ATHABASCA — The Athabasca area's new municipal energy manager will be devoting his energy to finding efficiencies and potential cost savings throughout the town, county and village for at least the next year.
Kevin Jacobs, 42, was hired by the three municipalities that operate within the borders of Athabasca County and started his work earlier this month. He may live in Morinville, but has deep ties to the region after spending some of his childhood on the family farm northeast of town near Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries Inc. (Al-Pac). Now, he will spend at least the next year, possibly two, helping the three communities identify and lower their greenhouse gas emissions on municipal buildings.
“I've lived all across Alberta; if you want to go all the way back, I was born in Calgary. I lived in Edmonton; went to school there, went to school in Morinville, I lived in on a farm near Al-Pac,” said Jacobs. “A couple of years in high school at Grassland Community School and then I came back to the Edmonton area and I've been here since.”
It was a love of physics that drew him to learning about alternative energy technology, plus a desire to protect the environment.
"My principles drive me toward wanting to take care of the environment and being efficient and I worked for a lot of years in Alberta's oil industry and I benefited from all that, but there was a point where I just wanted to move on to something different and this is what interested me so, I moved into this field,” he said.
“I'll be doing energy modelling on certain facilities and then we identify the ECM, which is an Energy Conservation Measure ... to determine if it's economically feasible to do an upgrade and find a way to fund it,” said Jacobs. “So, there are grants available out there; I’ll find ones that align, and then train and implement, which is always the goal to bring it to life.”
He explained he will be doing higher level audits, or energy scans, to determine the energy drivers, figuring out where the energy is going and where it can be saved; finding equipment that may not be running efficiently or near end-of-life and needs to be upgraded; and training staff to become aware of little things like closing doors to keep heat from escaping.
“To reduce energy costs — when it comes to energy management that's the No. 1 goal — and along with that, you can't help but reduce greenhouse gases. So, our goal is sort of within the first year to try and achieve a five per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.
Typically, if a building has a boiler, changing over to forced air wouldn't make a lot of economic sense, he explained, but if the boiler is at a stage in its life where it's possible to upgrade, then high efficiency boilers can be used without retrofitting all of the heat registers in the building.
“Also, there's other things too, like simply insulating hot water runs from boilers, can save quite a bit of energy too and make sure that it's getting to where it needs to be, as opposed to be lost along the way or just lost in the in the boiler room itself,” said Jacobs.
Now Jacobs has at least a year to benchmark the buildings based on their bills and doing site analysis to build energy models and work toward reducing energy consumption, but his position could be extended, especially considering the Municipal Climate Change Action Centre (MCCAC) funds 80 per cent of his wage and the remainder is divided between the three municipalities.
"I'm hoping that they take advantage of the second year because there will still be lots of work to once we get through the first year, especially trying to help three communities,” he said. “So, it's at least a year, hopefully two and if they see value, who knows, maybe more.”
