The minister said changes approved this week by Treasury Board will increase the household income threshold from $30,000 to $35,000. The increase would mean roughly 3,500 more Island families would be eligible for assistance than under the $30,000 limit established in 2006.

“Since the Office of Energy Efficiency was established in early 2008, staff have been able to process applications from about 1,200 low-income households and to help these families gain more control over energy use and energy spending,” said the minister. “Expanding the eligibility for these programs will allow us to help even more homes where energy costs can be a financial challenge.”

OEE programs targeting low-income households include:

• PEI ecoEnergy Audit Assistance Program for Low-Income Households

• PEI Energy Efficiency Loan Program – for Low Income Households

• PEI Home Energy Low-income Program (HELP)

More information on the Office of Energy Efficiency and its programs is available on the Internet at www.gov.pe.ca/oee.

How Does Wood Burn in a Stove

How can we reduce this risk? How can be get ahead of the risk and create a whole new economy that regular Islanders can participate in?

Stop heating with oil!

One of the smartest things we did on PEI was to kick start wind energy by deliberately creating enough scale at the outset by the Provincial & Federal Governments taking their share of the power from wind. This guarantee of use, built the foundation.

We can do this with wood heat as well. All Public Buildings could shift from oil to wood.

This chart shows PEI’s Energy use and costs in the ramp up in 2008. Nearly $200 million, A THIRD OF PEI’S INCOME TAX REVENUES – is spent on heating oil. While prices are lower today (71 cents vs 1.09) we can be sure that in the future even $1.09 will look like a bargain.

What if we started to use this same model with PEI’s Public Buildings? What if we converted from oil to Wood?

This is easier than you might think. Here is Dick Arsenault taking us around the test of a new Pellet/Chip furnace at the Ecole Evangeline in Western PEI.

You will see that such a furnace

• Can be easily installed
• Can be fed easily
• Has NO emissions
• Is easy to clean
• Can save a school about $100,000 a year

There are 2 new schools that will be built in the next year. There is federal money.

If we went full tilt in the public sector and went wood (pellet and Chip) we would create the support systems and the local businesses that we could then lever to help with the rest of PEI’s oil heating.

Lots of real jobs that are not going to go away will be created.

If we can pull this off, we would have to do a lot of work on conservation as well that also leads to many new jobs, then $200,000,000 at least will stay in the hands of Islanders.

The biggest tax break ever.

PEI will also be on track to start to reduce its dependency on oil and the outside.

Oh but Rob there is not enough wood for that!

Yes there is. Here is a snip from Roy MacMullin’s great piece on this question:

Looking at a wood alternative, we would have to cut 2.8 million cords of wood to replace this volume of oil. (For all of Atlantic Canada) To compare, the existing residential usage of hardwood in New Brunswick is roughly 500,000 cords each year.

Using wood as a solution requires an additional 332 thousand cords to be harvested annually to displace the New Brunswick fuel oil requirement. (Roy lives in NB) This shouldn’t be a problem with mills shutting down. Pellets and briquettes can use softwood that is compressed to provide the same heat density of hardwood, with less moisture content.

Wood heat could very quickly meet the requirements of a conversion program. The reduction of oil purchases of 943,000 barrels would retain $137 million a year in the New Brunswick economy as opposed to sending it offshore. Over the years, this would be the equivalent of investing over a billion dollars in the local economy.

If Efficiency NB extended their offer of $2,250 to oil heat customers converting to wood, it would go a long way toward alleviating the problems of oil prices. The cost of the providing stoves would be $135 million (60,000 x $2,250), probably spent over a number of years.

The use of EPA rated stoves ensures an efficiency of 70% and emissions that are less than 10% of previous generation stoves. In urban areas, the use of pellet or briquettes may have to be mandatory with round wood as a rural option.

This is surely the easiest political choice before us? There is no downside.

OHOES — The Cohoes City School District has saved more than $600,000 with an energy-conservation program and expects to save nearly $3 million by 2015. Five buildings in the district were recently awarded the federal government’s Energy Star label which is presented to the most energy-efficient school buildings in the country, officials said Thursday.

