Halifax’s new ferries: do we really need them?
Halifax’s Metro Transit is about to drop a few bills on new, faster ferries. They say that the new ships will decrease the time taken to do the current run, aiming for a top speed of 20 knots, more than double the current speed of 8 knots. On such short routes it’s hard to believe they’d hit 20 knots for very long, though the ride will definitely be faster. The simple question, however, is whether we actually need to spend the money on new boats.
With some (relatively) simple changes to the boarding ramps, the time taken to load and unload the boat at each end could be slashed by more than half. I estimate that this would allow for an additional crossing per boat per hour on the Halifax to Dartmouth run. How, you ask?
Currently, the same ramp is used to board and unload. Passengers wait far from the boat and the alighting passengers walk all the way past them to exit. Once the last passenger is confirmed to have left the passage, the doors are unlocked and the new passengers walk down to the ferry for boarding. This takes approximately five minutes, or 1/3 of the time taken to make the crossing. If a second ramp was installed on the outside of the dock, alighting passengers could leave via a dedicated route. Boarding passengers would already be down the ramp waiting for the ferry to arrive. Now, the second the final passenger has left, the alighting doors can be locked and the boarding doors unlocked, cutting the transfer time to approximately 2 minutes.
The current ferry terminal design.
With this change, trips would take 12 minutes instead of 15, allowing a fifth hourly crossing to be added. By shaping the jetty to look like a funnel, the ferries will not have a hard time docking, even in high winds (I dock an underpowered sailboat in a narrow dock in decently rough seas while in reverse on a regular basis). Surely this will cost less than purchasing new ferries, and will require fewer ferries to do the run.
If the ferries are in bad shape, then yes, we should look at replacing them. The new ferries should allow for two-sided alighting in order to make the proposed design change, allowing even more passengers to be carried well into the future. Since staff are paid on an hourly/salaried basis, the only added cost of additional crossings when the ferry is already operating is an increase in fuel consumption and a modest increase in maintenance costs.
These times have been gleaned from 4 separate observations of the ferry’s operations. More testing would be needed to confirm the improvement in speed. Times are taken from the moment the first passenger alights to the moment the doors close for the ferry to depart.
The proposed new design
Industrial Engineering Musings: Charlottetown Halifax Lean Metro Transit Toronto Toronto Transit Commission Transit Trius Transit Value Stream
by Ben
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Redefining the value stream in Canadian public transit
Canadian public transit providers seem to be at a crossroads. The Toronto Transit Commission is seeing a downright revolt from its riders, Halifax can’t seem to get busses to arrive on time or with frequency becoming of a modern city, Charlottetown’s budding system is undergoing a complete overhaul after a drop in ridership, and others are all over the map. There is, however, an underlying connection between all Canadian public transit systems, one that doesn’t directly involve their funding (or, arguably lack thereof): the value stream.
Public organizations, as well as most corporations seem to view the value stream as minimizing the cost of their operation, no matter what. What sets successful organizations apart is the way they view their value stream. Integrated discussions with both suppliers and customers, ensuring that costs savings are achieved in the correct spots in the stream, and viewing the relationship with their customers (riders) in a different way.
Haligonians and Torontonians who ride the bus or streetcar with any frequency have surely seen drivers stop mid-route for a coffee break. This is an example of a practice that is entirely contrary to the concept of a value stream. First, the driver is taking a break while paying customers wait. This reduces the value of riding a bus in contrast to driving. Second, routes are not optimized from the perspective of serving the customer, since they use what Tim Bousquet of Halifax’s alt-weekly “The Coast” calls “California-style scheduling.” He means the busses all arrive at the hub at once, then leave a long gap before the next bus comes. It works well in California, where missing your bus means sitting in the sun, but not in Halifax, where it means freezing to death. Since Halifax’s busses often follow similar routes between the hubs, this practice is arguably silly, and could probably be refined.
