Blackout’s 10th anniversary: Conservation still vital
On August 14th, 2003, conservation was on every politician’s lips. They spoke the word more times in two days than they had in ten years. But it was conservation by crisis. An overloaded line and a cascading power outage had rolled across the northeastern States and Ontario, plunging us into a blackout that lasted several days. Even as power was restored, the grid was fragile and conservation remained the watchword for many days afterward.
We proved ourselves to be resilient. We pitched in to help others and even celebrated a simpler and quieter time by holding barbecues to cook our thawing meat and by lying out under the stars. The better side of the crisis was immortalized in Mike Ford’s sweet song, “The Stars Shone on Toronto.” We responded as a community.
In the months that followed, the call for conservation continued. As Executive Director of the Conservation Council of Ontario, I had a perfect view on how crisis can shape policy. I had often said that the key to success as an environmentalist is to learn an issue and then wait for the crisis, and this was a true case in point.
Two months after the blackout, a new government was elected on a strong conservation platform and with a clear mandate. They soon set up a new initiative, Ontario Conserves, with a multi-ministry conservation panel chaired by the then Minister of Energy, Donna Cansfield. The government promised to promote “a culture of conservation” in Ontario that would cover air, earth, energy, and water. In response, the Conservation Council launched “We Conserve” as a public call to engage and support voluntary leadership for conservation.
Mandates, no matter how strong, soon get watered down in the face of reality and this was quickly the case with Ontario Conserves. The government initiative that could have introduced a true culture of conservation (the efficient use of resources) to all participating ministries was soon scoped down to be energy conservation alone. And energy conservation soon became electricity conservation.
No matter, we thought, electricity conservation is a good place to start.
In 2004, the government set up the Ontario Power Authority, and under it a Conservation Bureau headed by Ontario’s first Chief Conservation Officer, Peter Love. The Conservation Bureau ran several campaigns including sending discount coupons to every household in Ontario. Critics called it a waste of money, but dollar for dollar it produced much more lasting results at a fraction of the cost of a new nuclear plant. In 2009, the Conservation Bureau was phased out and the responsibility for reporting on conservation was passed over to the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario.
In the beginning, people were rewarded for using less electricity. If you used less than 500 kWh a month, you paid less and if you used over 1,000 kWh a month you were billed a surcharge. Somewhere along the line, the decision was made to focus on peak load instead of overall consumption, and we are now billed different rates based on when we use electricity instead of how much we used.
The government also made a commitment to introduce smart meters into every home. The cost was over $1 billion and on their own the smart meters don’t save a single watt of electricity. But they facilitate time-of-use billing, and they can help people find where they waste energy and how to lower their bills. It has been an important investment in creating that culture of conservation.
The utilities were given a huge role to play in promoting conservation. It may seem a bit counter-intuitive to have the companies in charge of selling us electricity also run the programs to convince us to use less electricity, but it worked. The hydro companies were able to roll out some excellent programs and incentives, and they able to recover their costs with provincial funding.
For our part, the Conservation Council looked at how we could use campaigns to engage people in conservation. We picked a hot-button issue: air-conditioned sidewalks. People were ticked off that while they were turning up their thermostats at home, so many stores were super chilled and the doors left wide open to attract customers. It was a cheap advertising gimmick for the big chains, but a huge symbol of waste. We came up with a simple campaign, “Doors Closed”, to put a poster in the window of every store that would close its door to save energy. The response was tremendous, and for a mere $3,000 in printing costs some 24 organizations helped to distribute 5,000 posters to stores in 16 communities across Ontario.
In summary, the past ten years have been one great and glorious experiment in conservation. We experimented with conservation authorities, infrastructure, technology, incentives, and programs. And when you look beyond the obsession with the ROI for individual conservation programs, the results are impressive. Ontario’s peak demand for electricity was 157 terawatt hours in 2005. That number has declined ten percent to 141.3 TWh in 2012. Sure, there may be economic factors to consider as well, but even at a household level, our consumption rate has dropped from an average of 1,000 kilowatt hours per month to around 750 kWh.
The bottom line is that conservation works, and that there is a lasting behavioural benefit from all these programs and incentives. Because of conservation, we have eliminated much of the pressure for new nuclear reactors or gas plants and saved an estimated $4 billion. We have given ourselves some much needed breathing room for planning a clean and cost-effective future.
Chris Winter is a leading advocate for a conserver society in Canada. He is currently spearheading a national initiative, Canada Conserves, to promote conservation and conservation leadership across Canada.
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