MOOSE JAW — Some city councillors are excited by the latest data showing that Moose Jaw’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions fell in 2024, especially since those reductions led to financial savings.
Dean Clarke, president/CEO of Greenwave Innovations, and Erik DeRosier, engineer and energy management advisor, spoke during city council’s recent executive committee meeting about both organizations’ efforts last year to reduce GHG emissions in Moose Jaw.
According to a council report, by the end of 2024, the city — using Greenwave’s technology — reduced its emissions by 11.2 per cent over the 2019 baseline.
Greenwave has attempted to interest the public in the city’s emissions-reduction efforts not with dollars and cents but by showing real-time numbers on digital dashboard TVs in 10 city-owned buildings, Clarke said.
“The City of Moose Jaw is the only Canadian municipality collecting this data and displaying it minute by minute, so it’s an accomplishment to showcase this,” he remarked.
For example, if people visited the Temple Gardens Centre — formerly the Events Centre — recently, they may have seen data showing that the building was using 475 kilowatts (kW) of electricity, 19 cubic metres of natural gas per minute and 109 litres of water per minute, a slide from Clarke’s presentation showed.
Furthermore, during the past 30 days, the building used 458 kWs of electricity, while solar panels generated 109.5 kWs of electricity over three days, data that venue staff can monitor in real time.
Moreover, in every building, employees can monitor equipment in real time and potentially predict when items need to be replaced before they fail, Clarke said.
Overall, since 2019, Greenwave’s technology has eliminated 3,905 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (C02e), equal to 2,611 households’ annual electricity use, Clarke’s presentation said, while monitoring devices reduced the loss of water in city-owned buildings by 5,557,007 litres or 2.2 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
Clarke also showed data comparing SaskPower’s projected GHG emissions reduction numbers up to 2030 to those of the federal government’s, pointing out that “discrepancies” exist between both parties’ reported and projected electrical consumption intensity targets since Ottawa’s projections are different than SaskPower’s by 233 C02e per kilowatt hour.
“We hope SaskPower is meeting their goals and targets. (However), we decided to use the federal government’s national inventory numbers, which are slightly higher, which puts us a little behind track for our 2025 goals (by 28 per cent),” he added.
“So … we will do some more investigating to see why those numbers are trending away from each other.”
Coun. Patrick Boyle pointed to Greenwave’s electrical utility analysis report, which showed that since 2022, Moose Jaw had saved $554,190 in expenses. He said that this data was “the real value” of what council wanted from this initiative since it provided significant savings.
“So we’re trending in the right direction with savings,” he remarked, adding he appreciated hearing how Greenwave was developing the ability to identify natural gas leaks in real time and potentially shut down those valves to prevent leakage into adjacent rooms.
Coun. Chris Warren inquired about whether Moose Jaw would see financial rebates from its solar panels and whether the city could store that electricity for its consumption.
Clarke replied that the city would receive a credit on its bills from the solar panels, while the energy must be used and cannot be stored, although that could happen during an expansion of renewable technology and growth in the province’s smart grid.
Coun. Jamey Logan said this data allows council and administration to prioritize their capital projects and decide what to do in the future using performance-based maintenance strategies.
“Seeing all this, I’m hopeful that it’s going to return our ($1.364 million) investment to us,” he added.
The next executive committee meeting is Monday, April 28.
