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Community energy planning
takes a holistic look at the way we use energy throughout a city, town or district. It can help reduce a community's overall energy consumption, and so cut emissions of polluting gases, reduce costs associated with both energy purchases and infrastructure investments and make our communities livelier, fairer and safer places to be.
Municipal planning and engineering, at its most trivial, is about keeping a municipality ticking over. At its most exciting, it's about actively leading a city or district to a better place - a place that you have had a hand in visioning and creating.
What makes a place a better place to live? Can you put your finger on what is that makes a city feel livelier, friendlier and better run?
Well-managed municipalities tend to have many features in common. There's a clear direction about where they're going. Staff spend less time firefighting, and more time thinking and planning interesting things. There's less duplication of effort, and greater understanding of what colleagues are up to. The better organized things are, for any given level of resources, the more rewarding work can be.
As unlikely as this may sound, community energy planning can be a great way, not just of helping your municipality become a better place to live, but also helping it become a better place to work.
By helping to systematically take control of energy use, you'll find yourself doing a number of things that soon make your life easier and more worthwhile. For example, you'll most likely:
Community energy planning is the holistic consideration of energy supply and demand in the design and development of regional districts, municipalities and neighbourhoods. Although easiest when designing communities, areas or developments from scratch, community energy planning is effective when used to help well-established urban centres take charge of their medium and long term future energy use.
The Community Energy Association, a collection of public and private agencies and companies dedicated to promoting community energy planning, has prepared an online resource to help BC's communities reap its rewards.
We've assembled a Toolkit to help you get started. See for yourself:
Fed up with spending hours searching through poor-quality websites? See some of the best links for community energy planning in British Columbia through our dynamically updated, librarian-filtered library of online resources.
Don't like reading on-line? Prefer a paper copy? Download the whole Toolkit as a series of Acrobat PDF files - either page by page or all together in one ZIP file - and print them out (on recycled paper please!)
Community Energy Planning offers a systematic and straightforward way of making a real difference to a community's well-being, and enrich your professional development at the same time.
For your community and yourself, make a difference!
Community Energy Association