A new course being taught at UBC has potentially saved taxpayers and private businesses thousands of dollars while helping reduce Vancouvers carbon footprint.
The class, offered through the Master of Engineering in Clean Energy program, provides grad students hands-on experience with conducting energy audits of buildings, which they provide free of charge through the schools Community Service Learning outreach program.
Theyre really working like consultants, only they dont get paid, said Eric Mazzi, the faculty member overseeing the course. We have these students who need facilities for learning because they havent done these audits and analyses before, but at the same time are providing something of value. To make it really meaningful and a good learning experience, what the students do is go do energy audits and then, of course, analysis of the data they get. They then come up with recommendations to essentially help the community partner save money on their energy bills and also reduce their CO2 emissions.
Mazzis students offered the service last year to 11 public schools in the Lower Mainland, and in the end a total of 50 energy-saving solutions were found.
They do kind of a screening level report looking at things like windows, upgrades to the hot water system, upgrades to the buildings heating system, etc, said Mazzi. They basically come up with recommendations and do things to improve the passive design of the buildings, like reduce heat losses or look a replacing things with more efficient equipment, more efficient fans, putting advance controls on their systems, things like that.
This year, students offered their services to the Building Owners and Managers Association of British Columbia (BOMA BC) and checked out several large facilities in the city.
Catherine Kohm, executive director of Haro Park Centre, a 154-bed care facility in the West End, said the experience was a win-win for all involved.
The thing is, if youre running a care facility, there are all kinds of things youre mandated to auditfor example, things like wounds and salves and that kind of thingwhich is great because it leads to best practices, but everybody is ignoring the physical plant and we dont have to do any reporting on that, Kohm said.
She added that a past audit had proved centre was succeeding at saving energy, but it was nice to have someone crunch the numbers again to reconfirm it.
It was reaffirming, especially because we dont have the time or the resources to do that on our own.
Lioznyansky estimated it would have cost Haro Park at least $5,000 to have a private audit done.
However, Mazzi said that the outreach program risks becoming a victim of its own success, with demand outstripping the supply of available students.
Unfortunately, its been so successful Ive got a bit of a backlog, he said. We were not actually able to help as many people who came forward as we would have liked, but I suppose its a good problem to have.
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