Energy

Goal: To promote green building practices to increase livability and reduce energy and resource consumption.

Why is this important?

• Energy use has direct implications for climate change and environmental health.
  
• We can significantly reduce the greenhouse gases (GHGs) we emit by selecting the sources of energy we use.
• We can also choose energy sources that have fewer impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem health. For example, heating hot water using solar energy emits far fewer GHGs than heating water with natural gas.

Where are we now?
Dawson Creek is a leader in energy planning. We have done energy planning for our corporate operations, as well as the community as a whole. Our planning has been focused on reducing our energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions in order to lessen our contributions to global warming. We have focused our efforts on the three energy sources that we use the most: electricity, natural gas and gasoline/diesel. Click on the links below to find out more about our initiatives.

Municipal Operations Energy Planning - Our corporate energy planning focuses on how we can reduce emissions from our own municipal operations.

Community Energy Planning – Our community energy planning is a broad look at energy reduction strategies for our entire community.

In both our Municipal Operations and Community Energy Planning, we focus on the following energy sources:

Electricity – Our strategies to reduce our electricity usage include solar photovoltaic, wind and increasing energy efficiency (conservation) and education.

Natural Gas – Our strategies to reduce our natural gas usage include solar hot water, bioenergy and increasing energy efficiency (conservation) and education.

Fuel – Our strategies to reduce our gasoline/diesel use include idle reduction, transportation planning and lifecycle vehicle purchasing.

How are we doing?
The community's sustainability plan will also outline a series of indicators so that progress toward sustainability can be measured over time. It is expected that the indicators will be available by the end of 2008.

What are we doing to improve?
Even though Dawson Creek is a leader in energy planning, we are constantly looking for areas in which we can improve and share our experiences with other communities. Check back under the links above for updates on our new initiatives.