What is a Community Energy Plan?
Changes and advancements in energy efficiency and energy production will significantly lessen costs to a municipality and lower environmental impacts locally and beyond. This economically and environmentally responsible forward-thinking is a major driving force for HRM in pursuing the voluntary development of a Community Energy Plan.
 A Community Energy Plan (CEP) is the result of a process whose goal is to create the way forward to a more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable community with a fundamental focus on energy. Energy use, supply and demand are all affected by community design and development, and ultimately the actions of citizens, businesses, institutions and the municipality itself. This includes efficiency in land use, transportation, site planning, building design, retrofits, infrastructure design and maintenance and operations, and development of renewable energy sources.
 CEPs have been developed for many municipalities across Canada, including Yellowknife, Bowen Island, Whistler, and Quesnel, to name a few. Each CEP has common threads, but since every municipality is unique in certain regards, their CEP strategies and projects contain different elements. It is worth noting that HRM's will be one of the most comprehensive CEP’s developed to date, and it pilots the new national CEP template. However, here are examples of ideas for us to consider :
- Land use: community design that reduces transportation needs, enhances energy efficiency and security, renewable opportunities, etc.
- Transportation: enhanced public transportation and links; emission reduction; energy efficiencies; etc.
- Site planning: enhanced active transportation, solar orientation, and other renewable opportunities, etc.
- Building Design, and Retro-fits: maintenance and operations that are more energy efficient, i.e. Leading in Environmental and Engineering Design (LEED), energy saving light bulbs, materials, etc.
- Renewable Energy Sources: i.e. geo-thermal, wind, solar, bio-mass, landfill methane capture, natural gas, etc.
A CEP will:
- Require upfront investment costs by sectors and by government;
- Decrease life-cycle costs, but increase short-term costs;
- Call for changes in personal patterns or habits; and
- Change municipal infrastructure or services over time.
Thus expectations will need to adapt accordingly for transportation, land use, neighbourhood design, parking policy, energy incentives and so forth. |
A Community Energy Plan process involves multiple stages which can generally be grouped into municipal energy auditing, assessment and design, and considers the community and stakeholders’ input in high regard. We must know where and how the energy is being used in HRM, where it comes from, and what we can do to reduce and optimize its use.
The end result of a CEP is essentially a list of actions that the municipality will adopt. Examples of possible actions may be:
- tax-based incentives for industries to optimize their processes from within,
- mandatory new building energy efficient design,
- regulated land use planning to ensure that communities develop in nodes instead of typical urban sprawl, or
- capital projects of alternative energy production.
The CEP in its final version will be a living document which must maintain a continual presence within our community and be allowed to evolve over time.
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