Responsible for managing all schools in Haida Gwaii, British Columbia, School District 50 required a method of benchmarking, monitoring and analyzing real-time energy trends to improve energy effciency and optimize electrical demand. In addition, the school district wanted to provide its facility managers with immediate alerts when heating systems did not operate as commissioned. To this end, Pulse™ energy management software was installed in several schools in the district in the fall of 2009.

Energy consumption patterns at Tahayghen Elementary were immediately noted as unusual when compared to nearby George M. Dawson Secondary. Although 20% smaller, Tahayghen was consuming twice as much energy as Dawson. School administrators were alerted and upon further investigation, the culprit — a malfunctioning boiler — was identified and corrected resulting in a 50% drop in energy consumption, with savings of 22,000 kWh, or more than $2,000, in the first month alone.

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The Government of British Columbia was faced with the challenge of accurately predicting the return on investment for energy conserving infrastructure upgrades across a large portfolio of existing buildings. Pulse™ software is helping the Government address this challenge by providing real-time monitoring and detailed energy analysis for a lighting pilot program which will inform decision making about lighting upgrades across government buildings throughout BC.

The ongoing pilot program at the Jack Davis building in Victoria is testing a number of potential retrofits that reduce lighting energy use, including: automated daylight dimming, motion sensors, and individual workstation switches. Facility and Energy managers at the Jack Davis building use Pulse™ to monitor real-time performance of these retrofits, accurately calculate the resulting energy savings, and determine the economic viability of each retrofit option. The Pulse™ Reporting application automatically calculates the energy performance of each retrofit option and then emails out a graphical report to facility managers and key decision makers on a weekly or monthly basis. A weekly comparison report for the Jack Davis building is shown below.

Lighting Retrofit Weekly Comparison

Pulse™ is also being used to promote energy conservation and track the effectiveness of occupant engagement programs. The Pulse™ Dashboard was a key part of a recent campaign to encourage staff to turn off lights at lunchtime. During the campaign, the Dashboard gave staff real-time feedback about their energy conservation efforts and allowed them to compare their results to colleagues on other floors of the building. The campaign week led to a 35% energy savings by staff using  the daylight dimming system.

“Pulse™ has allowed us to understand the performance of our lighting systems, promote energy conservation amongst our staff members, and track the results of energy conservation initiatives within our building,” said Brooke McMurchy, Strategic Energy Manager at MEMPR “The reporting tools provided by Pulse™ give us a regular snapshot of our building’s performance, without the burden of having our staff spend hours analyzing the data using cumbersome spreadsheets.”

The Village of Hartley Bay and Pulse Energy have installed one of the first complete Micro Smart Grids in North America. This intelligent Micro Smart Grid will enable a real-time demand response system to shed non-essential loads at peak times and avoid bringing multiple diesel generators online unnecessarily. In the future, this demand management system will work in concert with a planned 1MW hydro-electric facility, allowing fuel switching between renewable source electricity and heating oil, depending on whether a surplus of electricity is being produced by the hydro facility.

Hartley Bay, an isolated off-grid community of 160 people, is located on the north coast of British Columbia, Canada. Pulse Energy has been working on energy management programs with the community since 2007, and helping the community to make valuable reductions to its annual energy bills, which can exceed $1 million (or over $10,000 per household per year). This Micro Smart Grid project will bring some of the most advanced energy management technology available to rural and remote communities. Providing energy to rural communities is generally more expensive than urban areas, making it even more critical that they manage their energy as efficiently as possible.

Hartley Bay is the first Micro Smart Grid application of its kind in North America for an entire off-grid community. Pulse™ software makes the Micro Smart Grid more effective, by both enabling demand response and by bringing relevant energy information and analysis to building managers and occupants in a real-time, web-enabled format.

• Community leaders, managers and residents will all have access to Pulse™ software. Leaders can, for the first time, accurately measure the ROI on new energy efficiency equipment, track GHG emissions and measure savings.
• Managers can use the data to monitor community energy performance, fix anomalies, shed loads when necessary and optimize energy consumption and demand.
• Occupants can use the data to engage in and measure the effectiveness of community energy management programs and view their homes energy consumption and demand.

By tracking performance in real time, energy performance can be improved in days rather than years, and results can be communicated to the public via an automated dashboard.

The introduction of a Micro Smart Grid in Hartley Bay will work in concert with the community’s goal of becoming the ‘Greenest First Nation Community in Canada’. Around the world, combining Pulse™ software and automated demand response with diesel electric generation and intermittent renewable energy supplies will enable thousands of rural communities to efficiently use renewable energy, improve the reliability of their power supplies, and reduce their dependence on diesel.

The University of British Columbia (UBC) is one of the greenest campuses in North America. As part of the $35 million Ecotrek program, $6 million were spent on an Enterprise Energy Management (EEM) system and a sophisticated, campus-wide Building Automation System (BAS). The EEM system generates large amounts of data, but the volume and format of those data make them extremely difficult to use for building energy optimization. UBC needed a way to make their energy data actionable and meaningful to operations staff and the campus population.

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