and how it ended

A street built around a heat store

Every house in DLSC is a single-detached home with a rear garage. The garage roofs carry 800 solar collectors, and the heat they gather in warm months is pushed into the ground beneath a small park. In winter it comes back out through a shared pipe network and warms each house.

The idea is called seasonal thermal storage. Alberta has plenty of sun in July and a heavy heating bill in January, so the project moved energy across the calendar instead of burning gas to fill the gap. The full sequence is laid out in how it works.

Who conceived and built it

Natural Resources Canada, through its CanmetENERGY research group, conceived the project and led it with industry partners. Sterling Homes built the houses, United Communities developed the land, ATCO Gas ran the utility side and the Town of Okotoks acted as facilitator. Enerworks made the collectors. Roles and funders are listed on the partners page.

Ground was broken in spring 2005 and the Energy Centre and underground store were operating in 2007. Photo records of the build are in the 2005 construction timeline, and early press interest is summarised in this 2005 article on the groundbreaking.

The five parts of the system

• Solar collection on the garage roofs.
• The Energy Centre with its two short-term water tanks.
• The borehole thermal energy storage field, the seasonal store.
• The district heating loop carrying warm water to the houses.
• R-2000 homes with low-temperature air handlers.

What it achieved

The design target was to cover about 90 percent of space heating with solar energy. Monitoring recorded 97 percent by 2012 and 100 percent in the 2015-16 heating season; the numbers behind this are on the performance results page. At the design stage the project also estimated about 5 tonnes less greenhouse gas per home each year than a typical Canadian house, which was put at 6 to 7 tonnes.

The project collected several honours in its first years, listed under awards.

Where it stands today

From around 2020 the system suffered deterioration and maintenance problems. Decommissioning began in 2024 and most homes moved to natural-gas furnaces. The exact end date, current ownership and the future of the borehole field and Energy Centre have not been verified here, so check with the Town of Okotoks or ATCO Gas for current information. This site is an independent archive and explainer, not an operator of the community.

For a look at the early days, the news archive collects articles from 2005 onward, and the photo pages follow construction year by year.

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