Efficiency labelling for water fixtures

The Speech from the Throne, opening a new session of the Ontario legislature was delivered March 8, and among the new programs announced is the Water Opportunities Act.

The Act is envisioned as a vehicle to make Ontario “the North American leader in the development and sale of new technologies and services for water conservation and treatment.”

Generally speaking, when government comes out with a new program related to conservation and the environment, stakeholder groups are quick to lament that the program doesn’t go far enough or that it completely fails to address the problem. However, this time water conservation groups were generally positive. In a media release, Great Lakes United even suggested some strategies the Ontario Government may wish to pursue, one of which was to launch an efficiency labelling program for water fixtures.

However, a quick visit to the Web would indicate that such standards are already in place. Natural Resources Canada’s water conservation Web page suggests that low-flow showerheads are those that deliver less than 9.5 litres per minute compared to older models that use 14 litres per minute. Similarly, low-flow toilets use six litres per flush or less.

These may not be hard and fast definitions, similar to the Energy Star® program wherein products must meet certain energy use and efficiency criteria before they can display the Energy Star® symbol. However, if they aren’t hard and fast, then establishing such a program would be in the best interests of water conservation.

Go shopping, save the planet

Buying stuff now provides a triple benefit: you own something new, you help the economy recover and you save the planet. Not bad for an afternoon at the mall. AIR MILES® has announced the formation of a new division, AIR MILES for Social Change, designed “to help organizations more effectively inspire socially responsible lifestyle choices among Canadians by harnessing the power of reward miles.”

AIR MILES for Social Change is partnering with government agencies, energy utilities, transit service providers, and non-governmental organizations. According to the news release, these partnerships “leverage the value of AIR MILES reward miles and the program’s reach into more than 10 million Canadian households to create incentives for energy conservation, public transit, waste reduction and other sustainable choices to shift the attitudes and behaviours of Canadians in favour of healthy living and the environment.”

Details about the new program are scant, but “an innovative energy conservation relationship with the Ontario Power Authority is set to be announced in April, 2010. This joint program will help engage Ontarians to take simple conservation actions that will have lasting financial rewards and help fight climate change.”

Star Power

Home owners in Ontario and Saskatchewan are thanking their lucky stars.

Just like your kitchen appliances, houses can be given the coveted Energy Star designation, too. By meeting a list of requirements, licensed Energy Star builders, like EnerQuality in Ontario, can put the famous blue star logo on their projects.

In this pilot project, to achieve Energy Star rating homes must be at least 30% more energy-efficient than provincial building code requirements. That translates to huge savings in home energy use and cost – by keeping an eye on efficiency during construction.

The McGill family in Ontario reports paying much less for their monthly bills in their new Energy Star home than their previous one – which was 1,000 square feet smaller. They even say their health is better, which they attribute to their higher-efficiency air filter.

Sounds fantastic, but is it actually done? By bits and pieces. Tankless water heaters, Energy Star-rated windows and doors, proper insulation – among other things. They also install low-flush toilets, and low-flow showerheads to keep water usage down.

Recently, EnerQuality Homes upped the ante by creating the Greenhouse initiative. You might consider it a “hybrid” between Energy Star and LEED status.  Greenhouse aims to conserve energy as well as materials. EnerQuality president Corey McBurney says most houses are “overbuilt.”

“Greenhouses” will take advantage of optimal-value engineering; they use recycled products, and reduce the amount of lumber used to make houses.

With such cost-effective, energy efficient programs available, it’s no wonder homeowners are looking so starry-eyed.

Microsoft Launches Home Energy Monitoring Tools

Microsoft would like you to become more energy efficient – and they would like to get you there. A brand new, and free, trial application called Microsoft Hohm allows users to monitor and understand how they are using energy in their homes. It will also make suggestions on how users can cut consumption, manage their energy – and save money.

Hohm prepares a personalized energy report, with personalized recommendations. It asks why, when, and how much energy you use, and determine where energy can be cut back, and where home improvements can be made. It also reveals your total annual energy costs; helpful graphs and pie charts make the results easier to understand.

The website is filled with tips on how homeowners can reduce energy and money wastage. There is also a community for Holm members who can support each other, give each other suggestions, feedback, and words of advice.

Microsoft has partnered with four west coast utilities for the project: Puget Sound Energy, Sacramento Municipal Utility District, Seattle City Light and Xcel Energy. Customers of these utilities will have a more in-depth energy report.

If the name Hohm conjures images of yogic meditation, you might be on the wrong track; the developer of the software says the unusual spelling is a pun; the electrical unit of resistance is Ohm.

However, one might argue that the software’s purpose is to live in greater harmony; something with rather “Omm”-like qualities.

Conservation TIPS for the summer

Summer is officially here!

