Ryan,
I completely understand the limitations you have identified re. community capacity and the ability of small, rural, remote communities to track and commit to going after aspirational emissions targets. It may be useful to set targets around operations and installations that other organizations such as the Northwest Territories Power Corporation are tackling as part of their operations & planning (e.g. LED street light installations to replace costly mercury vapour & high pressure sodium street lights). Although, I am not sure if NTPC would be accounting for the GHG savings from their end, which would preclude the communities from also accounting for the GHG emissions reductions from such LED street light installations.
Either way that the GHG’s are accounted for, the communities still benefit at the end of the day from large-scale retrofit projects such as this, since the communities are the ones paying the power bills.
Perhaps working collaboratively on other retrofit/installation projects that tackle major GHG emissions and have an impact on the whole community, not just small aspects of it, will be of greater interest to community leaders. Once they get familiar with the results and benefits of such energy conserving and energy efficiency efforts, they may be more interested and engaged in undertaking more involved Community Energy Planning and target-setting activities. Things seem to be more readily received once that Awareness/Education tipping point is finally achieved.