When I lived in Europe, bus drivers never took a coffee break mid-route, even on the most rural of routes. I’m not arguing that drives should not be entitled to breaks – they should. In Europe, the drivers were swapped out at the central terminal, as well as other hubs when necessary, allowing them to take a break in the break room, with (presumably) comfy chairs and no paying customers to upset. With some re-alignment, this would not be impossible to achieve in Halifax or Toronto. Some drivers may get their break a minute or two early, some a minute or two late, but a competent management should be able to sell such a plan to the union, particularly if drivers are offered some form of compensation when breaks are curtailed.
With regard to route scheduling, two solutions immediately jump to mind. One is to realign the routes to cover the main arteries as frequently as every five minutes. Then, feeder routes would aim to arrive at the transfer point with about 3 minutes to spare, allowing customers to be whisked away quickly. The busses running down the artery should, but don’t have to, follow the exact same path. minor deviations can be accounted for in scheduling. This type of system was well implemented in Aachen, Germany, as well as a few other cities that I’ve visited. The second solution is to change the procedure for busses to leave transfer points. If a bus is marginally late (perhaps one minute or less) arriving at the transfer point, the departing bus should wait to allow passengers to connect. This would accelerate the travel of riders through the system, though has the potential to backfire if the same bus is held back several times (though more data would be required to confirm this assumption).
Changing drivers mid-route, or at the end, and having them take another route after the break has two key benefits. The first is reducing bus downtime, which on many routes in Halifax appears to be 15 minutes at each end of the route (through observation). This window could be cut to five minutes or less if the drivers were swapped, potentially reducing the number of busses required to maintain the current level of service. The second advantage, which would occur with less frequently serviced routes, is having drivers take a new route after their break. This reduces the monotony that comes from running the same route for an entire shift, and keeps drivers trained on various stop locations in case the regular driver isn’t there. This is one of the key principles in Lean thinking — cross-training employees to keep them interested and keep their skill level up.
When we consider effectiveness from the customer’s point of view rather than simply viewing the dollars we stand to gain in terms of ridership, customer satisfaction, reductions in vehicle downtime, and driver satisfaction. Re-aligning all of Halifax’s routes, which cover some 3,000 stops across an area of over 3,000 km2 is no small feat, though the benefits listed above, coupled with the potential for ongoing cost savings through increased efficiencies leads me to believe the long-term cost of the changes will be lower than the current costs. Of course, it would require access to all of Metro Transit’s route data, the collective agreement, and more, plus very complex simulations in order to estimate these costs precisely. On the surface though, the customer wins, and when the customer wins, they keep coming back — with their friends.
Industrial Engineering Musings: Arena Breast Cancer Capital Health CDHA Health PEI Healthcare Home care Lean Ontario Paramedicine Rockwell Automation Six Sigma Sunnybrook
by Ben
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Cutting costs in healthcare
When provincial governments announce they will find ways to cut health care costs, they are usually, and rightly, met with an outcry that they will cut services. Fortunately, with the help of Industrial Engineering professionals and new medical and nursing grads who approach their fields with more open minds than their long-entrenched colleagues, cost savings are a definite possibility. There has long been skepticism from the bureaucracy about fundamentally changing the way programs are delivered, and no politician wants to preside over job cuts. The reality of the situation, however, is that change is necessary.
Last year, Health PEI announced a plan to have paramedics provide some aspects of the homecare program in rural areas. Their logic was sound. The paramedics were under-utilized, and there is a deficit of nursing resources. The paramedics could provide many basic services, such as re-dressing a wound and ensuring patients took their medications, releasing the nurses to do other, more specialized work. Through this change, it would be cheaper to keep an ambulance in West Prince 24/7, something that was promised when emergency room hours were cut. The nurses union took this as an affront, but the government persevered, albeit with a smaller program, which launched this spring. Initial reports make it seem rather successful, and hopefully the nurses union will embrace its expansion.
Other changes have occurred behind the scenes. Two years ago, two graduating Dalhousie students applied queuing theory and simulation to the call centre for women looking for breast cancer screening in Nova Scotia. The problem at the call centre was tri-fold: staffing costs needed to be decreased, the average wait time for a caller needed to be less than one minute (due to fears they’d hang up and not be screened), and the call volume was highly seasonal, with a surge during and shortly after Breast Cancer Awareness Month each year. After applying sound engineering principles to this problem, new staffing levels were devised to meet these three goals, saving the system money, and possibly saving lives.
