Facilities managers and building operators in Ontario’s elementary and secondary schools have a new tool for tracking energy consumption – one that will soon allow them to benchmark a school’s performance against similarly sized schools anywhere in the province.
Developers of the utility consumption database have now uploaded electricity and natural gas billing information for more than 5,200 individual school properties via an advanced system that receives energy use data directly from the utilities.
“The minute a bill is available to go out from the utility, the database is updated,” says Norm Vezina, who serves as the Ontario Ministry of Education’s energy conservation officer in addition to his role as senior manager, environmental and office services, with the York Catholic District School Board. “It’s actually updated before the school board receives the bill.”
Among its many possible energy management applications, the database should make it easier for school boards to fulfill requirements for reporting annual energy consumption under the Green Energy Act. Although many school boards had already been relying on energy management software, the new database eliminates the steps required to collect billing information across a board’s portfolio and manually enter it into the program. Instead, energy managers and administrators can download applicable information from the larger database.
“Boards have access to it right now for information about their own schools. They can run reports and find out exactly where they stand. That was the first step in the database development,” says Vezina. “The next step, which is almost complete, is to give them the ability to compare themselves against all other schools.”
Reporting and planning mandate
The recently released Ontario regulation 397/11 outlines how public entities in the MUSH (municipalities, universities/colleges, schools and hospitals) sector are to produce mandated energy conservation and demand management plans. This includes tallying and reporting energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) as well as identifying and carrying out conservation and demand management measures that will reduce energy use.
Each municipality’s plan will have to be approved by its city council, while chief administrative officers or chief financial officers must sign-off on plans for hospitals, schools, universities and colleges. Plans must also be made publicly available.
Reporting energy consumption data may necessitate some extra administrative work but it’s expected most of the MUSH sector players should have the ability to comply, especially since the regulation gives an 18-month window – from Dec. 31, 2011, to July 1, 2013 – to submit the first report. Many public entities may also have to invest in new software to calculate GHG emissions.
This might also be characterized as the “peer pressure” aspect of the regulation. For example, the Ministry of Education’s utility consumption database will find and showcase the most energy-efficient facilities and make it difficult for poor performers to hide.
Ideally, too, it should foster communication among the entire group of energy consumers so the leaders can give the laggards some advice and support.
Compliance challenges
Designated public entities have an additional year (until July 1, 2014) to state their energy conservation goals and develop lists of the energy-saving initiatives they will implement, including renewable energy generation and/or solar thermal and ground source energy applications. This plan will have to be updated at five-year intervals.
For schools, this part of the plan presents more of a challenge. Plan writers are trying to look 7.5 years into the future to the document’s June 2019 expiry date.
“Each school board has a list of investment priorities that will reduce their overall energy consumption. However, the challenge for the sector in creating energy management plans is the Ministry announces funding allocations on an annual basis,” says Vezina.
Right now, it’s even a challenge to try to gauge the baseline jumping off point for the plan – energy consumption for the 12 months between July 1, 2013, and July 1, 2014 – because many school boards are just beginning to realize savings from the upgrades and retrofits the Ontario government funded in the past two years. That included money for new lighting, HVAC systems, windows and roofs.
Some municipalities face similar, arguably enviable, challenges.
“We have done a citywide energy audit under FCM (Federation of Canadian Municipalities) funding and, for the last three or four years, we have been doing all the things that were identified,” says Rajan Balchandani, the City of Mississauga’s manager of energy management. “We’re not sure what we will have left to do by 2014.”
Balchandani expects Mississauga’s plan will feature a combination of low-tech and/or no-tech measures and some emerging technology that is becoming more cost-effective.
“We are going to be doing more energy awareness and retro-commissioning programs,” he says. “We will look at new technologies that were not available when the energy audit was done in 2005. One of the areas we’re exploring is LED lighting, which has advanced a lot in the last three years.”
Barbara Carss is editor-in-chief of Canadian Property Management magazine.
