Camosun College recently announced its new Clean Energy and Efficient Buildings micro-credentials. The micro-credentials give people working in the field a chance to advance their career; the classes will be held mainly by distance on weekday evenings, and the college is aiming to have students enrolled in the first cohort next month.
“We started to work on something a few years ago,” says Camosun chair of Mechanical Engineering Technology Ross Lyle. “We met with a focus group, and they suggested that we might want to call it a Clean Energy and Efficient Buildings program, so we changed it from Green Energy to Clean Energy and Efficient Buildings.”
But Lyle says there was a setback when it came time to implement the program about a year and a half ago and the college decided to cut back on expenses.
“So, we fast-forward until October and we received a request from the Ministry of Advanced [Education] and Skills Training asking the college to develop a micro-credential program.
So [Camosun vice president of education] John Boraas and [Camosun dean of Trades and Technology] Eric [Sehn] suggested that maybe we could revisit the Clean Energy and Efficient Buildings program.”
Lyle says the government really liked the proposal for the program, and now the micro-credentials are a reality after the college received $211,000 for the program. He says that Camosun has been working on this for a long time, and adds that the demographic the college is targeting is “professional architects and engineers and tradespersons who have been in the workplace for a while.”
Lyle says the courses have great environmental benefits.
“The intent of the BC Energy Step Code is to create houses that are net zero energy by 2032,” he says. “That means that the house will consume no more energy than it uses over the course of the year. And the only way you can arrive at that is to put photovoltaic or solar energy on the roof of a house. So that’s why BC Energy Step Code has asked that houses be net zero energy ready by 2032. So incorporating an efficient building with solar photovoltaic means we can have way more energy efficient buildings which reduce the amount of greenhouse gases being embedded in the province of BC. So that’s what our program can address.”
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