MyHydroEye

With the installation of Smart Meters and subsequent Time-of-Use (TOU) pricing, the majority of residential consumers in Ontario have had the advantage of being able to view their electricity usage online – on an hour by hour basis. This insight, together with alerts and a host of other energy management tools offered by MHE, has helped residential consumers better understand and even pro-actively manage their electricity consumption.

However, there is another group of consumers that use significantly more electricity than any home owner, but have not had the online advantage that MyHydroEye affords until now.

Typically, these commercial businesses have a monthly average peak demand, during a calendar year, of over 50 kW and pay the market price for electricity rather than time-of-use prices. These businesses – who have not had interval meters – received a bill at the end of each period summarizing their electricity usage and cost. But without an interval meter, they had little or no insight into when and how they consumed electricity.

In 2014 – with the goal to improve this situation – things changed and the Ontario Energy Board (OEB) issued an amendment to the Ontario Energy Board Act that required a distributor to provide an interval meter to commercial consumers and to afford these businesses with access to the data collected by these meters.

For the past several years now TOU portal’s designed and developed by Whitecap, including Whitecap’s own MHE Residential TOU portal, have served residential consumers in over 50% of the Province of Ontario. Now, with the introduction of Whitecap’s new MHE Commercial online product this group of commercial consumers with peak demands of 50kW or more per month, can enjoy many of the same benefits as those realized by residential consumers.