There’s more talk than action in city’s plan to be greener

The city government is millions of dollars behind in its plan to save money by using less energy in its own buildings and is set to punt real work on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions past 2020.

Mayor Jim Watson drew attention to this corner of the budget when he gave his speech on the city’s 2018 spending plans last week. Harsher weather — hotter summers, wetter and messier winters — was a recurring theme, along with how the city’s adapting and doing its part to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

He made the energy-efficiency part sound pretty dull: “Under the umbrella of our Energy Evolution leadership, the city’s Building Engineering and Energy Management team has introduced over 120 energy reduction initiatives since its inception,” he said. “In 2018, the BEEM group will receive $1 million towards new projects.”

So the city has an energyefficiency squad and it’s getting a million bucks for LED light bulbs or whatever. Sounds fine.

Unless you know that it was supposed to get $2 million. The city has an energy-efficiency plan that city council approved unanimously in April 2014 and has underfunded every single year since.

In all, we’re supposed to have spent $8 million on low-energy lights, efficient ventilation and upgraded insulation by the end of 2018, but we’ll actually have spent $4 million.

Conserving energy is famously the easiest way to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. You pay a little more for LED light bulbs, they use much less power and last much longer than incandescents, and you come out ahead in all ways. Put in a motion detector that turns the lights off when nobody’s there and you’ll do even better.

The plan city council approved calculated it would take fiveand-a-half years before the conservation moves would pay themselves off. After that, the savings on energy bills are cash in the bank, or money that could be spent on other greenification efforts.

As it happens, on Tuesday, separate from the city budget, council’s environment and climate change committee is taking up that Energy Evolution plan, which goes way beyond conservation. It’s supposed to slash all net greenhouse-gas emissions in Ottawa 80 per cent from 2012 levels by 2050. It’ll mean switching to much cleaner forms of transportation, dramatically reducing energy use in our homes and businesses, and switching away from fossil-fuel heating wherever

The number’s the same but the money’s not being used the way it’s supposed to be.

we can. We’ll start, er, in a bit. The 2018 city budget includes just $500,000 for this “Energy Evolution,” all of it for grants to community organizations to do greenish things. A previous $300,000 for the grant program helped pay for things like a showcase for electric vehicles, sessions for Ottawa Community Housing tenants to hear about conservation, and mobile offices for the Bayview innovation centre (they have solar panels). Anything bigger will take provincial or federal grants, or deals with Hydro Ottawa to pay for, possibly, a microdam at Burritts Rapids and a solar farm at the city landfill on Trail Road.

The 2018 budget also lumps in $500,000 the city’s putting up for the extra cost of buying green vehicles when old cars and trucks in the city fleets need replacing.

Put it all together and it’s $2 million, or the amount we were supposed to be spending just on energy conservation. The number’s the same but the money’s not being used the way it’s supposed to be.

“It’s not ... entirely truthful,” says Robb Barnes, the acting executive director of Ecology Ottawa. He’s glad the city’s doing what it’s doing, but argues it should be doing a lot more than “relabelling” money that belongs in the fleet budget as an environmental move.

Especially since both the provincial and federal governments are itching to spend money on infrastructure and to fight climate change. There’s “a rare alignment of policy outlooks” that might not last more than a few months, depending on how the next provincial election goes, Barnes says. By the time the next city budget comes around, that could be over.

Council is being presented with a long list of things the city can do between now and 2020 that are, above all, cheap. Many of them are processy: developing frameworks, convening stakeholders, undertaking scans, investigating opportunities. Meetings, meetings, meetings.

One example: Shared heating and cooling systems can make multiple buildings more efficient at once. There’s a reason multibuilding campuses like hospitals, colleges and universities and even Parliament use them. There’s a slow-burning plan to do this in downtown Ottawa. Hooking several office towers together means running pipes under city streets and sidewalks, which there’s not really a process for and the city will need one.

So sure, let’s devise a process. But let’s not confuse the bureaucratic preparations for doing a thing with actually doing it. That’ll happen starting in three years, conveniently beyond the city’s budget-planning horizon. dreevely@postmedia.com twitter.com/davidreevely