While large health authorities have been employing industrial engineers for a number of years, the system is still largely inefficient. At a conference I attended in 2010, I learned that some 15,000 Canadians die each and every year through inefficiencies in our health care system. A project featuring a co-op student at Canada’s largest hospital, the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, was presented. The student was tasked with reducing spoilage, errors, and re-sampling for blood tests. With the old system, the nurse would take the sample, the porter would come by and collect that unit’s samples, and when finished the round, would deposit them at the lab. The lab would then analyze the samples, provide reports, and the porter would bring them back to the correct unit. Unfortunately, this process was time consuming, though rush jobs were moved more quickly. In the time between the sampling and the analysis, two things happened with shocking frequency: some samples would spill and others were mixed up, becoming useless. In both of these situations, the already-frail patient would require a second blood sample, taking up time for the nurse and the lab, and delaying the patient’s treatment. The student’s approach was (looking back) quite simple: better labeling and storage of the samples, and a switch to new containers that were less likely to spill. The result was a dramatic reduction in re-sampling of blood, and quicker care for the patients, ultimately getting more patients out of the hospital more quickly, and saving lives.
Another example, which was presented at a conference this past year, involved re-designing a Montreal-area hospital. The hospital’s elevator was running above capacity, with patients being transferred from the ward to the OR with an average transfer time of approximately 25 minutes. The hospital’s target was five minutes. With a mean of 25 minutes porters could move approximately two patients per hour. By reducing it to five minutes, the porters could be re-assigned to more valuable tasks than watching over a stretcher in a hallway. The hospital hired a local company, Trellisys, who used queuing theory and Arena, a simulation software from Rockwell Automation, to examine the layout of the hospital, as well as the arrival, departure, and movement of everyone inside. To an outsider, it would seem that five new elevators would be required to hit the hospital’s target. Five elevators would take up huge amounts of space inside the hospital’s narrow tower. Thankfully, that was not the case, and Trellisys recommended installing just one additional elevator. Their simulation found that the dialysis unit was wasting elevator resources, and recommended moving that to the first floor, and moving the cafeteria upstairs to where the dialysis unit used to be. Not only did this recommendation meet the hospital’s target, but they estimated it would take but two minutes to transfer a patient, on average, saving valuable porter resources, improving the timeliness of patient transfers, reducing patient stress, and saving huge capital and maintenance costs associated with adding four elevators.
A shocking example of industrial engineering came from Health PEI, who recently hired their first industrial engineer. After a few months on the job, she has already paid her way for years to come. A scheduling task which took a team of employees two days to complete has reportedly been modified to take a mere two hours. That’s an 800% improvement! This wasn’t a once-per-year task either. The team was continuously generating this schedule. The human resources are quickly being re-assigned to other tasks, and layoffs were reportedly avoided through attrition. (No public link to this report is available)
In 2010, Ontario ruffled some surgical feathers by insisting surgeons use checklists during procedures, no matter how many years on the job. While no statistically significant change in the complication rate was observed at the western hospitals in a major international study of surgical checklists, the Toronto hospital in the study quickly chose to push for the use of checklists across the board in Ontario. The government complied with their request and mandated it, partly in response to problems occurring at one Windsor-area hospital. Industrial Engineers are frequently called on to thoroughly document processes and create checklists to reduce variability and error.
Further savings in our health care system will be achieved through integrated practice models, where the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, dietitians, physiotherapists, and alternative practitioners such sports coaches, yogi, and others will work together to help patients live healthier lifestyles and concentrate human resources to their particular areas of expertise.
Industrial Engineers work behind the scenes to clean up processes and keep our hospitals humming along nicely. We enhance patient outcomes by applying queuing theory, simulation, statistics, and principles such as Lean and Six Sigma to every environment, reducing the strain on human resources, stresses to the patient, and costs to the public purse. When politicians are ready to get serious about cost savings in health care, they should continue to turn to us, and listen to the sound advice engineers provide across a variety of industries.