The district was also named an Energy Star Leader for its overall energy savings.

“We are very pleased to receive this recognition,” said Superintendent Robert Libby. “Our energy conservation efforts are saving taxpayer dollars and allowing the district to focus its financial resources on its core mission, student education. During difficult budget times like these, it is critically important that we be able to do just that.”

Since the district started participating with the Energy Education’s energy-conservation program in 2004, it has cut energy consumption by about 30 percent, officials said.

The schools have saved $616,397 and the environmental impact on just electricity savings is equal to taking 332 cars off the road or planting 39,339 trees.

The schools that received the Energy Star label included the Cohoes High School, Cohoes Middle School, Harmony Hill School, Van Schaick Grade School, and Page Avenue School.

School buildings must rate in the top 25 percent nationwide for energy efficiency to receive the label, officials said.

You don’t need to buy new windows – you can use inexpensive film and do the job your self – here is a great step by step guide for how to do this.

Correct those flaws, and heating and cooling costs are typically cut by 20 percent to 30 percent, a saving of more than $1,000 annually in some households. In addition, carbon dioxide emissions and the strain on the national electric and gas systems are reduced.

About 140,000 houses will be weatherized with public help this year, a total that President-elect Barack Obama has promised to raise to one million, to reduce energy consumption and cut energy costs for households and taxpayers, who often absorb those costs for the poor. This would represent a historic shift in emphasis for the federal and state governments, reducing poor people’s energy bills instead of helping to pay them.

Weatherizing a million homes annually would also create about 78,000 jobs for a year, according to the federal Energy Department’s weatherization project director, Gil Sperling.

The current 140,000 annual total creates about 8,000 jobs, Mr. Sperling said.

Although that is a tiny fraction of the five million green-collar jobs that Mr. Obama promised in the campaign, “it’s a decent number of jobs per dollar spent,” said Harry J. Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and at the Urban Institute, a nonprofit group in Washington. “The work is productive, and the jobs are at a mix of skill levels.”

Congress added $250 million to the weatherization budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1. Energy experts say that money could be effectively spent in low-income households and in households that have no need of public assistance.

In the forgotten corners of tens of millions of American attics and basements, near the old Trivial Pursuit games and out-of-season clothes, are flaws that waste vast amounts of energy. Buildings often resemble colanders. Leaking ducts bleed heated air into areas outside living space. Cold-air returns suck in dust and mold from attics, or gas and oil fumes from garden equipment stored in basements. Long-neglected air filters clog, forcing furnaces or air-conditioners to work harder.

Mr. Obama’s choice for energy secretary, Steven Chu, told a group in Washington in June that an extra $1,000 could make a new house energy efficient “but the American consumer would rather have a granite countertop.”

More than 1,200 P.E.I. households have taken advantage of government-subsidized home energy audits this year.

Mike Proud, manager of the Office of Energy Efficiency, told CBC News Monday that the rising price of fuel created a lot of demand for the audits over the summer and into the fall.

“It’s mostly insulation work. We hoped that that would be the case because we know that that’s the best investment to make,” said Proud.

“We’ve seen a lot of people doing the basement insulation, the attic insulation, even some doing exterior wall insulation.”

Proud believes when the price of furnace oil began to fall in July some homeowners may have postponed their plans to install alternative heating systems like pellet stoves, and decided on less-expensive upgrades.

“The whole popularity of the wood stove/pellet stove type of thing, you know, while it’s still there, it certainly hasn’t overtaken us like it did last year,” he said.

Since the beginning of the fiscal year, April 1, to the end of November, the office has loaned $1.2 million from a budget of $2 million.

Source CBC

Unlike the usual approach taken when trying to grow food in the suburbs – converting spare land on your own property (as discussed by aeldric previously and, more recently, in Jeff Vail’s series on A Resilient Suburbia) – guerilla gardening involves cultivating any spare patch of urban land that isn’t being used for another purpose, which could provide a substantial addition to the food growing potential of suburbia.” (The Oil Drum)

The full article is linked here: