Going above and beyond…bake sales

One passionate and persevering Pictou County councillor finds a (net zero) way to keep the lights on, and the doors open in community buildings in small town Nova Scotia.

Pictou County Municipal Councillor Andy Thompson. Photo courtesy of the Province of Nova Scotia.

In rural Pictou County, Nova Scotia, a lot of community-owned buildings “run on love” says municipal councillor Andy Thompson.

But love is not enough to keep the lights on — or pay the heating bills.

Over the years, Thompson found himself “writing grants to help fix these buildings up: ramps, roofs, washrooms, kitchens. All that stuff you need to have a building exist.”

Then, two years ago, while mulching leaves in his backyard, Thompson, whose day job is working as a community developer with Aging Well Nova Scotia, had an epiphany: he had been focusing on structural and accessibility upgrades but realized that wasn’t enough.

“How do I keep my buildings open? Your biggest driver is energy costs...The economics just don’t make sense,” he says. “Nobody wants to have a bake sale to pay the oil bill.”

Thinking about how to solve that problem led to the creation of the Pictou County Net Zero Community Buildings Project. With a total of $1.3 million in funding from Efficiency Nova Scotia, the Sustainable Communities Challenge Fund, and the provincial Low Carbon Communities program, the project is upgrading 21 community buildings — mostly small community centres, but also firehalls, a rink, and a women’s resource and sexual assault centre — and providing them with climate-friendly heating sources; all at no cost to the non-profits running the buildings.

Buildings run by volunteer boards are already stretched thin, and don’t necessarily have the expertise or the organizational capacity to oversee energy audits and retrofits. Some are too small to qualify individually for grants. But put them all together, and you can make significant change for the buildings, and the communities they serve.

Thompson says some of the buildings required extensive work, as was the case with the East River Valley Recreation Park, in Springville.

Map of participating buildings. Photo courtesy of the Province of Nova Scotia.

“There was no insulation, there were rafters with no ceiling, and there was no power hooked up. We had to re-hook up the power, then install new heat pumps, spray in foam insulation, install new siding on part of the building, and put solar panels on the roof,” he says. “Now they’re able to host summer recreation programs up there, and since they have heat pumps (which also have an air conditioning feature), on the hottest of days, they don't have to send kids home. Simple things like that make your communities function.”

One of the grants the project received was to hire Navigate Energy — brought onboard to help oversee the retrofits. Company owner Liam Cook, who says his mission is to “make it easy and affordable to pursue clean energy retrofits,” has an expertise that was essential to the success of the Pictou County project.

“They're all volunteer-run organizations. They didn't necessarily have the time or expertise on their staff to dive into what upgrades could be done in their buildings, to coordinate the contractors to get quotes, sit down with those quotes, ask if they make sense, and then coordinate the work as we installed clean energy installations within each of those buildings,” he says.

And because some of the buildings are in tiny, remote communities, getting contractors out to them for individual projects would have also been a challenge.

“How do you get contractors to go to that 400-square-foot hall that's 40 minutes away?” Cook says.

The answer was to bundle projects.

“If we’re going to be letting you have the ability to quote and install in the nicer buildings, you’re going to take time to go to the smaller ones as well,” he says.

There have been a few surprises along the way, says Cook: unexpected hazardous materials, and, in one case, finding a colony of thousands of bees in the eaves of a building. (A beekeeper was hired to relocate the queen.) But, for the most part, he says, the retrofits have gone smoothly.

Debi McIntosh calls the Pictou County Net Zero Community Buildings Project nothing short of “incredible.” McIntosh, president of the Little Harbour Community Centre board, says an energy audit done through Efficiency Nova Scotia found no insulation in the attic or upper walls of the building. Annual operating costs for the building are in the range of $25,000-$30,000, putting a strain on the community hub’s finances. All that aside, she says she’s optimistic about the future.

Sunny Brae Capital Project before. Photo courtesy of the Province of Nova Scotia.

Sunny Brae Capital Project after. Photo courtesy of the Province of Nova Scotia.

“We now have a new heat pump, and we’re hoping to get the solar panels, which will bring our heating costs down considerably — hopefully even to zero,” she says. “The centre is well used, so this project has been really beneficial, because without funding like this, these small community centres are barely making ends meet.”

Like several other buildings involved in the project, the Little Harbour Community Centre is also a comfort centre — meaning residents can shelter there at times of extreme heat or cold, or during extended power outages; not just a theoretical concern given that one of the project’s buildings is in a community that lost power for three weeks after post-tropical cyclone Fiona devastated the area.

With 60 per cent of the project completed, Cook and Thompson say they are happy to share what they have learned with others.

“We’re future-proofing our communities, and this can be done anywhere,” Thompson says.

Cook mirrors this sentiment.

“If there are other people in communities across Nova Scotia that want to do the same thing, we're both pretty flexible and want to share as much of this work as we can.”

Climate Stories Atlantic is an initiative of Climate Focus, a non-profit organization dedicated to covering stories about community-driven climate solutions.

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