The Town of Essex is looking at ways to improve energy use at three of its sports facilities.
The town is receiving $84,070 from the Green Municipal Fund's Community Buildings Retrofit initiative.
Essex will use the grant to study achieving net zero at the Essex Recreation Complex, Essex Centre Sports Complex, and Harrow Arena by examining measures including installing geothermal heat pumps, converting remaining natural gas heating to electric heating, and adding heat recovery to the refrigeration plants at each facility.
Jake Morassut, Director of Community Services for the Town of Essex, says they have some engineers and some teams coming in to evaluate the facilities.
He says they do use a lot of energy with their (HVAC) heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems.
"Some other things that are very simple that may also work out, for instance, is using a pool cover at the pool," says Morassut. "It is a large pool so it takes a different type of system to heat those things, it's not just like your backyard pool where you pull a cover on top, so there be a system in place to do that. The investment may be worth in in the long run to reduce our heating charges for our water temperatures."
He says we're going to be seeing increases to the energy rates over the next decade, especially for natural gas usage.
"Whether we put investments now or later, we don't want to pay more costs than we have to," says Morassut. "So if we can while we're doing our asset management planning and replacing some of these units to begin with, if we can take the energy efficiency approach, not only are there savings up front to our energy usage but there are also savings for potential grants to get more energy efficient products."
(Photo Credit: Courtesy Town of Essex)
The Community Buildings Retrofit initiative is part of a $950 million federal investment in Federation of Canadian Municipalities's Green Municipal Fund (GMF) and is designed to scale up energy efficiency and lower emissions across Canada.
GMF, which is administered by FCM and funded through an endowment by the Government of Canada, helps local partners switch to sustainable practices more quickly by giving them the tools they need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and build sustainable, prosperous communities.