It was a big news week for Canada in efficiency news, as TreeHugger reported that the Vancouver Olympic games aim to be sustainable with the help of Canadian environmental rock star David Suzuki and a fistful of performance and sustainability studies, and Ontario continued its efforts to paint the province with Smart Meters in order to get a better handle on peak usage and provide the opportunity to re-build its ailing grid. We have high hopes for what Smart Meter technology can achieve when deployed with homeowners' best interests in mind, but the details of its adoption by Ontario utilities have stoked our initial concerns over who will most readily reap its benefits - utilities or customers?
On the legislative level, Clean Break reported that Ontario handily passed its long awaited Green Energy Act, a legislative development that Energy and Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman says “...will truly set us on the path to a 21st century green economy for Ontario, one that is sustainable, easy on the environment, and focused on the jobs of the future.”
In other big news, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released a frightening report on home energy efficiency, noting that our global collective obsession with personal electronics is creating a fresh and growing electricity drain. This from the New York Times :
Somewhat ironically, most of those devices are not energy hogs. That said, it's blackfly season in the North Woods, an annual reminer that little blood suckers can cause big trouble in numbers.
Chinese state media suggested on Friday that their post-Kyoto strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions may center on improving energy efficiency, Agence France-Presse reported.
The Dalai Lama, meanwhile, has signed a Buddhist Declaration on Climate Change, which urges members of the international Buddhist community to "retrofit and insulate our homes and workplaces for energy efficiency; lower thermostats in winter and raise them in summer; use high efficiency light bulbs and appliances; turn off unused electrical appliances," and undertake other efforts to reduce energy consumption, as reported in the Shambhala Times.
This week saw the announcement of SHASPA, covered by Earth2Tech and others. The still-in-development platform brings a gamer's mentality to home performance, and appears to enable home owners to control heat, water, and other household systems from a variety of remote devices. We contrasted this distant approach to that of the Thousand Home Challenge, a true-grit, firm believer efficiency project. We're eager to see how each progresses.
And finally, the household staple Kleenex plays a cameo in a cleverly indignant ad from Greenpeace that made the Twitter rounds this week, joining together the unlikely pair of a headcold and a chainsaw:
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