According to an article in Metro, “Kwantlen’s campuses use 40 per cent less energy than the typical college and 66 per cent less energy than the average university in Canada.”

Recently, Kwantlen was awarded with a 2010 BC Hydro Power Smart Leadership Excellence award for its continuing success in energy management and conservation. This is the fifth time BC Hydro has recognized Kwantlen’s involvement in energy conservation and the third year in a row it has been acknowledged with the leadership excellence award.

Kwantlen was only one of 13 other organizations in B.C to be a recipient of the award in 2010. The award recognizes organizations that have been geared towards energy savings year-over-year and continue to strive towards more savings.

“It actually becomes kind of fun. It’s like when you get better and better at a video game… you know you want to go to the next level,” said Karen Hear, executive director of facilities management at Kwantlen.

Hearn says that a huge part of the success has come not only out of her contributions, but those of the entire Kwantlen team.

“I think because we’re taken an approach that ‘We is smarter than Me’ and tried to involve a great number of stakeholders, from our service suppliers to our maintenance contractors to our in-house personnel. Everything from security officers to janitors, involving them all… they’re part of it.”

According to Metro, Kwantlen’s energy saving efforts over the past 10 years are enough to power over 4,100 homes for a year, which has also resulted in the big savings on utility costs.

For Hearn, this is major part of the big picture.

“We really want to be conscious of, one, reducing our impact on the environment, but at the same time saving money,” she said.

“Basically our costs for utilities, that’s water, natural gas and electricity, in 2001 at that point our budget was about $1.4 million. We were about 850,000 square feet. We are now 1.1 million square feet, plus or minus a slight bit, and our utilities budget this year is about $1.43 million.”

Kwantlen has been innovative with the way it is going about conserving the amounts of energy. Recently, a new system was introduced to minimize the amount of kitchen exhaust. Instead of having the exhaust fans above the grills in kitchen going all the time, Hearn and her team came up with the idea to installation of variable speed drives that work like an accelerator in a car depending on the amount of smoke and heat in the air. Now, when the grill is being used a lot, the fan speeds up, but when it isn’t, it automatically slows down to a minimum speed.

“We have tried to be very creative that whenever we are doing a renovation or a system upgrade or new building construction, we try to take that opportunity to look at what are some very creative ways that we can minimize the amount of energy that is required in support of the facility,” said Hearn.

The next project that her and the facilities management department are focused on is what Hearn refers to as the Awareness Program, which will be aimed more at ensuring students are being guided to helping making Kwantlen more environmentally friendly and identifying what a student can do on an individual level to help.

More information on Kwantlen’s energy and environmental management and its action plans and records can be found at the college’s sustainability web site.

Scaffolding has appeared outside Surrey's C Building as renovations get under way. (Abby Wiseman photo)

Kwantlen’s Surrey campus is getting a facelift, funded by $4.9 million from the federal and provincial Knowledge Infrastructure program.

The money will first be put towards the replacement of cladding and windows of building C, said James Meschino, associate director of planning and construction. After that is finished, in January, the rest of the money will go to upgrading other buildings on Surrey campus. According to Meschino, the building has been well maintained over the past 20 years, but wear is starting to show and the cost of maintenance is more then the cost of replacement.

Windows will be replaced with more energy-efficient ones and stucco will be replaced with metal cladding made of zinc, which has a 40-100 year lifespan and will not require painting or maintenance.

Maintenance costs and energy efficiency are not the only goals Kwantlen has for the building. According to an overview of Kwantlen’s Building Expansion projects, Kwantlen wants to reduce its natural gas consumption by 25 per cent and its electricity consumption by 45 per cent for 2010. All of this is in the hopes of getting LEED certified and LEED gold ratings.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is a program created by the U.S. Green Building Council that certifies buildings that are built in an efficient and sustainable manner. The awards range from LEED certified to LEED silver, gold and platinum.

Kwantlen’s Cloverdale campus achieved LEED gold status, while the new library at Surrey campus is shooting for the platinum award, said Meschino. He is aiming for LEED gold status for building C.

Building C will be the first to receive a facelift, mainly because it is an administration building and students will not be disturbed. Meschino is treating this project as a test for when construction moves to other buildings. As for what this means for students at Surrey campus, Meschino said they are hoping to create as little disruption as possible and the worst of it will be looking at scaffolding from now until January.

“There’s going to be noise just like any other construction project, but we’re going to work with both the users of the building and the contractors to make sure those noisy activities can happen either off hours or at times that will be less of an issue for users.”