A quest to save the planet through urban planning

What do you get when you cross an environmentalist, an industry chairperson and a former politician? Well, you could probably think of a few answers to this, but if you put a whole group of them together, one answer could be QUEST (Quality Urban Energy Systems of Tomorrow).

It might sound like an odd group of people, or “strange bedfellows” as Shahrzad Rahbar, Vice-President, Strategy and Operations of the Canadian Gas Association (CGA), describes it. But it’s an important mix of people, especially in light of what the group is trying to do. QUEST believes the need for action on climate change must be factored in to urban design and that Canada’s GHG reduction targets can be met through integrated energy systems throughout all of Canada’s communities. QUEST’s holistic view of urban planning includes energy systems that accommodate multiple energy types and long term planning that reduces the urban carbon footprint, such as higher density development, properly matching energy types with energy use, managing surplus heat and converting waste into energy. It’s a big-picture approach that will take time for governments to embrace. But the ball is rolling. Fast.

Let’s go back to the beginning. About two years ago, CGA had been involved in a series of conversations with the federal government regarding mitigating climate change and reducing the industrial carbon footprint of the energy ‘distribution’ sector. It was an ongoing conversation in which one important factor was soon realized to be missing from the equation. “You see, in the gas world, two-thirds of emissions are from end-use and one third is from exploration, production, transmission and distribution,” explains Rahbar. “The distribution piece of that one third is less than one per cent. So we had an ongoing conversation about managing reductions in the less than one per cent of the oil and gas upstream side.”

Initially, CGA had very little luck in generating a fruitful conversation with the government about this end-use piece of the equation. QUEST started out as nothing more than a conversation between Rahbar and Ken Ogilvie, former executive director of the NGO, Pollution Probe. CGA initially approached Pollution Probe to see if they felt their concerns about the demand piece of the GHG equation were valid and to see if it was worth trying to spark a serious conversation. Turns out it was.

First Steps

Both Ogilvie and Rahbar turned to their own networks for support and insight into the “end-use” concept of GHG mitigation and eventually, what was an informal nod of agreement by many heads, turned into a focused, productive and official brainstorming session in Niagara on the Lake, that later resulted in QUEST’s first white-paper on the subject. Participants walked out of that meeting with a reenergized conviction of the importance of “end-use” in conversations about emission reduction. “We knew the solution was to have an integrated approach to land-use, transportation, water, waste and energy,” said Rahbar. “Good things happen when you look at those things as a whole instead of the silos we have been viewing them as.”

Ogilvie, a former competitive chess player, relates QUEST’s proposition to his game of choice. “It’s one thing to know how all the chess pieces move and to start moving them individually,” explains the QUEST consultant, “but it’s another thing to understand that the pieces can work together harmoniously and you’ll be playing a much more sophisticated game.”

From Ogilvie’s perspective, after walking out of the Niagara-on-the-Lake meeting, one of the big challenges wasn’t necessarily getting participants to recognize the need for a holistic, integrated view on sustainable communities, but rather figuring out how to coherently bring everything together. During that first meeting, QUEST didn’t even exist as an official organization and all the participants had come from disparate backgrounds; there were people working on green buildings and net zero energy homes, leaders of associations for solar, wind and biomass as well as big players like Ontario Power Generation.

“We had a big idea of what we were shooting for but no real coherence,” explains Ogilvie, adding that if someone is an executive director of an association, it is that person’s job to help its members by lobbying for good policy and providing technical support. But it’s not that person’s job to go and plan an urban centre. “As an association leader, you may be aware of how different technologies can and should work together, but your mandate is dealing specifically with your own technologies. So who would try to quantify some of the benefits of integration, get politicians interested and disseminate the information?”

