The town has issued the following notice on its website:
Be advised that Wellesley Town Hall will be closing at 1pm on Friday June 4, 2010 in order to conduct an inter-departmental energy assessment of the building. Stay tuned to see our results!
I proposed the same at my office today but it didn’t fly.
Chris Ketchen, deputy director of general government for the town, explains that at the heart of the Power-Up/Power-Down exercise is the GroundedPower technology that Wellesley began using recently to track power usage (the Globe has a more detailed write-up of that program).
Ketchen writes: “We will attempt to ‘Power Up’ the building and measure how much electricity the Town uses during the business day when equipment is being used (e.g. computers, unit-vents, copiers, etc.). Then we will attempt to ‘Power-Down’ in stages by turning various equipment off by category throughout the building, and measure the results at various benchmarks. The exercise starts at 2PM, after a building-wide staff briefing, and will continue until we have ‘Powered-Down’ to the maximum extent that we can. Using the Town Hall as a test-case, our goal is to identify what categories of equipment consume the greatest electricity building-wide and develop policies on usage accordingly.”
Friday’s exercise is part of Wellesley’s plan to slash carbon emissions by 20% for government operations by 2013, a goal approved at Town Meeting this year.
Sort of – they powered down for a test, not to save one afternoon’s worth of energy.
They have a realtime electricity monitoring device you probably know about, and by firing everything up and then shutting it down bit b y bit they could tell exactly how much energy everything used. This is really useful when you’re trying to save energy / emissions – you know what to focus on and what not to bother about.
I have the device in my home too – as part of the DPW trial and it is fascinating. I already discovered that one of my 2 AC units is about half the efficiency of the other – time for a new AC (and time to save some money, energy and emissions).
Quentin Prideaux