Student start‑up designs the power bill of the future

Your power bill arrives in the mailbox, or is sent to your email. What do you look at first? The dollar figure, most likely.

But imagine if your power bill didn’t just tell you what to pay, but gave you the information needed to cut down your energy footprint – and let you channel the savings into sustainable options.

That’s the idea behind Green With Energy, a startup company led by Dalhousie student Megan McCarthy (Bachelor of Management, major in Environment, Sustainability & Society). It's a company that's already earning buzz with its success in the international Start-Up Weekend competition.

Green With Energy began as an ESS honours thesis project to help improve energy security for the city of Summerside P.E.I. Her proposal, which Ms. McCarthy prepared under the guidance of engineering professor Larry Hughes, was to redesign energy bills to help consumers save money, and then for customers to use these savings to upgrade to electric heaters that would run off wind energy instead of oil.

“There’s nothing like this going on in Canada yet, so it was a great idea,” she says. “There are already companies in the United States like Opower that are looking into these initiatives. We are so far behind compared to places like Norway who, in 1993, had already created studies about the possibilities involved with cutting energy consumption and have since been adopted by legislation creating 10-15 per cent savings.”

A start-up opportunity

In November, the project took off in a new direction thanks to a Start-Up Weekend at Dalhousie. Invited to take part by Ed Leach, professor in the Faculty of Management, Ms. McCarthy got the chance to brainstorm and discuss how to turn the project into a tangible product. With the help of Dal students Andrew Coe and Jason Duong, along with Nicole Leblanc from the First Angel Network, a web application started to come to fruition and Green With Energy took shape.

“I’m not very technologically inclined,” Ms. McCarthy admits. “ I am more the business side of things, and so I was really lucky to gain such a great team.”

Over the 54 hours of the Start-Up Weekend, the team structured a web app that would include different modules to depict real-time energy feedback using simple, easy-to-read graphs along with personalized tips on how to change consumption behaviour to save money.

Ms. McCarthy feels that the role of technology in today’s business ventures is irreplaceable—“[but] it’s not being used to its full potential ... all this technology has been created but not a lot has been implemented.

“I have the advantage of being a bit older, having gone to school in Calgary for three years and then working for different energy and oil companies. Their major failings are that they are not implementing new technologies and just want to do things 'business as usual' even though it is not as efficient.”

Bringing the idea to fruition

At the end of the weekend, Green with Energy won the competition, earned a $30,000 prize package and was entered into the Start-Up Weekend’s international round, competing against 47 other cities’ winners around the world. Though Ms. McCarthy and her team didn’t prevail, their result was impressive: 15th overall.

Future plans for Green with Energy are still taking shape; Ms. McCarthy says they’re continuing to look at investment offers and potential partnerships that have come their way since they’ve begun to garner attention. They’re also setting up a pilot project in the city of Summerside.

“I feel really honoured to have the privilege of being in the Start-Up Weekend and having the opportunity to put my ideas in motion,” she says. “For now we just want to focus on getting the test pilot out for Summerside and then we can start looking at expanding the idea.”