QUEST would. And it did. The organization continued to grow, albeit organically with no fixed organizational structure or budget. When the organization began, there wasn’t as much of an appetite for the end-use discussion, and now, three years later, the policy landscape has shifted. Governmental entities such as the Ontario Minister of Energy and the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources are actively listening to QUEST’s ideas. Cities like Guelph, Ontario and Vancouver, British Columbia are already making efforts towards accomplishing integrated energy systems. Karen Farbridge, Mayor of Guelph, is piloting a Community Energy Plan that shares the QUEST mission and vision and has major utility companies on board. She is preparing a guide so the knowledge sharing process between cities can begin.

Gaining Momentum

Today QUEST is chaired by Mike Harcourt, the former Mayor of Vancouver and 30th Premier of B.C. Harcourt’s first interaction with QUEST was the Niagara-on-the-Lake meeting but prior to that, in 2003, he was part of a Canadian team in the International Sustainable Urban Systems Design Competition which was held in Tokyo. The competition’s focus is planning for long-term sustainability and Harcourt’s team, Cities PLUS, ended up winning the competition. The team, which was sponsored by CGA, used Vancouver as a model to demonstrate the transformation of a large urban centre into a sustainable community.

“We put together a document that showed how you could pick the future you want,” says Harcourt, who was asked to Chair QUEST last year. “The idea is, instead of forecasting where a given city will be in the future, we did backcasting where you pick your future and work backwards to create the path you need to get there.”

So how far into the future is the energy utopia that QUEST envisions? “I think it’s going to happen very quickly, like before 2020,” says Harcourt, adding that within ten years he envisions a dramatic change of attitudes among consumers that will be analogous to changing perceptions about smoking. A few decades ago, the Marlborough Man was considered cool. Now that people are aware of the harmful affects of smoking, it is very uncool to smoke. “The same thing will happen to people that drive SUVs and live in big mansions in the suburbs that can’t be served by transit,” Harcourt adds. “People will think ‘What? You live like that?’”

In fact, the shift has already started. According to Harcourt, 75 per cent of new housing construction around Vancouver over the last 15 years has been multiple family and only 25 per cent have been single family. “You’ll see people living close by to where they work, play and shop, and in very attractive apartments in green buildings that use different energy approaches. It will be a cool way to live for a mass majority of Canadians.”

But for many other parts of Canada, we still have a ways to go. Take Rahbar’s neighbourhood for example. A few years ago she moved into a suburban community in Ottawa and she’s noticing an increasing number of the ironically named “smart centres” replacing open fields; “You know the ones that have these huge box stores, that in order to get from one store to the other you have to drive,” explains a flustered Rahbar. “I’m cognizant that my choices as an individual are pretty limited. I’ve got the programmable thermostat and the curly bulbs and I feel good about them, but the impact is nothing. The big difference lies in your land-use patterns, transportation models and energy systems.”

Ken, on the other hand, is lucky to be living parts of the dream now in his compact mixed-use community in Toronto. He and his spouse haven’t needed to own a car for six years because everything is connected by transit. “I think I have a magnificent quality of life because I go out the door and know the shop is down the road and I know people down the street,” says Ken proudly. “Not everyone is lucky; they have families so not everyone can get rid of a car. But what we can do is start designing our communities so they make it easier for people to make individual choices that make a difference.”

So with all the support the group is receiving and all the changes happening around Canada, what exactly is the group up to now? Well, after the Niagara-on-the-Lake workshop was a second Victoria B.C. workshop in fall of 2008 where participants labored to transform solutions from the realm of examples to the realm of actions. The organization has produced several white papers and the latest one makes use of scenario planning to determine the big “what’s next.” The two outcomes of that ended up being implementation and value measurement.

“So with implementation we leverage the policy attention that we are now getting federally, provincially and municipally into facilitating the actors that need to come together to make this happen,” explains Rahbar. The next stage is quantifying the benefits, which includes identifying suites of policy measures required to transition towards integrated energy systems.

In 2009, QUEST will continue its efforts by engaging economists and policy makers across Canada with engineers and academics to do the actual transportation, land-use and economic modeling required to move forward.

“The real challenge now is implementation,” says Harcourt. “It’s a whole different way of thinking and acting but I think it’s going to happen very quickly. There is urgency. We have a planet to save.”