Town Hall closing early Friday to save energy

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.