Summer means warmer days and evenings, more daylight, and afternoons on the patio. It also means energy use patterns change, and with it, strategies to use less and conserve should change too.

Natural Resources Canada’s Office of Energy Efficiency has released its conservation TIPS for the summer, and there’s loads of good and useful suggestions in there. One major area for Canadians to consider is their summer appliances. Do they need to be gas-powered?

Your mower, trimmer(s), leaf blower, and others consume a lot of fuel and produce significant amounts of carbon dioxide. Electric mowers and trimmers work equally well while consuming proportionately much less energy.

Even better are manual versions. Do you really need a high-octane blower when your broom is right there? And there’s the added benefit of being whisper-quiet. You know how your neighbour’s dog drives you crazy, barking to be let in, then out, and over again? Same idea.

Canadians can also reduce the energy consumed by their indoor appliances. First of all, why are you using your oven so much in the summer, anyway? In winter, sure, a pot of chili hits the spot – but during a heat wave? Cool down with cool foods.

If you do use your oven, make sure the range fan is turned on (which many forget), which doesn’t just keep smells in the kitchen. It effectively vents excess heat from your kitchen to outside, where it doesn’t stifle, and you’re less likely to turn on the A/C.

By switching a few energy habits into summer-mode, you can beat the heat and the energy bills!

Smart meters a smart choice for curbing consumption

As electricity consumption reaches record highs, utility companies and governments are searching for eco-friendly alternatives to the energy crisis. 

Smart meters can provide real-time readings of energy use, providing more detailed information than conventional meters. Many energy companies throughout North America and Europe are in the process of replacing manual meter readings with these instant, automated systems. 

If consumers know the time-of-use prices for its energy consumption, the hope is that they will think twice before doing a load of laundry or running the dishwasher during peak evening hours. The long-term goal will be to reduce overall electricity demand, therefore requiring less generating capacity. 

Smart meters can cost anywhere from $250 to $500 depending on features. Critics argue that the cost of installing the new smart meters does not justify the expense, especially when used by low energy consumers, such as homeowners. 

The cost of managing old meters is about 50 cents per unit, compared to the nearly $5 per unit for the smart meters. Although expensive to install, the idea is that meters will save money by eliminating the process of sending paid employees on-site to manually read or manage the meters.  

Energy savings are expected to be around 10 percent per household, but in order for the system to be truly effective, the smart meters need to be coupled with a sliding pricing rate and data feedback to consumers. 

With cooperation and ingenuity, smart meters can be another effective step towards reducing energy consumption.

Smart AND beautiful: new fridges score double points

Worldwide, households are rejoicing: the smart fridge is finally here! Do smart fridges make dinner, notify you when the milk needs replacing, or keep a grocery list? 

Well, no. But they will save you money. And that’s nearly as good. 

Refrigerators are big energy suckers and account for 36% of electricity consumed by all domestic appliances. But if a fridge gets a brain, it will know when to adjust power use to match needs of the grid without us having to lift a finger. 

Energy efficient refrigeration can use up to 70% less energy than existing, less efficient models. By redistributing the energy load more evenly, extra power stations won’t be needed to keep the grid stable, allowing more opportunity to use alternative energy sources.

Say it’s time to defrost the fridge. The fridge will do it for you, and save money by delaying the task from happening during peak energy usage hours. So you’ll pay for the same amount of energy at a lower rate later in the day. And your fridge will defrost itself while you’re in bed watching the Late Show.

But wait! There’s more! 

Smart fridges have cousins and cute brothers that will also be joining the party. Soon, smart washers, dryers, dishwashers and ranges will be available, complete with displays that notify users of rate changes and critical peak pricing to avoid energy use at those times. 

“Sorry dear, dinner is late because the stove won’t turn on.”

Pretty cool.

Micromanaging…good for energy, bad for people

While most employees don’t appreciate their boss checking on their progress every step of the way, when it comes to energy consumption, micromanaging is the way to go…and save.

As the summer months heat up, so does the energy grid. 

Air conditioning use is in highest demand on sweltering weekday afternoons. So what’s the solution? In both Canada and the US, governments are offering a Peak Saver program. Consumers are given a free programmable thermostat which is also installed and programmed free of charge.

It gives consumers the power to adjust their energy consumption, automatically reducing consumption when no one’s around. Out of the home or office unexpectedly? No problem—the thermostat can be adjusted via the Internet.

And in the blistering heat, utility companies like Hydro Ottawa, also have the option to “cycle” or remotely access your air conditioning unit to reduce electricity use for short periods of time. Generally, it means that the compressor gets turned off for about 10 minutes each half-hour. 

