A provincial panellist and St. Albert resident wants you to tell her this evening how the province should spend some $645 million in energy efficiency cash.
St. Albert’s Tanya Doran will be one of the seven members of the province’s Energy Efficiency Advisory Panel hosting an open house at MacEwan University today (July 20). The event is meant to give residents a chance to tell the province how they want the new Energy Efficiency Alberta agency to operate.
The agency is set to spend $645 million in the next five years to promote energy efficiency and community energy systems, said Doran, the senior sustainability lead at Stantec and member of St. Albert’s Environmental Advisory Committee.
“We’re the last (region) in North America without any energy efficiency programs,” she said, and there are a lot of quick wins to be made here in energy efficiency.
About 190 enthusiastic people came out to the first open house Monday in Calgary, which Doran described as a “soul-filling” experience.
“It tells me we have some pent-up capacity to move on this.”
She encouraged residents to come out to Wednesday’s open house with their ideas or to send them to the group through email.
“I want to hear about their vision. I want to hear about how they want to make their homes energy efficient, their businesses energy efficient. I want to hear what kind of programs they think they need,” she said.
“Bring your questions, bring your solutions.”
Godo Stoyke of Edmonton’s Carbon Busters said he hoped the panel would recommend either rebates or interest-free loans to help people do energy-efficient retrofits of their homes.
Rebates are popular, but they don’t work if you don’t already have a lot of cash on hand, Stoyke said. Interest-free loans, which are popular in the U.S., would let residents get cash to install, say, solar panels on their roofs and then pay the loans back with their energy savings.
The open house runs from 5:30 to 8:30 p.m. today (July 20) at MacEwan University’s Robbins Health Learning Centre. More open houses are planned for this fall. Residents can also email suggestions to the panel at [email protected].
The panel’s recommendations are due this November, Doran said.
Getting soaked by your lawn? A group of NAIT students is coming to town to give a free talk on a possible solution: xeriscaping.
The team from the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology will speak at the St. Albert Botanic Park.
The talk is the capstone project for their degree, said team spokesperson Dermaine Whittaker. The goal was to figure out how to help St. Albert meet its water conservation goals.
St. Albert has committed to reducing its water use to 200 L per person per day by 2020 under the city’s environmental master plan. The city currently uses 252 L/person/day.
“The current landscape is mostly turf grass,” Whittaker said, which uses a lot of water. His team’s research suggests that xeriscaping could reduce the amount of water St. Albert uses on its lawns by up to 75 per cent.
Botanic park volunteer co-ordinator and xeriscape plot manager Lyn Reynolds will give next week’s free talk.
Xeriscaping is a type of landscaping that uses plant choice, mulch, and landscaping to use as little water as possible, Reynolds said.
“You can have a beautiful landscape without the lawn,” she said, and it will need considerably less fertilizer, pesticides, weeding, and watering – she almost never has to water the xeriscape plot in the botanic park, but has to water everything else several times a week.
“Environment Canada has predicted that the next decade is going to be even drier than the last,” she continued, and St. Albert’s population is growing. That makes controlling our water use essential.
Xeriscaping isn’t a simple matter of removing sod and throwing down plants, Reynolds said. Gardeners have to consider topography, plant choice and other factors, all of which she will address in her talk.
The talk runs from 7 to 9 p.m. at the botanic park at 265 Sturgeon Road. There are about 50 spots available. Search for Cultivating Xeriscaped Yards at eventbrite.com for tickets.