Musings: CO2 emissions confidentiality warnings email spam
by Ben
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Remove your email confidentiality notice, save the planet
Occasionally I come across interesting tidbits of news. Then I usually turn to Twitter and share them. Today, I re-considered a piece that I had read a while back: email confidentiality notices are about as useful as letting your Hummer H1 idle all day. Basically, you can’t force someone into a contract after already providing the good or service. You could, possibly, send one email saying the contents in the next email are confidential, wait for a reply confirming that the other party agrees, then send the confidential stuff, but email isn’t confidential anyway.
According to a paper on energy usage when sending data published by IEEE (the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the people who set the standards for all networking equipment), 4kb of data requires about 3 joules of energy to send. As it so happens, the average of the last three confidentiality notes I’ve seen was 4kb. Sure, 3 joules is a drop in the bucket, but we sent 294 Billion emails every day in 2010. A mere 10% were real emails, the rest were spam, but if we assume 1/3 come with confidentiality notes, that’s 9.8 billion emails sent and received, or 8J per. Assuming it takes 1s combined to send and receive any email, and converted to kWh, we use 3.3 million kWh of electricity every single day to send this useless crap. It takes a one megawatt plant with no transmission loss (for you Nova Scotians, that’s one and a half Lingan coal plants) running 24/7 to move spam around, or 5.55 million kilograms of CO2 per year, if you’re as dirty as Lingan. If we nixed those stupid notices, it’d be like taking 1000 cars off the road. Sure, it’s not much on a global basis, but it all adds up.
If you really want to cut down on CO2 emissions though, stop subscribing to email lists that you don’t read, and find a way to stop spam emails in their tracks, since spam accounts for 90% of total email volume.
Gotta love Engineering
Some people say that some weeks are crazier than others. When you’re in Engineering, every week is crazy. An example of this is this week: I have over 25 hours of class, 10 hours of work, an exam, and four assignments. Not to mention a monthly beer tasting that I volunteered to host before I really looked at my schedule. Added on to that is a student union meeting that I’ll probably end up missing, a CBC website usability study that I strangely agreed to, three job interviews, and another meeting that I may skip. I haven’t been to the monthly meeting for the Web Committee for Dal Libraries since November. To be fair, I told them I probably wasn’t the best student for the job due to the fact that the meeting is during the day and I have class.
On top of all of those things that have a fixed schedule, I have flexible things. Four assignments that take an average of 7 or 8 hours each need to be considered. I’m writing this post rather than working on one that needs to be handed in tomorrow. We’ve estimated 12-15 hours to complete this beast, and I used the nicest weekend of the semester to do it. Basically, my fixed time (class + work) is 35 hours, plus 32 hours for assignments. If it takes 9 hours to get ready for bed, sleep, and wake up/shower each day, I’m down to 45 hours to eat, work out, relax, exercise, buy groceries, and do things like job interviews and beer tastings.
The lesson that I *should* be learning from this is time management. Instead, it’s cram-cram-cram, rush-rush-rush, then go out and drink hard/play trivia on Fridays. Perhaps someday I will learn the lesson. I’ve heard an entrepreneur should plan to spend 50-60 hours per week working on a new venture. That’d be a nice break from my current schedule!
Slowly, my planning is getting better. I’m getting more of my assignments done in advance, but there’s still too much cramming going on. When I get back on my work term this fall, I will be relieved. Maybe I’ll plan wisely and come out of the term refreshed and ready to survive my winter semester. I doubt it. Time management is a skill, sadly, it’s a skill I clearly have yet to master.
Musings Tech: android apple dodgeball foursquare Google iPhone nexus s phone twitter
by Ben
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The first week with my Nexus S
I’ve been hemming and hawing about replacing my aging iPhone 3G, bought in mid-July of 2008. The phone was taking forever to complete everyday tasks such as opening apps to a usable state, loading web pages, and performing general functions. The battery was worn too, struggling to last the day. Furthermore, a lot has changed since I bought it. The world has leapt ahead, especially with Web 2.0. When I bought my iPhone, I didn’t have twitter. Few did. Foursquare wasn’t on anyone’s radar, at least, until Google killed Dodgeball. The way we interacted with our phones was fundamentally different.
