Retrofitting Residential Neighbourhoods for 80% GHG reductions
Presentation By Ellen Pond
May Vancouver Chapter Meeting Report
Retrofitting residential neighbourhoods for 80% greenhouse gas reductions: Focus on Burnaby
With special presenter: Ellen Pond
Wednesday, May 6, 2009 6:30pm
Vancouver City Hall
Strathcona Room
12th and Cambie
Vancouver, BC
UBC Landscape Architecture student Ellen Pond presented her Master’s degree work which was to see what it would take to reduce GHG output 80% by 2050 (a target needed to stabilize climate change) at the scale of a suburban community. Just to maximize the challenge, Ellen chose a 1950s-era, car-oriented low-density Burnaby neighbourhood east of Brentwood mall (bounded roughly by Lougheed Highway, Willingdon, Parker/Curtis and Sperling).
Ellen inventoried/estimated energy resource use (electricity, natural gas, vehicle fuel) and resulting GHG produced by the neighbourhood, under the rubrics of transportation, housing, and food. She then looked at the interlinking of these systems, and carefully assessed the landscape and topography (including parks, Beecher creek ravine, and the steep elevation rise from the Skytrain stations and Lougheed highway at the edge of area) up to and including the siting of homes and buildings. Taking all this into account she then designed neighbourhood specific strategies to conserve energy use (primarily natural gas and electricity), integrate locally sourced sustainable energy, produce locally grown food, enhance transit use and car/transit alternatives (such as cycling and walking).
Solutions included building neighbourhood Geoexchange heating systems (using laneways and yards), using photovoltaics where light exposure and roof construction styles allowed (50’s bungalows rule!), using passive solar hot water, and converting some roadways or other space into block farms. Things that were considered and didn’t work were storm water or creek micro hydro, biomass electrical/heat generation, or sewer heat recovery.
Ellen’s creative vision and tailored integrative approach fires the imagination to show what could be possible, so much so in fact, that Ellen received the American Society of Landscape Architect’s Research Honor Award for the study.
However, her takeaway message is that these fixes are very (and perhaps prohibitively) expensive. Municipalities should require that these approaches be built in for any new developments.
Ellen also presented an analysis done for the City of Prince George that showed that the urban forest around Prince George had the potential for sizable biomass heat and electricity production, but that the downtown area had poor potential for solar/PV.
