Utility Costs

In reviewing the cost of electricity service in Grande Prairie, I came across a number of alternative providers that will help me save money on my monthly utility bill.  I also found out that a colleague of mine has started an electricity reseller company and is offering some very competitive rates as well.  He forwarded some information to me that I think everyone should consider (see below).

Here's a link to a story that I found really interesting on utility consumption.  It's written by someone who calls himself the Green Canadian.

http://thegreencanadian.blogspot.ca/2009/07/how-low-can-you-go.html. 

At the City Environment Committee, I've asked our Sustainability Manager to ask our local utility providers to include similar information on the utility bills they send out to their customers.  I believe that knowing how your bill compares to an average household will help people to monitor their own usage.  Let's hope they adopt this practice.

As for the letter below, this was sent out to our local MLAs, but the information is meant to be shared.  Chad Mielke is a reputable business owner (and fellow engineer) and I have no problems whatsoever endorsing his business and have no affiliation with Peace Power at all.  I believe we need more competition to keep prices in check.  Perhaps this information will help you save some money on your future electricity bill.
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I am sure you have heard of Peace Power; one of Alberta’s independent boutique retailer of electricity in the province.  Located in Grande Prairie, the company is operated by Chad Mielke.

During February residents of in your ridings of Grande Prairie, Smokey and Wapiti, who are buying electricity from Peace Power paid only 4.6 cents per kWh compared to the governments Regulated Rate Option, provided by Direct Energy at 7.7 cents. 

The Bottom Line?  During February the RRO energy rate is 66% higher compared to buying from Peace Power.

As you most likely are aware, Direct Energy owns the GP franchised territory and is the approved RRO Provider.  But why switch off of Direct?  First of all consumers in your region will save some money and this should be good enough. It is hard to comprehend customers complaining over 2 or 3 dollars added to the cost of transmission when they ignore the potential of saving +$20 last month alone as the difference between Peace and Direct.

Education and awareness are the obvious problem.  We hope that this is one of the key priorities addressed when the RMRC 5 MLA member group assembles.  Consumers need to know, that the government, through a well designed policy, guarantees that every consumer regardless who they select as a retailer will continue to be well serviced by their existing Wires Operator.  The lights will not go out !!!  Government policies have made it easy to switch retailers. 

Want another reason to promote Peace Power in your local market?  

Consider the following:

• DIRECT: Direct Energy has outsourced call center jobs to the Philippians, Financial services moved to India and their marketing operations are run out of Texas in the USA.  Profits on the sale of the RRO are likewise exported for consolidation as part of their world wide income on the Centrica’s balance sheet in the UK.  This is good for the stock holders of Centrica.  (Cut costs, increase prices, consolidate profits)  But it does little for our local Alberta economy.

     

Customers have a choice and we hope that you and other MLAs will start to promote small independent business run by folks like Chad:

• Buy Local (and reduce your cost of electricity).
• Support the private sector (innovation is driven by small business ventures).
• Keep the jobs and profits in Alberta (why not – it just makes good business sense).

If you or other MLAs want to sign up for Peace Power – it is easy:  Just Click Here

Support the private sector by signing up and letting your constituents know that the concept of choice is thriving.   

We hope that you will lend your support to one of your own independent business located in Grande Prairie.

Yours truly, Nick

Nick Clark, Managing Partner

Curbside Recycling Issues

There’s been some discussion over the curbside recycling program and whether or not the additional $4.39 charge for the service is fair, given the fact that we all already pay $7.82 in recycling charges in the city.

I have to admit that I may have mistakenly given bad information regarding the current service. In the Daily Herald Tribune article, it is implied that the entire $7.82 fee goes to Recycle Plus, when in fact that isn’t true. The fee is a combination of efforts between Aquatera and Recycle Plus. Aquatera runs the landfill, Eco-Centre and is in charge of managing the other recycle depots. Recycle Plus collects the material from the depots (blue bin locations) and processes the recyclables by compacting, sorting, transporting and sometimes selling the processed goods.

Recycle Plus has a contract in place with Aquatera for the depot service until the end of 2012. The value of the contract varies depending on how much material is processed. Recycle Plus thinks that the average per household is about $3 per month, while Aquatera feels that the number is closer to $4.50 per household per month.

The additional costs to the consumer are for running recycling services at the Eco Centre and the city landfill. On top of the cardboard, paper, plastic, tin, etc. that we are allowed to recycle in the blue bins, Aquatera offers additional services. Aquatera collects fluorescent light bulbs, batteries, paint, oil and other hazardous material. They also take larger appliances at the landfill and e-waste. The collection and processing of this material also has a cost associated with it.

When I mentioned in the paper that after 2012 some of the costs would drop off, I was referring to the Recycle Plus portion and not the remaining Aquatera portion. I was a little embarrassed that I didn’t make myself clear. It’s difficult when you only have a few minutes after a Council Meeting to provide information to the media.

In any case, there is a little controversy over the overlapping service between implementing the curbside program and the expiration of the Recycle Plus contract. Note that Recycle Plus is mainly responsible for the processing of the collected material. The new curbside program would be awarded to a different company who plans to collect the material and send it to a processing facility in a larger centre (Edmonton, Calgary or Red Deer). What I’ve been told is that these other facilities are offering much lower processing costs and the savings are passed onto our residents. That is why Aquatera has chosen not to continue the contract with Recycle Plus.