I was planning to wait until WWDC to see if they’d drop a really nice iPhone, but then I took a hard look at the Nexus S. I was impressed with what I saw. The drawbacks were few, the opportunities were greater. It looked like a smooth, fast phone, and I felt it would drop seamlessly into my lifestyle, not to mention cushioning me from constant accusations of hipsterism. So I called Rogers and asked if they had a deal. We agreed on a free phone, 300 weekday minutes, 6PM evenings and weekends, unlimited messaging, unlimited nationwide calling to 10 numbers, and 1GB of data, all for $55/month plus tax. I practically skipped to the store yesterday: the old guy could retire.
While the clerk did some paperwork, I installed and configured my key apps. He looked over and said “I guess you don’t need a tutorial?” It turns out I did. He casually mentioned I could access voicemail just as before, forgetting visual voicemail. I’m going to miss that. Hopefully Android will get it before long.
With the knowledge to be able to check my messages, I departed. Right away I noticed that issues relating to my sloppy typing were exacerbated on this phone. But the speed with which it functioned was amazing!
I certainly have a few reservations about the phone, however, they are largely insignificant. The phone lacks a certain polish, which is probably due to it coming with a pure build of android. There is nothing built-in to notify of new messages if the speaker is off, no email counter exists (à la iOS email icon), the calendar icon doesn’t show the date, the weather app icon doesn’t show the icon, and there is no percentage on the battery meter. These are the few that I notice regularly, and can mostly be fixed with apps. If you purchase other Android phones, the manufacturer has patched many of the perceived defects to suit their hardware.
The battery life had initially left something to be desired, though I feel that that was largely due to being in a rural area the first few days, and treating my phone like a kid in a candy shop. Battery life has stabilized and I can now make it through the day without fear of my phone dying.
My key beef is the keyboard. I was a sloppy typist on my iPhone, and I find it worse on the Nexus S. I’m sure if I slow down and train my fingers my accuracy will improve, but the keyboard may be slightly at fault too. Even after a week, I feel my acuity isn’t improving. I’ll really have to sit down and practice typing accurately.
Other deficiencies with the phone lie with the developers. Twitter hasn’t enabled push notifications, which is a total PITA for an addict such as me. The Foursquare app lacks polish too, with the nearby venues list populating much more slowly than I’d expect, and no ability to peer into a friend’s checkin history, save the most recent one. Sure, that may sound somewhat stalker-esque, but there are times when it’s handy, particularly when engulfed in a points or mayor race.
App selection has been satisfactory at worst, wonderful at best. I wish kijiji had an app, to improve my pending selling spree, but I’ll make do. There’s no official CBC livestream app, which I hope changes before long. I’ve enjoyed QR Droid, a powerful QR reader, Angry Birds (which I’d sworn off on my iPhone), and Tweetdeck. There are a few apps I use infrequently, such as Google talk, which is good but not great. The key miss there is the lack of ability to flip from front to rear camera in a voice call.
None of these grievances is enough to coax me into returning the phone, but I do hope developers get together and bring this functionality to us end users.
Other nitpicky complaints include the camera’s shutter noise (unnecessary. Rules requiring it were designed to stop a few people from doing upskirts, which is problematic, but shouldn’t prevent me from having a silent camera. I tried to take a picture of a robin this weekend, and it heard the noise and flew away. I’ve since learned to turn the ringer off first.) There’s no ability to take a screenshot, which is handy when reporting problems or saving records of events.
Overall I’m very pleased with the phone. If I think of any more problems or delights, I’ll post them here. If you’re considering an iPhone 4, and don’t mind the lack of polish and inability to play your DRM iTunes music, the Nexus S is definitely worth a second look, if only for the speed, wide availability of free high quality apps, and a rapidly improving OS and user community.
Dalhousie-NSAC Merger
As a former Dalhousie Senator, I’m quite pleased to see that a long-time partner, the Nova Scotia Agricultural College, is looking to merge with Dalhousie. The main reasons that I support this are that Nova Scotia has too many different universities, both Dal and NSAC benefit from increased collaboration and partnership, and alumni have reportedly been hesitant to donate to NSAC due to its close affiliation to government. I feel that this merger will improve the experience of all NSAC students, as well as many Dalhousie students, particularly those involved in biology and life sciences.
