Energy Planning and Innovation Mandate
The Energy Planning and Innovation (EPI) group operates within UBC’s Energy and Water Services (EWS). The group’s mandate is to develop long-range energy infrastructure plans and implement energy and water conservation and efficiency measures that reduce UBC’s operating costs, defer costly infrastructure upgrades, reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and lessen UBC’s exposure to fluctuating energy markets.
The long-term value of our energy management efforts can be measured by the reduction of UBC’s energy use intensity, which is the energy consumed per square metre (m2) of building floor space.
Since the start of UBC’s ECOTrek energy and water retrofit program in 2001, 200,000 m2 of energy-intensive laboratories have been built on campus. However, through our energy conservation efforts, energy use intensity actually decreased, as shown in the chart.
UBC has avoided energy costs of over $40 million since 2001. Current and future projects such as the Steam to Hot Water Project, Building Tune-ups, Green Labs and other successful energy conservation and efficiency efforts will continue to drive down UBC’s energy and water costs.
Goals
The EPI group’s goals for the next five years are to:
- Offset 100 per cent of UBC’s new building energy consumption through energy conservation and efficiency measures
- Aggressively pursue UBC’s Climate Action Plan targets of reducing GHG emissions by 33 per cent below 2007 levels by 2015, 67 per cent by 2020, and 100 per cent by 2050
- Reduce UBC’s natural gas consumption by 20,000 gigajoules (GJ) annually
- Reduce UBC’s electrical consumption by 4,000,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) annually
- Maintain all energy savings achieved through building performance monitoring, targeting and reporting
- Achieve energy savings and GHG emission reductions in a fiscally responsible manner
- Improve overall building thermal comfort, lighting, air quality and system reliability
The Energy Planning and Innovation team use a number of tools to visualize and monitor energy use and consumption trends across campus.
Click here to view UBC’s publicly available ION Energy and Water Database
Click here to view Pulse Energy’s publicly available Energy Dashboard