City of Vancouver’s Green Czar Faces Off with Local Energy Efficiency CEO in a Low-Energy Showdown

The real-time consumption data collected at each of the participating buildings between last Saturday and this Saturday were tallied and Deputy City Manager Sadhu Johnston’s impressive savings of 85% was surpassed by Pulse Energy co-founder David Helliwell’s savings of 97%.

General Motors Place results compare both Earth Hour energy consumption to past Saturday nights when the Canucks played (an 84% reduction) and those where there was no event planned (a 58% reduction). Pulse Energy was able to use historical data because they’ve been deployed in General Motors Place since December, initially for an Olympic monitoring project.

Other participants include Pulse Energy staff, Simon Fraser University, and the Village of Hartley Bay, who shut down the diesel generators that power their entire village, and subsequently reduced their energy consumption by 100%. Live data results, along with energy efficiency tactics are showcased at earthhour.pulseenergy.com.

“Getting to see minute by minute energy consumption has been quite an eye-opener.” said Sadhu Johnston. “Turning down the heat has made a huge difference in our home’s energy consumption, and now that we realize how much energy our electric dryer uses, we’ll definitely be line-drying our clothes.”

“My family and I don’t typically use a lot of energy in our downtown condo, so we pushed hard to shut things off for Earth Hour. We unplugged almost everything, and got our power down to 33 watts, which is less power than a low-energy laptop charger.” said David Helliwell. “Even though the primary application for PulseTM software is large commercial buildings, using it as a tool for this energy showdown has been very useful.”

The average savings by all participants was 43%. If everyone in Canada reduced their energy consumption by 43% for 1 hour per day for a year, enough energy would be saved to send the Skytrain to the sun and back 13 times. If everyone in the world did this, the Skytrain could be sent to the sun and back 421 times.

Energy monitoring was enabled by PulseTM online energy management software.  Real-time energy tracking helps optimize energy efficiency and catch anomalies or operational problems as they occur. It also enables the comparison of performance to other similar buildings and as a measurement tool for retrofitting. Typical Pulse Energy clients have medium to large commercial buildings and use the software to improve energy efficiency by 5% to 25%.