As for the period of overlap, residents would be asked to pay a redundant $3 or $4.00 per month to have both services in operation for a while. I believe that some overlap is required anytime you switch from one service to another. Perhaps the time period for this overlap is too long. I admit that I was quite excited about the prospect of curbside recycling that I probably didn’t give as much attention to the reaction of the fees by the general public. The way I saw it, we spend more than $3 a month on gas driving to and from the recycling depot in my household. Also, the surveys showed that over 80% of the public wanted this type of convenient service. Since this motion passed unanimously, I assume that others on Council felt similarly.

I believe that we should look for opportunities to encourage recycling and make recycling more accessible to the community. Diversion of waste from our landfill will save us millions of dollars in the future by not having to find a new landfill site and not having to build and manage that site. However, this is not an initiative that would suffer from a short delay. I would be open to delaying implementation of the curbside recycling program by a year, until the spring of 2012. This would be a good compromise for everyone and would give us time to properly deal with the current depots (a meeting with Aquatera indicated that delaying for a year would not be advisable since Council already passed the motion to go ahead -- it was worth asking though ~ Nov. 2010). It wouldn’t make sense to delay it any further than that because we don’t want to go without recycling services and the spring is the best time to start a new program. That being said, it may not be possible to make that change since the new council may not be in place before the new contract is signed. Motions of council are acted on as soon as they are passed and the decision to go ahead has been made.

Curbside Recycling

Curbside recycling is an initiative that residents and elected officials have collectively advocated for and is finally becoming a reality in Grande Prairie. Aquatera and Recycle Plus have both conducted extensive surveys that show a demand by over 80% of respondents in favour of curbside recycling. Curbside recycling has many benefits to a community. Not only will we divert more recyclable material from the landfill, but it encourages a recycling mentality from people who receive the service. Hopefully, they will carry those habits into their workplace, which is where recycling will make a major impact since commercial waste makes up over 75% of all material going to the landfill. In any case, residents will be happy that they will no longer have to burn fossil fuels in order to do their recycling.

This matter comes forward to City Council on Monday, October 4th. Council will decide on the type of container system and the consider whether or not the associated cost will be acceptable to residents. As this is a new service, there is a price tag associated with it. I believe the additional cost is just under $5 per household for weekly curbside recycling using a biodegradable blue bag system.

Recycling Glass

I had a question posed to me about recycling of glass containers. It seems that we collect glass at our recycle bins, but it seems to end up at the landfill anyway. I checked into this and found some very interesting information.

First of all, recycling is a business which is subject to local, regional and world markets. The product that we all recycle, gets processed and sold to buyers in the larger centres. The market is subject to extreme fluctuations in pricing which can make recycling centres difficult to financially manage. For example, a couple of years ago, the price of cardboard fell to almost nothing, which meant that our recycling centre ended up losing money in order to get rid of their supply.

The market for glass is currently non-existent. No one in Canada is collecting it at this point in time because they can't get rid of it. In Grande Prairie, we are still collecting it because people want a place to recycle their glass containers. What ends up happening to it is that it is stockpiled in our landfill and they crush it and use it as a substitute for gravel. This is not the ideal solution, but I'm happy that it's getting used once more rather than getting discarded.

It seems that, ultimately, we may stop collecting glass containers because there is no market and no "real" re-usability. I'm hoping that we can come up with a better solution. At one point we were crushing the glass into a coarse particle and selling it to sandblasting companies. That didn't work out well because it tended to destroy the equipment in the process of creating the particles. Until another solution is found, glass will most likely end up in the landfill.

Environment Committee

I chaired my first meeting of the Environment Committee for the City of Grande Prairie. I wouldn't say that I'm an avid environmentalist, but I have very balanced views when it comes to taking care of this planet and what will be accepted policies and legislation for the general public. I look forward to taking on the role and making things happen.

Gasification of Solid Waste

I attended a presentation the other day which I found extremely interesting. It was a way to make the landfill a little "greener". The technology is called gasification. Basically, you take your typical munipal solid waste (household garbage) and dump it into a bio-reactor. The reactor burns up the garbage and produces 2 by-products: syngas and ash.

The syngas is a mixture of hydrogen gas, H2, and carbon monoxide, CO. The gas is burned to produce electricity to be used locally or sold back to the grid. The heat from burning the gas could be used in a district heating system, which basically heats water (or a mixture of water and glycol) in pipes which is used to heat nearby buildings. It's possible to build a network of insulated pipes to carry the heated water to building several kilometres away.

The solid ash that comes from this process can be used as filler for pavement or concrete. It may be possible to sell this by-product to paving companies. In any case, compared to the amount of solid going into the system, the ash is 10 times smaller in volume than garbage.

Our landfill in Grande Prairie brings in about 150 tonnes per day. Of that, only about 60 tonnes is household garbage and the rest is made up of construction and industrial waste. Other than tires, none of the other waste will burn up in this system. In addition, you wouldn't want to burn up wood or any organic waste that could become good compost. However, doing some quick math, we have the potential to turn 40% of our current landfill garbage into something usable right away and stretch out the lifespan of the landfill. If our current landfill has an estimated 25 years left, we have the potential to stretch out its life to 35 years. If we got really creative and started "trading" garbage with our regional partners, we could do even better. Why would they want to "trade" garbage with us? We would be taking the "smelly" garbage that is environmentally unpleasant and they would be taking the construction waste which is relatively inert and potentially resold at a profit. It's a win-win situation for everyone.

So what's the downside? We need to do a feasability study to determine whether or not the economic benefits offset the pricetag. In order to get into this kind of technology, we would have to be willing to invest in the neighborhood of $20 to $30 million. There are plenty of government grants for environmental initiative, so it may be possible to reduce the city's investment. I'm hoping that Council will fund the study and set us down this road.