I should probably elaborate on the above statements about the merger:
1. Too many universities: Report after report has recommended mergers. When the original King’s College in Windsor burned down, a condition imposed by the Carnegie foundation to get funding for reconstruction was that it merge with Dal. That didn’t happen. This debate has been happening since the early 1800s. In short, the administrative costs per student will drop, as well as supply acquisition (bigger orders lower costs) and a few other yet-to-be-seen efficiency gains. They aren’t necessarily huge, but every dollar helps.
2. Dal and NSAC are already big partners. NSAC’s grad programs are actually Dal programs. The engineering students at NSAC move on to Dal for 3rd and 4th year. Many lecturers at Dal teach at NSAC too. When it comes to research, there is significant collaboration, particularly in engineering and life sciences. Presumably, the merger cuts down on red tape when moving things between the two.
3. Money: NSAC was a crown corporation until recently, which made donors hesitant to come to NSAC. That hasn’t really lifted. Dal has one of the largest per-capita endowments of any Canadian universities. Part of that has to do with plundering Maine during the war of 1812. Part of it has to do with a (relatively) strong bond with alumni. NSAC will benefit from Dal’s internationally recognized name, and Dal will benefit from the addition of several highly specialized programs to its offerings, and will expand its pool of alumni.
That being said, as an engineering student, I still feel the bad blood between TUNS and Dal over the forced merger of engineering and architecture. There is a definite feeling that money that is earmarked for Sexton (the old TUNS campus) goes up to the main Dal campus. A recent example is the Life Science Research Institute, which was reportedly moved forward at the expense of the IDEA building at Sexton. There has been no major development undertaken on Sexton since the merger in the late ’90s, and soon after the merger the Faculty of Computer Science was moved off campus. The infrastructure on Sexton is far worse than on Studley and Carleton. The only changes have been a makeover of the alumni lounge and, thanks to the generosity of a Bell executive, new equipment in the weight room.
On the whole, I still feel this will be a positive move for both parties, but I hope they learn from the mistakes of the TUNS/Dal merger.
For readers’ benefit, I’ve attached the letter sent out today by Dalhousie President and Vice-Chancellor Dr. Tom Traves, who also oversaw the tail end of the Dal/TUNS merger.
TO: The Dalhousie University Community FROM: Tom Traves, President DATE: May 20, 2011 RE: Dalhousie/NSAC merger
I am pleased to announce that Dalhousie has entered into discussions towards a merger with Nova Scotia Agricultural College. A team will be appointed to work out the details of what this new relationship would look like, but at its heart this will mean a new working partnership and a significant opportunity for both institutions. This is an exciting time for both Dalhousie and NSAC. There are so many new possibilities that exist for each of us to serve Nova Scotia – to grow, to enrich the learning experience for our students and to create an enhanced research community that will directly impact the fortunes of our region while creating new opportunities for innovation and interdisciplinary learning.
Students at both campuses will benefit from shared expertise and learning opportunities that will produce graduates who are ready to take on the agrifood challenges of our times. This will also present a new opportunity to enhance our study and research programs.
The relationship between our two schools is not new and the discussion we are about to have feels like a natural one. As you know, NSAC degree programs are approved by Dalhousie’s Senate and NSAC has offered Dalhousie degrees to its graduates for many years. We also boast a close working relationship through our Faculty of Graduate Studies. In addition, of course, there are longstanding research partnerships between NSAC and Dalhousie professors. For many years NSAC faculty have attracted the second highest amount of research funding, after Dalhousie, in the province. A merger under these circumstances seems like a logical next step.
The timing of this discussion is fortuitous. At a time when food prices are increasing precipitously around the world and populations continue to soar, the challenge of feeding the global population looms large. To confront this challenge while still being mindful of our responsibility as stewards of our shared environment, is going to require the disciplinary perspectives and contributions of many scholars, starting with agrifood specialists and extending into the many fields that Dalhousie incorporates. To draw upon the respective strengths of our two institutions will allow us to train generations of leaders who will be ready and able to face these challenges head-on.
