Short of time? Take a look at out priority reading list for municipal planners and engineers!

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 Planners and Engineers

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:

• talk more to more people about what's going on in your municipality;
• start seeing systemic energy 'connections' between activities in different parts of town;
• become more involved in improving your own environment, and making various parts of the municipality more livable for people;
• break out of a rut of doing everyday things;
• take on more interesting professional challenges (if you were to re-design engineering standards or community development guidelines starting from a blank piece of paper, what would they look like?)
• solve more interesting problems in partnership with developers (how would you fancy tackling a geothermal heat pump?)
• learn more about the way energy, environmental and social systems interplay in your municipality.

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:

• An introduction to CEP - descriptions of what's involved, how to go about it, and how to overcome the barriers you might run into;
• A series of energy ideas and suggestions on specific things you can do to improve your community's energy planning;
• A collection of detailed case studies that examine a broad range of actual initiatives are ongoing in communities throughout BC.

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

Priority reading list for municipal planners and engineers

• Need to find out quickly what community energy planning involves?

• What does a community energy plan look like? Here we list various kinds of community energy plan, and outline a process for creating one.

• Who does what? - roles in the development process.

• Well, it would be nice, if we had the money. Look at some ways of freeing up financial resources.

• It couldn't happen here because... overcome some common barriers to implementing change.

• Looking for a big splash? What about doing something interesting with a neighbourhood or subdivision?

• How about energy efficient infrastructure planning?

• Think renewable energy isn't possible on a municipal scale? See how Lillooet has done it.

• Can't afford or get support for a district heating system? See how the City of North Vancouver is playing a waiting game