Vancouver's Leader in Transition toward Strong, Resilient, Complete Communities

Ideas for Energy Network Projects

Idea	Description	Project type/product	Interested parties
Investor group - alternative energy	Group focused on investing opportunities in alternative energy companies, with emphasis on local start-ups	Meetings
Alt energy supplier guide	Build guide for locally sourced alternative/green energy products and services	Yellow page
Reskilling energy tech	Courses to teach energy savings and generating skills	Courses
Lobbying smart grid	Government outreach program to increase opportunities for distributed energy generation	Govt activism
Awareness raising energy resillience	Films, talks, workshops, - prepare and distribute materials	Presentations
Library books films	Resource library	Physical collection
Speaker bureau	See above – maybe getting some high profile speakers to come in (i.e., Richard Heinberg)	Resource, funding, event organization
Outreach other groups - VPO, bullfrog	Networking with other organizations for outreach, funding, members	Networking
Solar, econol, tidal energy, club	Research group to provide input on state of art technology to Energy Group network	Meetings, reports, pilot 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?

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