While the weekend emergency alert sent many Calgarians scurrying through their homes looking for every amp of power to spare, the bright lights of the downtown left many wondering what was being done in the core to curb power consumption.

That was the question brought up by Ward 14 Coun. Peter Demong during Question Period at Tuesday’s Public Hearing meeting of council.

“Over the weekend, Albertans endured extremely cold temperatures and calls from the Alberta Electric System Operator (AESO) to limit energy use to prevent the need for rotating outages,” he said.

“I’ve seen many comments about how our downtown continued to be lit while residents in Calgary limited their use.”

Coun. Demong asked what measures are at the city’s disposal to discourage unnecessary energy use on commercial properties – particularly those buildings downtown.  He also asked what actions the City of Calgary took during this time.

AESO issued a grid alert on Saturday, and a confluence of events elevated that into an emergency alert Saturday evening. They said once the emergency alert was issued, power use across Alberta immediately dropped by 100 MW, and by a total of 200 MW a few minutes later.

CEMA Chief Sue Henry said that they’re very closely integrated with different agency members across Calgary, including Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) Calgary, which represents many of the downtown buildings.

In a statement sent to LiveWire Calgary, BOMA said that when the grid alerts were issued, many downtown buildings took steps to reduce their electrical load.

“Most downtown office buildings closely manage their electricity use as both an environmental and a cost-savings strategy year-round,” BOMA’s email response read.

“This means that every evening and weekend they are using a fraction (in many cases 40% less) of their usual demand, while the opposite is true for households. A number of downtown towers also participate in existing provincial programs for shedding load when the grid is stressed, and responded to these requests over the weekend.”

Not a significant draw

The BOMA response went on to say that most of the lights on downtown buildings are controlled by tenants, and often on motion sensors. They said lights could mistakenly be left on in some buildings, but that quite often overnight sweeps of floors mean lights are turned off.

“Second, in today’s day and age where buildings have largely converted to LED lighting, these are not a significant draw on electricity. While lights are the most visible representation of electrical use in a building, they are responsible for about 8% of the electricity in the average building,” they email read.

“The more impactful measures that were taken are lowering the various fans, motors, and pumps for heating and water systems that cannot be seen from the street in a way that lighting can.”

They acknowledged that the alerts presented an opportunity to fine tune processes to address lighting automation moving forward.

The City of Calgary’s General Manager of Operational Services, Doug Morgan, said once the alert came out, the City immediately turned off things they considered “no brainer.” That included winter beautification items in front of city hall, he said.

“We also did some back-of-house things where we actually reduce the City of Calgary load, plus actually start to generate power with some of the systems that we have and feed it back into the grid to try to provide more supply for the issue,” he said.

Morgan also said they continue to work on converting to LED lighting, and having the building centre lighting come on only when offices in the building are occupied. There is also an extensive solar power system, Morgan said, and they use that to help power some of the buildings.

Enmax said that during the recent cold snap, a new winter electricity demand record was set at 1,656 MW.

“Following the January 13 Alberta emergency alert, all areas of the city saw a reduced electricity consumption of approximately 60MW total load,” read an email response.

LWC had asked for load density by city geography, but Enmax couldn’t immediately provide those details.