Research Proposal Presentation Title

Energy Conservation in British Columbia for Sustainable World

Student researchers

Nie Pengyu

Yoshihiro Toyama

What is your research question?

What can people do to conserve energy in BC for protect to environment and ecology?

Research proposal keywords or concepts

The First keyword is "energy conservation"

The second keyword is "energy conservation"

The third keyword is "consciousness for energy"

How would you summarize your proposed research idea?

Just increasing energy production would not be the most appropriate way to reach carbon neutral. On the other side of energy production, energy conservation also takes a significant role in the energy consumption data and rely on residents' daily use habit to a great extent. We want to support the process of carbon neutrality in B.C. by discovering the relationship between energy consumption and people's awareness of energy conservation.

Where is the literature gap and how does your proposed research attempt to fill that gap?

Bradford (2020) highlighted several ways for energy conservation. However, not many researchers mention people's consciousness for energy conservation in B.C. So our literature gap is people's consciousness for energy conservation is consciousness and future actions' correlations in the past and next few years in B.C. For that, we need to know people’s energy consumption in the last five years.

Why is this gap worthy of research?

We believe that our study can contribute to people’s actions for energy conservation. Also, our study can give the reference of how reducing energy generation and energy consumption. Those are reasons we believe the gap is essential for people to make a sustainable world.

What future change could this research possibly contribute to, related to sustainability?

Our study could highlight two main considerable implications for sustainability. The first implication is, if people can decrease energy consumption, the government can reduce energy generation systems' stress. The second implication is, decrease energy consumption would decrease risks for climate change and global warming.

What made your group interested in and/or what excites you about your proposed topic?

According to Murray and BCSEA, people use much energy on house heating, including the Vancouver City Hall. House heatings are producing an enormous amount of energy (Murray, 2015; BCSEA, 2015). From those facts, we become interested in people’s energy conservation, and we found that change people’s energy consumption is an essential part of a sustainable world. For that, the government is doing many policies such as carbon tax (Murray, 2015). However, we think change people’s awareness and actions for energy conservation is also essential. So we do this research to think of a better world.

References

Bradford, M. J. (2020). Assessment and management of effects of large hydropower projects on aquatic ecosystems in British Columbia, Canada. Hydrobiologia. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10750-020-04362-3

Erdemir, D., & Dincer, I. (2019). Potential Use of Thermal Energy Storage for Shifting Cooling and Heating Load to Off‐Peak Load: A Case Study for Residential Building in Canada. Energy Storage. https://doi.org/10.1002/est2.125

McCalley, L. T., de Vries, P. W., & Midden, C. J. H. (2010). Consumer Response to Product-Integrated Energy Feedback: Behavior, Goal Level Shifts, and Energy Conservation. Environment and Behavior, 43(4), 525–545. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916510371053

Murray, B., & Rivers, N. (2015). British Columbia’s revenue-neutral carbon tax: A review of the latest “grand experiment” in environmental policy. Energy Policy, 86, 674–683. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2015.08.011

Our nature. Our power. Our future. (2019). Retrieved from Clean BC website: https://cleanbc.gov.bc.ca/

Zirnhelt, H. E., & Richman, R. C. (2015). The potential energy savings from residential passive solar design in Canada. Energy and Buildings, 103, 224–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j .enbuild.2015.06.051