Nova Scotia Agricultural College has served the people of Nova Scotia and particularly the people of Bible Hill, Truro, and Colchester County communities for many years. We look forward to working with NSAC to build something that does justice to that admirable track record and enhances it even further.
We will work toward having the merger completed in time for the incoming class of Fall, 2012. In the meantime, there is much work to do and many questions that need answering about a host of academic, organizational, personnel and financial issues. At this point we have as many questions as answers, but we will be working closely with our partners in the months ahead to build something new and very exciting.
Tom Traves
What are your thoughts on the merger? Let me know below.
Musings Student Politics: Dalhousie dalhousie student union levy loaded ladle
by Ben
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The Loaded Levy
I’m currently involved in a campaign that stinks: the “Loaded Ladle Levy” it’s some triple-alliteration designed to take away our hard-earned money. The meat of the argument is expressed on the “no” campaign website, facebook fan page, and on www.punditry.ca. The synopsis of the argument: you pay, they eat.
Giving credit where it’s due: Dalton McGuinty and Time of Use Billing
It’s great to cheer for yourself when you’re right. It’s polite to congratulate your opponents when they are. But it’s most important to cheer your opponents when they are correct. Dalton McGuinty is known in Ontario as “Premier Dad”, for his controlling, nanny-state policies. He’s also known for implementing two important and forward-thinking policies. The first is the HST. The second, and the subject of this post, is the Time of Use Billing (TOU) arrangement that Ontario power companies must now provide.
In any industrial process, it is wasteful and costly to have excess capacity. Processes that have low variability are a dream. They’re easy to plan for, and easy to run. They’re also cheap. Processes that vary in resource utilization can be complex and costly. Consider, for example, oil companies. The price of oil varies seasonally. You pay more in the middle of summer when everyone’s travelling and using air conditioning, and again in the winter, when houses need heating and lights are on longer. They can only ramp production up a finite amount, and it is expensive to do so. Unlike oil, fluctuating electricity production costs are hidden from the consumer.
Power generation is similar to oil drilling. Every day, power usage fluctuates up and down, on a relatively constant pattern. As the graph below shows, in the winter, energy usage in Nova Scotia peaks at approximately 1750 megawatts between six and ten PM. After ten, it drops abruptly, before bottoming out at 1350 megawatts at 5 am, then reversing course and rising sharply. The curve changes with the seasons, thanks to electric heating and air conditioning, but the utility needs to pick a balance between cheap, high-capacity, slow-starting energy sources such as coal and nuclear power, and costly, low-output, but fast-startup sources like gas. Other sources, like hydro, wind, and solar, are also part of the mix, with hydro falling somewhere between coal and gas on the cheapness/ramp up scale, and wind and solar requiring backup generation due to their high volatility on current grid infrastructure.
Typical hourly energy use, by season, in Nova Scotia. Graph and data courtesy of Nova Scotia Power Inc.
During the peak hours, those gas turbines are chugging away to help you watch TV, do dishes, and read. At night, the coal plants are producing some 1600 MW of electricity (rated capacity). That means, in winter, about 300MW of electricity is being thrown out, a figure that rises to 500MW in the summer. Ignoring renewable sources, the cheapest, most energy-efficient way to produce electricity is large-scale power plants. The turbines are high-cost generators that are used for a very short amount of time each day.
This is where time-of-use billing comes into play. McGuinty recognized that by implementing this policy, he could actually lower the environmental impact of living in Ontario, without changing a single electricity source in the province. By billing consumers based on how much it actually costs to provide the service at the given time, he’s encouraging a shift to low-cost time. Rather than run the dishwasher right after supper, set it to run overnight. Rather than paying $0.10/kWh (it’s cheaper in Ontario, a topic for another day), the customer pays around $0.056. That’s a half-price load of dishes. Instead of using electricity at the peak, causing gas generators to do the work, you use the electricity that otherwise would have been dissipated at coal (or nuclear) sources.
This same logic can be applied to other daily activities: your hot water heater can run overnight, electric cars can be charged while you sleep, laundry can be done as you sleep, or on weekends, and consumers may think twice before turning on the A/C at supper time.
