The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
A new pilot project will determine if utility customers who have "smart" meters installed to track their energy consumption will better manage their energy use. This week, Senator Tommy Banks announced the Government of Canada's contribution of approximately $150,000 to the Pay-As-You-Go Smart Metering Project. The project, the first of its kind in western Canada, also introduces the pay-as-you-go concept to energy purchases in Alberta. The 500 residential customers who volunteer for the project, to be conducted in Drumheller and Grande Prairie, will be able to prepay their electricity with a smart card (similar to a prepaid telephone card) and monitor their power usage in real time. "Electricity delivered to the home is one of the few things that most of us use before we pay for it," said Senator Banks. "The pay-as-you-go system could be an important added incentive to conserve energy and reduce emissions that contribute to climate change." Projects such as this one can be a significant step in helping Canada meet its climate change objectives and the One-Tonne Challenge goal of reducing individual greenhouse (GHG) emissions by 20 percent. In Canada, this metering concept originated with Woodstock Hydro, which installed smart meters on a voluntary basis in selected homes in the southwestern Ontario city. The City of Woodstock reports that these households are saving about 15 percent in electricity costs compared with homes using traditional billing methods, because users can more closely monitor their energy use and take individual measures to reduce it. The goal of the Alberta project is to determine if this technology can produce the same energy savings in other communities as those found in Woodstock. Since residential electricity consumption represents a significant percentage of Canada's GHG emissions, a wide-scale pay-as-you-go system could reduce emissions substantially. "By providing people with real-time information on how much electricity they are using, customers have control over their energy consumption," said Woodstock Hydro Services Inc. President Garry Roth.
