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Weekly UpdatesMayor Vic Fedeli cringes when someone chastises the City of North Bay for not showing vigorous support to an Earth Day lights-out campaign.
He views those measures as largely "symbolic" that only mask other municipalities' shortcomings for not doing something practical to save energy and reduce their global footprint.
"Those (events) are motherhood issues to get the communities that aren't doing anything off the hook."
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The northeastern Ontario city has taken on the challenge, to be as energy efficient as possible, with real gusto.
With new provincial green legislation coming up, urging municipalities to find ways to save energy, the city decided to get ahead of the law.
After reviewing their entire operations, city officials drafted and Energy and Environmental Action Plan, released last winter. It's a blueprint of initiatives and projects that are both quick-fix and more advanced technologies that will be rolled over in the years to come.
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It's meant having total employee buy-in starting with their 15-member 'green team' made of the city's rank and file of chief mechanics, equipment managers, along with top bureaucrats.
The plan calls for five per cent reductions in electrical consumption and fuel use over the next five years, with a three per cent natural gas reduction used to heat three dozen administration buildings, arenas, garages and swimming pools.
"It's a work in progress," said Fedeli. Environmentally, it's the right thing to do, but the also loves the savings.
They started with the simple things.
Light bulbs in municipal buildings are being changed to CFB (compact florescent bulb), saving about a million kilowatt hours of power annually, or roughly $100,000 a year.
Drawing down power at a local arena compressor when the ice pad is not in use, helped save $2,000 a month.
All the city's 46 traffic signals have been converted to LED (light-emitting diode) technology, which cut electricity usage by 80 per cent and saves $50,000 a year.
The 5,500 street lamps are being fitted with new 20-year life induction bulbs to reduce power consumption by 1.2-million kilowatt hours annually. Power to light them is being purchased at off-peak prices which ranges between $50,000 to $70,000 in savings.
Last summer, the city's most visible green project was a solar array hoisted to the roof at city hall. All the power generated from the 9.9 kilowatt system is sold back to the province. The $120,000 investment stands to make the city $5,000 in revenue annually.
At the city's landfill site, a methane gas collection system was installed two years ago. Though the city flares off the captured gas, eventually the plan is to spend more than $5 million on generating equipment and power line ungrades to make power for the provincial grid.
Through a carbon credit trading system set up the Canadian Federation of Municipalities, the city is eligible to make $300,000 a year just for flaring off the gas. If the city and North Bay Hydro receive provincial approval to start selling power in 2009, they could gross $700,000 more in revenue.
With 45,000 tons of garbage arriving annually at the landfill, there's enough methane to fire up a 1.0 to 1.6 megawatt generator, or enough to power between 160 and 250 homes.
"Those are big deals for a community our size," said Fedeli.
Before they dive into experimenting with bio-fuels for city vehicles or fleet upgrades, the city is training employees to change their driving habits. Performance computers installed on transit buses measures fuel-efficiency, frequency of stops, and automatic shut-downs are built-in to stop unnecessary idling.
"This is one place where corporate culture has a big impact," said Peter Bullock, the city's Environmental Service Manager.
Down the road, more capital-intensive projects are in the offing, like electrical and HVAC retrofits at specific buildings, making changes in transit fuel, and installation of solar walls and geothermal technologies.
Bullock said it can be a tough sell to convince municipalities to invest big dollars up-front in energy-efficient technologies that can take years to pay for itself.
"Renewable energy is a hedging strategy with high up-front capital costs, but once it's installed the energy is technically free."
Luckily his job is made easier by having such a green-minded city council and a local distribution company--North Bay Hydro--that goes "above and beyond" in helping to find efficiencies and point out government incentives.
"For a community our size, there's no questions we're at the absolute top end of efficiency," said Fedeli.
North Bay Hydro COO Todd Wilcox agreed.
Wilcox, a former Ontario Hydro, Toronto Hydro and independent conservation consultant toured 150 Ontario municipalities last fall and said North Bay is "second to none in its approach, commitment and results.
"They've (North Bay) driven that process, they're getting significant results and are showing that it can be done."
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Wilcox, who sits on the city's green team, runs a successful community energy outreach program that, so far, has saved it's 25,000 customers about $1.4 million this past year, or about $60 per ratepayer.
The program includes energy audit walk-throughs of 150 businesses, including 22 large companies, that have completed energy retrofits that run the range from new lighting, to recycling of old refrigerators, to more expensive HVAC upgrades.
Wilcox acknowledges smaller local distribution companies can achieve greater results in conservation programs than the big hydro operators.
"It's difficult to get high level participation by customers in the programs, but at the City of North Bay, with the participants rates we have, other utilities can only dream of those penetration rates."
By IAN ROSS
Northern Ontario Business
www.northbayhydro.on.ca
www.city.north-bay.on.ca
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