The fan continues to run, meaning that the change in temperature is hardly noticeable. The temperature inside generally falls no more than 2 degrees. So utility companies can manage the sweltering heat outside without having to activate more power plants, and still keep consumers cool and happy on the inside. 

Even better, energy savings can be as much as 10%, so there won’t be any blistering energy bills that leave you hot under the collar.

Will the end of oil force greener lifestyles?

Mom said not to eat anything that’s been on the floor, but what about the roof? Green roofs are sprouting up worldwide as Peak Oil is starting to force a movement of eating locally.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that approximately 15 percent of the world’s food is grown in urban areas. This number is expected to rise as the population increases, food prices sky-rocket, and environmental awareness swells.

But in places like Cuba and other developing nations, the new Green Movement is old news. When the Soviet Union fell apart in the early 1990s, Cuba’s oil supply was cut off, reducing rations of imported foods. Cuba was forced to become self-sufficient and began planting thousands of cooperative gardens. They have been hitting pay dirt ever since.

Cuba may have been forced to go green, but now busy cities in North America are starting to pay attention. Vertical urban gardens are blooming on rooftops, beside parking lots and in vacant and abandoned spaces. Some architects are even beginning to design urban buildings to incorporate these rooftop gardens right from their inception.

And this ‘growing trend’ is catching on in Egypt, Singapore and Russia. Increasing oxygen production in some of these congested areas is nothing to cough at either. Energy, economic and environmental payoffs make vertical farming such a fruitful solution.

Vegetables and chickens: coming soon to a rooftop near you.

A quest to save the planet through urban planning

What do you get when you cross an environmentalist, an industry chairperson and a former politician? Well, you could probably think of a few answers to this, but if you put a whole group of them together, one answer could be QUEST (Quality Urban Energy Systems of Tomorrow).

It might sound like an odd group of people, or “strange bedfellows” as Shahrzad Rahbar, Vice-President, Strategy and Operations of the Canadian Gas Association (CGA), describes it. But it’s an important mix of people, especially in light of what the group is trying to do. QUEST believes the need for action on climate change must be factored in to urban design and that Canada’s GHG reduction targets can be met through integrated energy systems throughout all of Canada’s communities. QUEST’s holistic view of urban planning includes energy systems that accommodate multiple energy types and long term planning that reduces the urban carbon footprint, such as higher density development, properly matching energy types with energy use, managing surplus heat and converting waste into energy. It’s a big-picture approach that will take time for governments to embrace. But the ball is rolling. Fast.

Let’s go back to the beginning. About two years ago, CGA had been involved in a series of conversations with the federal government regarding mitigating climate change and reducing the industrial carbon footprint of the energy ‘distribution’ sector. It was an ongoing conversation in which one important factor was soon realized to be missing from the equation. “You see, in the gas world, two-thirds of emissions are from end-use and one third is from exploration, production, transmission and distribution,” explains Rahbar. “The distribution piece of that one third is less than one per cent. So we had an ongoing conversation about managing reductions in the less than one per cent of the oil and gas upstream side.”

Initially, CGA had very little luck in generating a fruitful conversation with the government about this end-use piece of the equation. QUEST started out as nothing more than a conversation between Rahbar and Ken Ogilvie, former executive director of the NGO, Pollution Probe. CGA initially approached Pollution Probe to see if they felt their concerns about the demand piece of the GHG equation were valid and to see if it was worth trying to spark a serious conversation. Turns out it was.

First Steps

Both Ogilvie and Rahbar turned to their own networks for support and insight into the “end-use” concept of GHG mitigation and eventually, what was an informal nod of agreement by many heads, turned into a focused, productive and official brainstorming session in Niagara on the Lake, that later resulted in QUEST’s first white-paper on the subject. Participants walked out of that meeting with a reenergized conviction of the importance of “end-use” in conversations about emission reduction. “We knew the solution was to have an integrated approach to land-use, transportation, water, waste and energy,” said Rahbar. “Good things happen when you look at those things as a whole instead of the silos we have been viewing them as.”

Ogilvie, a former competitive chess player, relates QUEST’s proposition to his game of choice. “It’s one thing to know how all the chess pieces move and to start moving them individually,” explains the QUEST consultant, “but it’s another thing to understand that the pieces can work together harmoniously and you’ll be playing a much more sophisticated game.”

From Ogilvie’s perspective, after walking out of the Niagara-on-the-Lake meeting, one of the big challenges wasn’t necessarily getting participants to recognize the need for a holistic, integrated view on sustainable communities, but rather figuring out how to coherently bring everything together. During that first meeting, QUEST didn’t even exist as an official organization and all the participants had come from disparate backgrounds; there were people working on green buildings and net zero energy homes, leaders of associations for solar, wind and biomass as well as big players like Ontario Power Generation.

