By Justine Kelsie

City recognized for smart energy approach

Mar 15, 2018 | 11:08 AM

The city of Grande Prairie has been picked as one of six communities to help form a “Smart Energy Communities Scorecard”.

Quality Urban Energy Systems of Tomorrow (QUEST) and Pollution Probe, an environmental non-governmental organization, are looking to develop the measuring system and have launched a pilot project.

Mayor Bill Given says the city is in the early stages of creating a community energy strategy.

“As a municipality, we are always working to ensure that we get the best out of projects that we do. That we have an opportunity to learn from them and improve our practices. The intent of this is to ensure that we are becoming more and more efficient and effective both in terms of limiting our environmental impact, but also, ensuring that we are being as financially responsible as possible,” said Given.

He says it is an honour to be recognized for the city’s smart energy approach. Calgary, London, Ontario, Bridgewater, Nova Scotia, as well as Yellowknife and Inuvik, Northwest Territories were also chosen for the pilot.

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“As the community knows, we have a number of projects underway like our off-grid electric bus project and we have also worked to reduce our CO2 emissions in a number of different areas.”

The scorecard initiative will eventually work to establish a standard set of key policy and process indicators, create a method to evaluate how areas of communities are contributing, a scorecard report, and a web-based roadmap of how the six communities can get to becoming a “Smart Energy Community”.

“Communities will be crucial in the transition to a low-carbon economy. The Smart Energy Communities Scorecard initiative will help communities make this transition by providing best practices and examples,” said Richard Carlson, Director of Energy Exchange and Energy Policy at Pollution Probe, in a media release.

According to the two organizations, energy planning, geographic representation, and community size were all taken into consideration when selecting the six places.