The building already
has the capacity.
Get paid for it.
The chiller plant is usually the largest controllable load in a commercial building. Ontario pays for that flexibility through the IESO Save on Energy Peak Performance Program — provided the reduction can be proven against a baseline. We aggregate buildings into the programme and run the whole season on Q-Peak, our own platform.
Capacity, not
consumption.
Peak Performance does not pay for energy saved. It pays for load that is verifiably not there during a small number of system-peak hours across the season. That is a different product from efficiency, and it stacks on top of it — a building that has already been optimized can still enrol.
Payment is per MW at a rate set by the IESO programme rate card, calculated per event against the enrolled baseline. Weak events are dropped from the count before the season settles.
- Rooftop units and air handlers — a setpoint raised two degrees for four hours, in a building with thermal mass to absorb it
- Chiller staging — staged down against a precooled space rather than switched off
- Precooling — the load is moved to the morning, not removed, which is why occupants generally do not notice
- Non-essential lighting — garage and common area, dimmed rather than dark
Every asset is registered with its own kW, curtailment strategy and comfort constraint before the season starts. A building is never asked to do something on the day that was not agreed in advance.
Five stages,
one record.
The kW you enrol is the kW you baseline, the kW you shed and the kW you are paid for. Nothing is re-keyed between spreadsheets on the way through, which is the usual place a settlement dispute comes from.
The baseline is
the whole
argument.
A curtailment is invisible. What is settled is the difference between what a building did and what it would have done, and the second half of that sentence is a model. If the model is wrong, the payment is wrong in whichever direction the error runs.
The IESO methodology takes the closest four eligible days by temperature and applies a same-day adjustment. We hold the interval data, the regression and the event capture in one system precisely so that a settlement can be reconstructed line by line months later.
Figures shown to illustrate how an event settles. Real portfolio composition and season results are visible to enrolled clients inside Q-Peak.
All of it runs on Q-Peak.
One console at three altitudes: we run the season, portfolio owners see the money, and property managers see the four things they have to do on Thursday afternoon. Multi-tenant hierarchy with scoped roles, IESO-methodology baselines, asset-level modelling and the full event lifecycle from standby through settlement. Live in Toronto Hydro, Hydro Ottawa and Alectra territories.
Common questions.
Generally not, because the load is shifted rather than removed. A building precooled through the morning coasts through a four-hour afternoon window on its own thermal mass. Each asset carries a comfort constraint set before the season, and a building that cannot hold the space is not asked to. Four events a season, weekdays only, four hours maximum.
Anything with a meaningful summer cooling load and interval metering: office towers, retail plazas, industrial facilities, larger multi-residential. What matters is curtailable kW and whether the BAS can be driven to a schedule on the day. Smaller buildings work through aggregation — that is what the aggregator is for.
No. Efficiency lowers the baseline; demand response is paid on the reduction from whatever that baseline now is. The two stack. The one thing worth watching is timing — a major retrofit part-way through a season changes the baseline mid-stream, so it is better to establish the baseline after the work, or to plan the enrolment around it.
Performance is calculated per event and the weakest events are dropped before the season settles, so a single bad afternoon does not define the year. Persistent under-performance does reduce the payment, which is why the asset register and the comfort constraints are agreed honestly at enrolment rather than optimistically.
Thirty minutes, with the engineer who would run the work.
No cost and no obligation. Bring twelve months of utility bills if you have them — that alone is usually enough to say whether a building has a capital problem or a controls problem.