City of Ottawa Meets Environmental Challenge with ManagingEnergy.com

City of Ottawa Meets Environmental Challenge with ManagingEnergy.com

Nestled along the shore of the Ottawa River, which straddles the border between Ontario and Quebec, Canada’s capital City of Ottawa stands proudly beside the historic Rideau Canal. As home to Canada’s federal government, the city is under constant pressure to set a good example for the rest of the country. Environmental stewardship and sustainability are high on the list of the city’s priorities. With energy use accounting for a major portion of GHG emissions in the city, it was clear that the city needed to manage energy use properly. That task of finding an appropriate energy management tool fell to Paul Samborsky, P.Eng., a Senior Project Manager in Building Engineering & Energy Management Unit of the Building Technical Support Group, in the Public Works Department for the City of Ottawa.

In 2000, Ottawa and the surrounding municipalities amalgamated. With a current population of over 900,000 people, the City has a portfolio of over eleven hundred facilities and manages almost two thousand accounts. In the early days, the only tools used to track energy consumption were spreadsheets and an old DOS-based system that could not analyze more than a few accounts at a time. “At that time we could tell you how much the bills were but the details were often unavailable”, said Mr. Samborsky. “To reduce our energy consumption, we first needed to know exactly where the money was going and why. Only then could we start to plan on making the improvements”.

In 2002, the City chose to work with Efficiency Engineering in the development of an Energy Accounting package known as BOSS. This was the predecessor to what’s now known as ManagingEnergy.com, (MEC). “In my opinion”, said Paul, “the folks at ManagingEnergy.com were, and still are, visionaries who know how to build a solid application and also understand energy management in detail.” referring to MEC’s approach to managing energy costs and consumption. More than just an Energy Accounting application, MEC provides a vast array of tools that have given the Energy Management Unit the ability to examine their entire portfolio in detail as a means to identify unique controllable elements that can be addressed to reach their ultimate goal – to reduce energy consumption, which in the case of Ottawa, includes natural gas, water and electricity.

Managing Energy Inc, the software spinoff of Efficiency Engineering developed its software using the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. This means that the software resides on a central server accessible through a standard web browser. This was exceptionally attractive to the City’s team and solved their bandwidth and software upgrade problems at the same time. Now anyone with authority can access the system quickly and with ease. And because MEC hosts and maintains the application and hardware, all Paul and his team have to do is add data and use the system. MEC takes care of all the rest including backup.

Developed for large portfolio owners and managers, MEC contains unique functionality specific to the challenges of managing multiple buildings from a central location.  In the case of the city of Ottawa, few features match the benefits of the combination of the universal search function and the ability to import photos and documentation of buildings and their equipment. “By simply using a search criteria, we can find anything within seconds”, said Samborsky. “Once found, we can analyze historical trends, get detailed reports of the utility accounts and view images, drawings, photos and other documentation associated with that asset within seconds”.

Within the Energy Management unit, there are only a handful of day-to-day users of the system but their impact on the bottom line is far from trivial. In addition to using the information in the system to help produce accurate quarterly and annual utility budgets, this team is able to strategically plan retrofits to best utilize their capital expenditure budget to get the largest energy reduction for their investment. “Without MEC, we would have been guessing at best”, explained Samborsky. “It’s because we have consistently proven the numbers using MEC, the city has provided substantial budgets for energy saving capital improvements”. The city has spent over $7M on energy reduction projects to date. This has resulted in almost $5M in energy savings over the last six years. And because these savings are cumulative, the amount saved each year will continue to grow. In this current fiscal year, the city expects to save almost $2M, without any additional capital injection. The current goal for the City is to fund projects that have an overall Return on Investment (ROI) of 20%. “Much better than putting the money in any bank”, Samborsky said. “These are aggressive returns and we have managed to maintain these numbers year over year”.

As a specific example, data from MEC is being used to create BEPI’s or Building Energy Performance Indexes on hundreds of Ottawa’s facilities. Using these indexes, it became clear that the city’s arenas were by far the biggest consumer of electricity per square foot throughout the portfolio. By drilling down through facility details, analyzing lighting, HVAC and other energy consuming equipment, it was possible to isolate High Intensity Discharge (HID) lighting as the primary consumer of electricity. Over the course of the past two years, Ottawa has systematically replaced HID lighting with fluorescent lighting product. This resulted in an average cost savings of $3,500 per year for each arena. Based on the cost of the retrofit, the simple ROI is 5 years. Combine these statistics with other benefits such as reduced maintenance costs, better performance and the ability to add motion sensors to automatically turn lights off and on when required (not feasible with HID lighting systems) it is clear that this is a very lucrative investment.

Paul will proudly be the first to admit that these statistics would not be possible without a total energy management plan and the hard work of everyone involved. He does, however, credit MEC for being the catalyst for getting things started and the glue that holds the program together. Despite the positive results over the several years of using MEC, the City of Ottawa is looking forward to even more benefits from the system. “Even though the system has easily paid for itself, we know we’ve only brushed the surface with MEC”, concluded Samborsky. “I know there is so much more that we can do with the system and we intend to gradually do more with it as time and manpower allows. The more we put into it, the more value we receive as a community as that information is used within our group and is distributed to other city partners.

ManagingEnergy.com is an enterprise class application accessible on the internet through a standard web browser. Subscriptions are made available to property owners and managers who have large portfolios of building and wish to reduce their energy costs and consumption while balancing the need to be more environmentally conscious through reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

More than just an Energy Accounting application, MEC provides a complete set of tools designed to provide its users with a holistic approach to energy management.

To learn more about MEC’s approach to Energy Management and a detailed description of the product offering, please visit our website at www.managingenergy.com.