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THE CAMPUS RESIDENT APRIL 18, 2011
Sustainability Corner Energy Conservation at Home If you stopped by the BC Hydro Power Smart booth at our recent UNA Earth Day event, you learned about ideas and incentives for reducing your energy consumption at home. You might not have learned just how important your choices are to BC’s future energy plans. In an earlier column, I noted that BC’s Clean Energy Act will require 66% of projected future electricity demand to be met through conservation efforts. This laudable target will allow BC Hydro to continue to produce some of the cleanest, hydro generated energy in North America without having to purchase or develop fossil fuel based generating capacity. To meet this target means that BC Hydro will be depending on you to make significant energy conservation choices at home. What do those choices look like? According to a recent study, it might not be what you think. The study found that survey participants tended to focus on curtailment (e.g., turning off lights) rather than efficiency improvements (such as switching to energy efficient appliances) when asked to identify effective ways to conserve energy. Further, participants tended to slightly overestimate the benefits of low energy saving activities (switching to a lower wattage bulb or using a laptop instead of a desktop computer) and significantly underestimate high energy saving activities (such as changing settings on your washer and dishwasher or air drying clothing). To find out more, you can access the full article at www.pnas.org/content/107/37/16054. There are two important lessons from these findings. The first is that armed with good information, you should be able to achieve significant energy savings at home. The second is that the commonly held assumption that saving energy necessarily means sacrificing something is not always true. For example, a simple but significant change you can make is to switch your washer from “hot wash, warm rinse” to “warm wash, cold rinse”,
Ralph Wells which does not cause any inconvenience. In fact, many people use only cold water for washing, generating further savings. Choosing Energy Star rated products is also a smart choice that will conserve energy. Of course, other smart choices such as lowering your thermostat in winter or air drying clothes do require some level of sacrifice, but awareness that these choices make a real difference might influence your desire to make these choices. You will also benefit by lower electricity bills – something that will become more significant as our electricity rates increase in the coming years. You can expect more help in reducing your energy consumption in the future. Smart meters will soon be installed in all BC homes, allowing the potential for tracking your home energy consumption in real time, rather than just on your monthly bills. The UNA-UBC Community Energy and Emissions Plan will identify potential retrofit opportunities for your home and strata building. But you don’t need to wait - you can start saving money, and doing your part to keep BC’s energy green and affordable by instituting smart changes at home right now. Find out more at www.bchydro.com/guides_ tips/green-your-home.html. Be sure to check out Power Smart incentives while you’re there. For example, you could earn $75 dollars by reducing your energy use by 10%.
SUSTAINABILITY TIP Are you a UNA resident who would like to provide a practical tip on how each of us can contribute to sustainability? Be sure to submit your idea to the UNA Sustainability Contest at sustainabilitycontest@myuna.ca. The author of the tip selected will receive a $25.00 gift certificate (courtesy of Save-On) for use in our local Save-On Supermarket and at the end of the year there will be a significant prize for the year’s winner. This month we feature a BC Hydro Power Smart tip:
Resist the urge to check your baking often: every time you open your oven door, you lose about 20 per cent of the oven’s heat. Look through the oven window instead. WE ACKNOWLEDGE THE PARTICIPATION AND SUPPORT OF ONE OF OUR COMMUNITY’S PARTNERS IN SUSTAINABILITY, WESBROOK PLACE’S SAVE-ON SUPERMARKET.
Ethnographic Films Feature at The Old Barn, MOA Venues UNA is co-sponsor; some of the most exciting anthropology films in world shown UBC celebrates the fifth annual international festival of anthropological film at the Museum of Anthropology (April 30, 3 PM-6 PM) and at the Old Barn Community Centre (May 1, 10 AM-5 PM). Hosted by The Ethnographic Film Unit at UBC and co-sponsored by the University Neighbourhoods Association, the festival gathers some of the most exciting new anthropology films the world has to offer. The Gala Opening, in the Michael Ames Theatre at MOA, will feature the festival jury prize winning films and the outstanding films produced by this year’s student members of the Ethnographic Film Unit. Films being showcased on the Sunday Main Stage range from scenes of a Japanese Funeral, to Irish memory cards
for loved ones who have passed away, to Thailand red-shirt activists cursing the government by pouring real human blood on the doors to their parliament. For the less squeamish the festival showcases a set of films on the search for personal identify through depictions of German ‘cowboys’ who love the wild west, a group of Swiss who live as though they are Lakota Indians, and an international group of trekkers travelling the famed Inca Trail in South America. Also showing will be a brand new film from The Ethnographic Film Unit, Small Nets in a Sea of Change, a tragic tale of what happens when large industrial fisheries takes charge. These films, and a half dozen or so more other short films, go far beyond the typical journalistic view to an in-depth explication of the people and cultures being displayed. For more information please contact charles.menzies@ubc.ca