The County of Simcoe recognizes the many benefits of improving our energy use. Using energy more efficiently and increasing renewable energy sources helps to reduce our footprint and save costs, which is good for the environment and our operations!
LEED® Certified Buildings
LEED® stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, a third-party certification program and an internationally accepted benchmark for the design, construction and operation of high performance green buildings. LEED® promotes a whole-building approach to sustainability by recognizing performance in five key areas of human and environmental health:
- Sustainable site development
- Water efficiency
- Energy efficiency
- Materials selection
- Indoor environmental quality
Click here to take a tour of Georgian Village.
The Barrie-Simcoe Emergency Services Campus is a joint venture between the County of Simcoe and the City of Barrie, completed in 2020 and combines local services into one building.
The Campus offers cost-effective, modern facilities for the Barrie Police Service, Simcoe County Paramedic Services and Barrie Fire and Emergency Service, and the communities that they serve. The facility provides a new police headquarters, a communications dispatch, and an emergency hub with ambulance storage, mobile command unit, support areas and staff/administrative training spaces.
The project was delivered through an Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) method, one of the first in public safety in Ontario.
Energy Projects
The growth of LED lighting has created an opportunity to improve the quality and durability of lighting at significantly lower energy costs. As part of a corporate-wide lighting retrofit program, the County is upgrading many of its traditional lighting to LED lighting. Provincial programs such as SaveOn Energy have provided further financial incentives to ‘switch’ to LED lighting.
Living in a climate with cold winters and warm summers requires lots of energy to heat, cool and ventilate buildings.The County of Simcoe keeps these priorities in mind when servicing and upgrading HVAC equipment and, by doing so, has saved energy and costs by upgrading to more efficient equipment. Programs offered by Enbridge and Union Gas have provided further financial incentives to utilize more efficient equipment.
Renewable Energy
Renewable energy uses the sun, wind, earth or water to generate energy, and does not require the burning of fossil fuels. At the County of Simcoe, a variety of renewable energy projects have allowed the County to generate clean electricity and heat independent from the power grid.
A rooftop solar PV system – 27.7 kW AC (32 kW DC) was installed on the roofs of Building 1 and 2 to generate on-site, emissions-free electricity for the Archives.
A geothermal heat pump system provides a portion of the building’s heating and cooling as ‘free’ energy via 60 vertical wells buried underground. When the building has excess heat in the summertime, the geothermal system transports and stores the heat deep underground. In the wintertime, the system draws the heat out of the ground and brings it into the building. 