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Energy upgrade funding a fraction of SFU’s carbon offset costs

After paying the provincial government almost $2 million since 2010 to offset its carbon emissions, SFU will get back $195,000 this year to make its Burnaby campus more energy efficient.
SFU
SFU's Burnaby campus

After paying the provincial government almost $2 million since 2010 to offset its carbon emissions, SFU will get back $195,000 this year to make its Burnaby campus more energy efficient.

The funds were announced Wednesday in a Ministry of Advanced Education press release that said the government will pay B.C. colleges and universities $3.8 million under its Carbon Neutral Capital Program this year for projects that reduce energy costs, demonstrate clean technology and lower carbon emissions.

About $170,000 has been earmarked for SFU for five new high-efficiency boilers that will save the university a combined $19,900 a year on energy costs and cut CO2 emissions by just over 100 tonnes.

Another $25,000 will go toward a $450,000 project to upgrade the education building envelope – work that will save the university $3,240 per year on energy costs and reduce CO2 emissions by 18 tonnes.

The funds hardly compare to the $2 million SFU has paid in carbon offsets since 2010, when the government – in a bid to become carbon neutral– decided all public sector institutions would have to start paying $25 a tonne for their annual CO2 emissions.

(That money was to be pooled by the oft criticized Pacific Carbon Trust – a Crown corporation folded into the environment ministry last year– and used to invest in green programs that help offset the pollution.)

Despite the relatively small size of the SFU grant announced Wednesday, SFU development sustainability manager Wendy Lee is happy the university is getting any money at all to help make its facilities more energy efficient.

“What they are doing is at least creating a little bit of program funding,” she told the NOW. “We’ve been lobbying hard for something, just in terms of, like, you can’t continue to punish us without creating some means for us – and the shortage has always been about capital – to access those energy efficiency opportunities.”

Before March of this year, universities and health authorities paid carbon offsets but did not, like school districts, receive any funding for energy-efficiency upgrades.

Lee said SFU has managed to cut its CO2 emissions by about 2,500 tonnes per year since 2007 through energy management and community awareness campaigns, but there are limits to such initiatives, especially at the university’s older Burnaby campus.

So Lee welcomed the Carbon Neutral Capital, but she and her counterparts on the Carbon Neutral Higher Education Committee would like to see the government explore a revolving-fund model, in which government would provide seed money to start a fund and then, as emission reductions occurred, universities (and other public institutions) would repay the fund out of energy savings, making the program self-sustaining.

Lee said SFU doesn’t oppose the ultimate goals of the carbon neutral government program.

“It aligns with our goals,” she said, “so it’s not that we’re trying to fight against it. It really is just the fact that unless you’re actually creating a means to get there, it’s just penalizing without assisting us.”