At the council meeting of December 18 I voted no to HAT Smart, the City’s residential energy efficiency initiative, but my comments during the council meeting weren’t as clear as I would have liked. I’d like to clarify a few things.
I’m not against energy conservation or environmental programs. But a role of council is to provide a check on municipal programs to make sure they’re effectively meeting their intended goals.
So what is the goal of HAT Smart? Well, the program has no goal at the moment. HAT Smart was created to help achieve certain goals laid out in Medicine Hat’s Community Environmental Roadmap set in 2008. But these goals were discarded in 2016 with the admission that the goals were unrealistic (and thus unachievable, at least with the current strategy and resources.)
The last council’s strategic priorities, which are still in place until we complete our strat planning, don’t provide much direction for Hat Smart. None of their six strategic priorities mention conservation or environmental goals. Vision 1.4, in the Strategic Highlights comes closest: Sustainable Environment and Infrastructure: A mid-size, SMART city and a leader in sustainable environmental practices.
I find this too vague to be useful and it’s somewhat ironic since SMART seems to reference to the HAT Smart program, but SMART also refers to a common process for setting goals namely that they be: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. Unfortunately, none can be said of HAT Smart's goals.
The lack of clear goals for HAT Smart means that the program has been running without an overarching direction for two years, making it impossible to gauge the effectiveness of the program. How do you know if you’re making progress towards your destination if you have no end point? This was the main basis for my concern.
At the very least I thought HAT Smart should be paused until council can set new goals for the program.
Effectiveness of HAT Smart.
I meant to only voice my concern about the lack of strategic direction for HAT Smart. It was a straightforward, important, and basic concern. I did not mean to debate the effectiveness of the program, which is a different and more complicated conversation. Obviously we can’t judge a program’s effectiveness without understanding what it’s trying to achieve. For example, the rebate program has distributed the lion's share of the funds, but would a education focused program have achieved a similar (or better) energy reduction? or some other option?
We can look at why it failed to meet the previous targets to learn how to better set future direction and goals.
Community Environmental Roadmap
Hat Smart was created as a vehicle to help achieve the Community Environmental Roadmap. The Roadmap laid out long term goals and performance indicators for conservation and environmental standards for Medicine Hat. It was created with community stakeholders including: Grasslands Naturalists, MHC, Palliser Airshed Society, the Chamber of Commerce, Palliser Health Region, Urban Environmental and Recreation Advisory Board, and the Medicine Hat Industrial Group. These groups formed an advisory group that worked with city staff and rolled out the Roadmap in 2008.
Here is the last update to the Roadmap provided by city staff in 2015. It shows the goals and the how close we are to achieving them. HAT Smart wasn’t responsible for all these goals, it wasn’t even solely responsible for the energy conservation parts of the Roadmap. Neither is the city soley responsible for these goals. The Roadmap was intended as a community plan and it depended on groups beyond the city to achieve them.
The 'Energy Conservation' and 'Renewable' sections in the table above relate to this discussion. As you can see we did reduce our natural gas and electricity usage since 2008, though we failed to meet our targets. Again HAT Smart did not have a specific target of how much the program was responsible to reduce residential gas/electric usage.
Here is how HAT Smart worked towards the targets.
Hat Smart 2018 is funded through the Environmental Conservation Charge levied on high-consumption residential utility customers at these levels:
Electricity – $0.0074 per kWh above 950 kWh
Natural Gas – $1.01 per GJ above 18 GJ
The program is fully funded by the funds collected through this charge.
The majority of funds (about $5 million) have been spent through the rebate program, which provides a subsidy to encourage residents to improve the energy efficiency of their households and to help with renewable energy installations. Some funds are also spent to educate residents about the advantages of conservation and more energy efficient practices.
Here is how HAT Smart will encourage energy efficient practices in 2018. Staff have worked hard to make sure it is a complimentary program to Energy Efficiency Alberta, a provincial initiative along the lines of HAT Smart--to encourage Albertans to save energy through home improvements and education.
HAT Smart 2018 is illustrative of the difficulty in reaching the goals set out in the Community Environmental Roadmap.
Peggy Revell of the Medicine Hat News wrote about HAT Smart on May 6, 2016: The Roadmap set a goal of 25% of residential energy provided from renewable sources by 2025. Currently this rate is at 6.7 per cent. While the city has had initiatives like $1.1 million in HAT Smart rebates, the concentrated solar thermal project and a power purchase agreement for wind power, to meet the original goal would require either nine additional wind turbines or 8,600 residential solar PV installations. "Just to put that in perspective, the 8,600 residential solar PV would cost $64.5 million in investment," said utilities business support department manager Jaret Dickie.
8,600 residential solar PV installations to meet our original target. We’re subsidizing 16 in 2018. At this pace we’ll achieve this in…?
This highlighted an important point for me. Since the goals were community goals it would be tough to meet them without broad adoption of individual residential green energy projects or conservation practices. What the city tried to do with HAT Smart is spark the community to adopt these practices, but if people only do things if there is a subsidy then we’re limiting how fast we can change our practices.
Again from the same article by Ms. Revell here is the former Chair of the Energy and Utilities Committee speaking about the goals in the Roadmap: "I think when we chose the numbers we weren't being realistic about the cost," said Coun. Bill Cocks. "We just picked nice round-sounding numbers. Who wouldn't have thought we could reduce our consumption by 25 per cent? Like, that's doable. Well actually it's not.”
Anything is achievable, but did the community get behind the Roadmap? If no, why not? Did the City put commensurate resources and prioritize these targets? If no, why not? One takeaway is that while we’ve made progress there are obviously larger forces driving our energy, water, and waste usage. Until we understand what those are we’ll have a tough time making the kind of environmental impact we want to have. Though we’ve failed there is much good here and things we can learn.
What I would like to see when council sets our goals for this program and this 4-year term is more consideration about what it would take to achieve them and make sure we are commmitted to giving each goal the appropriate resources.