Citizens armed with infrared cameras hope to help Georgetown, P.E.I., cut emissions
CBC
Residents and business owners in Georgetown, P.E.I., are being enlisted to help their town become climate-neutral.
Researchers at the University of Prince Edward Island (UPEI) have asked locals to take pictures of their buildings using infrared cameras, which capture heat leaks, as well as with humidity-measuring hygrometers.
The Faculty of Sustainable Design and Engineering team will loan the high-tech equipment to participants for free.
The data is being collected this month in a new survey, part of the researchers efforts to help Georgetown become a net-zero community — meaning a municipality that reduces at least as many carbon emissions as it creates.
The project is being led by UPEI working with community volunteers its researchers call "community champions," who are helping get the word out throughout the community.
"We will be seeing how much energy each house or each building in Georgetown is consuming," said Kuljeet Singh Grewal, an assistant professor leading the project.
Two of Grewal's graduate students are in Georgetown overseeing their survey. They hope to collect data from at least 300 to 350 buildings in Georgetown before the end of this month, which will be used to build a computer model to simulate the town's energy consumption patterns.
"Some houses are built in [the] 1800s," Grewal said. "Some are maybe very recent, and some are renovated.
"There's so much variability in building stock, so first we want to identify what is the existing insulation level."
Georgetown's journey to becoming certified as net-zero on emissions began last Oct. 5, when the province's Department of Environment, Energy and Climate Action announced it would be P.E.I.'s first carbon-neutral community by 2027.
As part of efforts to hit that ambitious goal, the UPEI researchers will look for ways Georgetown could reduce emissions and improve energy efficiency.
"Sometimes people ask, 'Why Georgetown?' said Grewal. "Georgetown is a scalable town. This is a pilot ... in that way, future assessment projects will be much more rapid than this."
But the project team aren't going it alone. So far, they said, four members of the community have stepped forward. Researchers hope is those citizens can each recruit another 15 residents in the town of less than 550 people.
"That's the beauty of Georgetown," Grewal explained. "It's a small community and people know each other, and that's what we want to capitalize on."
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