“We had a big idea of what we were shooting for but no real coherence,” explains Ogilvie, adding that if someone is an executive director of an association, it is that person’s job to help its members by lobbying for good policy and providing technical support. But it’s not that person’s job to go and plan an urban centre. “As an association leader, you may be aware of how different technologies can and should work together, but your mandate is dealing specifically with your own technologies. So who would try to quantify some of the benefits of integration, get politicians interested and disseminate the information?”

QUEST would. And it did. The organization continued to grow, albeit organically with no fixed organizational structure or budget. When the organization began, there wasn’t as much of an appetite for the end-use discussion, and now, three years later, the policy landscape has shifted. Governmental entities such as the Ontario Minister of Energy and the House of Commons Standing Committee on Natural Resources are actively listening to QUEST’s ideas. Cities like Guelph, Ontario and Vancouver, British Columbia are already making efforts towards accomplishing integrated energy systems. Karen Farbridge, Mayor of Guelph, is piloting a Community Energy Plan that shares the QUEST mission and vision and has major utility companies on board. She is preparing a guide so the knowledge sharing process between cities can begin.

Gaining Momentum

Today QUEST is chaired by Mike Harcourt, the former Mayor of Vancouver and 30th Premier of B.C. Harcourt’s first interaction with QUEST was the Niagara-on-the-Lake meeting but prior to that, in 2003, he was part of a Canadian team in the International Sustainable Urban Systems Design Competition which was held in Tokyo. The competition’s focus is planning for long-term sustainability and Harcourt’s team, Cities PLUS, ended up winning the competition. The team, which was sponsored by CGA, used Vancouver as a model to demonstrate the transformation of a large urban centre into a sustainable community.

“We put together a document that showed how you could pick the future you want,” says Harcourt, who was asked to Chair QUEST last year. “The idea is, instead of forecasting where a given city will be in the future, we did backcasting where you pick your future and work backwards to create the path you need to get there.”

So how far into the future is the energy utopia that QUEST envisions? “I think it’s going to happen very quickly, like before 2020,” says Harcourt, adding that within ten years he envisions a dramatic change of attitudes among consumers that will be analogous to changing perceptions about smoking. A few decades ago, the Marlborough Man was considered cool. Now that people are aware of the harmful affects of smoking, it is very uncool to smoke. “The same thing will happen to people that drive SUVs and live in big mansions in the suburbs that can’t be served by transit,” Harcourt adds. “People will think ‘What? You live like that?’”

In fact, the shift has already started. According to Harcourt, 75 per cent of new housing construction around Vancouver over the last 15 years has been multiple family and only 25 per cent have been single family. “You’ll see people living close by to where they work, play and shop, and in very attractive apartments in green buildings that use different energy approaches. It will be a cool way to live for a mass majority of Canadians.”

But for many other parts of Canada, we still have a ways to go. Take Rahbar’s neighbourhood for example. A few years ago she moved into a suburban community in Ottawa and she’s noticing an increasing number of the ironically named “smart centres” replacing open fields; “You know the ones that have these huge box stores, that in order to get from one store to the other you have to drive,” explains a flustered Rahbar. “I’m cognizant that my choices as an individual are pretty limited. I’ve got the programmable thermostat and the curly bulbs and I feel good about them, but the impact is nothing. The big difference lies in your land-use patterns, transportation models and energy systems.”

Ken, on the other hand, is lucky to be living parts of the dream now in his compact mixed-use community in Toronto. He and his spouse haven’t needed to own a car for six years because everything is connected by transit. “I think I have a magnificent quality of life because I go out the door and know the shop is down the road and I know people down the street,” says Ken proudly. “Not everyone is lucky; they have families so not everyone can get rid of a car. But what we can do is start designing our communities so they make it easier for people to make individual choices that make a difference.”

So with all the support the group is receiving and all the changes happening around Canada, what exactly is the group up to now? Well, after the Niagara-on-the-Lake workshop was a second Victoria B.C. workshop in fall of 2008 where participants labored to transform solutions from the realm of examples to the realm of actions. The organization has produced several white papers and the latest one makes use of scenario planning to determine the big “what’s next.” The two outcomes of that ended up being implementation and value measurement.

“So with implementation we leverage the policy attention that we are now getting federally, provincially and municipally into facilitating the actors that need to come together to make this happen,” explains Rahbar. The next stage is quantifying the benefits, which includes identifying suites of policy measures required to transition towards integrated energy systems.

In 2009, QUEST will continue its efforts by engaging economists and policy makers across Canada with engineers and academics to do the actual transportation, land-use and economic modeling required to move forward.

“The real challenge now is implementation,” says Harcourt. “It’s a whole different way of thinking and acting but I think it’s going to happen very quickly. There is urgency. We have a planet to save.”

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