Ideas for Energy Network Projects

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Permalink Reply by Randy Chatterjee on June 3, 2010 at 9:30am

One concept that I have had for several years is to create neighbourhood energy profiles as a means of recognizing how much total energy per person each neighbourhood in Vancouver uses, and how much carbon is produced. Credits might also apply for growing food, composting locally, maintaining permeable ground-cover, and other carbon-positive and ecologically-sensitive activities. This would be both a competitive and learning-oriented endeavour, much like Bike-to-Work-Week's individual and team challenges.

Such an effort would require governmental and Crown corporation support, and may well fail due to false concerns over data privacy even if all we seek are gross aggregations. However, as VV grows to nearly 350 people in all neighbourhoods of Vancouver and surrounding towns, we could conduct such a statistically-significant survey in-house.

This would be a way to create our own "PowerSmart-plus" program, incenting and learning about ways to reduce energy usage. Maybe we could help each other through organized VV-EcoEnergy teams. I'll bet we could get a grant for that! (Such an idea at the neighbourhood level was raised at our last meeting.)

Exactly on point with this idea and now published is BC's Community Energy and Emissions Inventory, compiled for each larger municipality in BC. Vancouver's is linked below. It shows such things as each Vancouver residential dwelling uses 7573 kWhs of electricity per year or almost 21 kWhs per day! (It would take over 50 solar panels per house at an initial cost of $100,000 to produce this much power.) Similarly, gas usage per dwelling (normalized since not every home is heated with gas) adds another 12,187 kWhs per year, and also 2.2 tons of CO2e (CO2 equivalent) per dwelling.

Can we not show that we VVers can do better, lead by example, and jumpstart our Energy Descent at the grass-roots level?

Attachments:

• CEEI_2007_vancouver_city.pdf, 121 KB