Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America and one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Its population grows by more than 100,000 every year.
Because of this, energy consumption is an increasing problem, and newly constructed highrise buildings are a main contributing factor. The Toronto area already has 5,000 buildings of various sizes and plans are in place to construct another 300 new highrises.
Change through incentives
Toronto Hydro, one of the area’s largest energy providers, launched a comprehensive energy saving incentive programme to help customers monitor their energy consumption.
“Many customers have completed lighting retrofits and are now looking for other areas with huge savings potential,” says Albert Payne, senior project consultant at Toronto Hydro.
“In that search, old booster pumps in highrises have turned out to be one of the blind spots that needed some attention. Thanks in part to Grundfos’ support and expertise, we have developed an auditing programme to really look for the potential energy savings.”
Old, oversized and inefficient pump systems account for 30% of the total amount of wasted energy. A complete upgrade was the obvious solution.
Great savings
Toronto is the capital city of the province of Ontario. In order to reduce the electricity consumption of all of Ontario by a much needed 62GWh within the next few years, the Ontario Power Authority hopes to replace thousands of old pump systems.
“To encourage building owners to replace old pumps with new, high efficiency pumps we offer up to 50% off the total project cost. But in order to qualify for the incentive programme we require a pump audit and Grundfos’ expertise has helped some of our applicants through this process,” explains Jennifer Grado, technical energy consultant at Toronto Hydro.
Focus on booster pumps
Grundfos is currently the only pump manufacturer with a pump-specific audit programme, which allows customers to identify excessive energy consumption.
“Grundfos’ pump audit programme focuses on booster pumps, because old booster pumps are known to be oversized by three to 10 times of a building’s actual need. They are operating at a constant speed and have reached their end of life condition at 15 years of age,” says Feras Marish, business development manager and head of the Grundfos pump audit programme in Canada.
According to Marish, some buildings waste as much as CAD15,000 (£8366) annually on power consumption.
“The average payback time is around two years, but I have had projects where it has been as short a time span as six months. The incentives offered also help make the projects even more attractive with short paybacks and energy savings, and that has really been an eye opener in the market,” says Marish.
During a six month period, Grundfos audited 45 booster pump systems. The resulting pump retrofits allow for a reduction in power consumption by more than 2.5m KWh hours annually, leading to savings of more than CAD300,000 (£167,362) a year.
Read more about pump audit programmes in Toronto here.
More from the Grundfos partnerzone:
- Smart cities secure water supplies while global risks loom
- Water-borne bacteria can cause havoc in hotels and hospitals
- Green and clean solutions to the dairy industry’s wastewater problems
Content on this page is paid for and provided by Grundfos, sponsor of the water hub