Where is Nova Scotia on TOU? I sent a tweet to Nova Scotia Power and they informed me that currently TOU is only offered to customers using electric thermal storage, akin to an electric furnace, which charges up overnight and releases heat during the day. I was told there are no plans that he’s aware of to implement TOU billing for all Nova Scotians.
TOU billing has been the norm in Europe for several years now. The adjustment can be tough, as consumers are used to a flat rate for power. Once consumers got in the groove, they modified their consumption habits, and spoke with their wallets. The same is currently happening in Ontario. Those who refuse to change are paying over 30% more to wash their laundry after supper than they did a year ago. Those who adapted are paying half price. Both the savings for consumers and immediate benefits for the environment with TOU billing are clear. I spoke with Hydro Ottawa, who sent me a study prepared for Newmarket Hydro, near Toronto, which found that TOU billing decreased on-peak demand by 2.80%, mid-peak by 1.39%, and increased weekend off-peak (Friday at 10PM through Monday at 7AM during the winter) by 2.13%. No statistically significant change was found for weekday off-peak consumption when tested at 95% confidence.
TOU rates are accomplishing what they have been designed to do. Although average changes in consumption during the on-peak and mid-peak periods may appear small, they are significant and correspond directionally to what the rate design intends.
-Newmarket Hydro study
The study also included a public opinion survey. They found that consumers were fearful of the change, and felt it would increase their power bills, which had already spiked in recent years. The consumers made it clear that they could not afford another cent on their electric bills. However, the study found that after a short adjustment period, there was a neutral or net positive (ie decrease) in the bills.
What public concern there is regarding increased electricity costs under TOU rates fades rapidly as customers adapt to the new rate design and perceive that TOU rates have a neutral or slightly favourable impact on their electricity bill.
TOU requires a digital meter which knows the time of day, but most new meters have this ability. Older meters must be replaced, which costs a few hundred dollars, a saving that the utility will see in the long run, by reducing the need to install gas turbines, and generate wasted power.
While we wait for TOU billing to come to Halifax, we can make a conscious lifestyle change, despite the lack of financial benefit. If you have a dishwasher with a timer, run it in the middle of the night, starting as close to 4 am as possible. If there’s no timer, start it just before bed. The same goes for your washing machine, if you have one in your house or apartment. If you can, don’t use the dryer. It’s better for your clothes, and your wallet, but again, that’s the topic of another article. If you have control of your electric hot water heater, put it on a timer. Charge your electronics while you’re asleep too, and unplug them during the day.
We can dream big about one day deriving our electricity entirely from wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and maybe even a machine that will draw static out of the air, but the reality is that those technologies take years to implement, and still aren’t as reliable as they need to be. Dalton McGuinty made the right move in Ontario, so as we build up the capacity for renewable energy, let’s switch to TOU billing to accelerate the reduction in impact on the environment.
Read the Newmarket Hydro study online.
(Originally published in the Dalhousie Sextant)
DSU Exec blow through their budgets
I’ve embedded the DSU budget revisions for the year. The following items really piqued my curiosity, as they show significant changes from the budget approved in April. (sorry the embedded file is hard to understand)
- An increase of $2,958.15 for governance and external lobbying (Total $174,479.75)
- An increase of $2,229.16 for the office of the President (Total $44,465.52)
- An increase of $11,678.90 for the office of the VPI (Total $53768.36)
- An increase of – wait for it – $25,519.26 for the office of the VP Student Life (Total $111,160.48)
- Nearly $11,000 of the Sustainability Office’s budget appears to be going unspent this year
- An increase of $10,000 in the operations budget (Total $139,474.47)
- An increase of $12,274.70 for the accounting department (Total $125,990.00)
- A $1,200 improvement in revenue for the handbook. (It made a profit of nearly $400!)
- A drop of nearly $2,000 from the Sexton Campus programming budget.
- Overall, a $12,000 decrease in the surplus.
Remember, these are increase over the budgeted values, rather than a requested increase in the budget. Needless to say, I’m unimpressed and will be looking for answers next week. Comment if you’d like!
[scribd id=44098919 key=key-186bq997xqwxmtmq615n mode=list]
