Guelph Community Energy Initiative Update 2016-2017

The City of Guelph has been a leader in community energy and greenhouse gas reduction planning, and implemented one of Canada's first Community Energy Initiative plans (CEI 2007 – GMF 7281) that included greenhouse gas and energy reduction targets. In this project, the City of Guelph will update its 2007 Community Energy Initiative (CEI) plan to reassert the original vision and sustainability plan, to set greenhouse gas emission reduction targets using the Global protocol for Community-Scale Greenhouse Emission Inventories (GPC) and to establish an implementation plan in coordination with key stakeholders that will lay out how the city as a whole will achieve the new GHG and energy targets. Establishing the updated targets will consist of four components: 1) on-going community stakeholder engagement; 2) baseline measurement and energy mapping; 3) simulations and strategies for sub-sectors; and 4) policy scan and market transformation analysis, which includes comparisons to other comparable cities.Although the 2007 CEI was progressive for its time and inspired leading-edge infrastructure projects and policies, it lacked a strong link between aggressive targets and an integrated implementation plan that leveraged key community partners (e.g. industries, community organizations, academic institutions). This project will seek to address this gap in order to build a stronger plan and the methodology used to update the CEI plan will use a combination of community stakeholder engagement and the GPC standard for municipal greenhouse gas accounting. Ongoing stakeholder engagement will be used to identify industry and community leaders to spearhead scale projects as components of meeting the GHG and energy reduction targets; develop new partnerships that will ensure the launch and success of scale projects once the CEI update is complete; and leverage community and provincial organizations to provide resources, funding, and network connections to key stakeholders to ensure success of all aspects of the project. The outcomes of the project will be shared by communicating success stories to inspire new scale projects and more community and industry involvement.