Is your business paying peak-level power rates or exceeding your demand level price?

Are you needlessly cutting into your bottom line with uncontrolled utility bills? Do you need to get a handle on your energy consumption and resultant utility bills?

It’s time you took charge of your operations and slashed costs by tracking crucial data through Trackflow’s energy management, reporting, and automated load shedding application.

This Calgary and area company was created exclusively as a solution to erratic price peaks precipitated by power deregulation in Alberta.

Trackflow’s VP Operations John B. Ewen, left, and President Gord Duff have the means to help cut power costs.

Trackflow, based in Calgary with offices in Bragg Creek and Toronto, connects you to your data via an exclusive internet website and a sophisticated software application that tracks and reports crucial data from virtually any electronic device in real time.

Here’s how Trackflow’s leading-edge solutions can give your company an edge and enhance your bottom line:

* Trackflow’s application tracks production data and reporting and graphing both real time and historical data through the internet.

* Trackflow’s application automatically alarms to e-mail, pagers, cellphones or scada as real time data varies from the user’s pre-set parameters.

* Trackflow’s application allows for automated or manual intervention by the operators to control processes in response to real time data.

* Trackflow’s application can automatically control industrial and commercial processes via the internet.

* Trackflow’s application has sophisticated analysis and reporting tools including historical trend analysis, spot market and pricing analysis and forward curve information.

In a nutshell, Trackflow tracks virtually any type of electronic signal, reports the data from the signal and alarms and controls in response to the data based on pre-set user parameters and reporting standards.

Trackflow’s application will automatically control devices based on power-pool prices. It will turn devices on and off based on price and other criteria, including outside temperature, time of day or any other user defined priorities. Trackflow can then shift the load for these devices to off peak times when we virtually “give power away” in Alberta.

“Essentially, we can track any electronic signal, control it, move it over to a website and the user can have as many alarms and actions as they define,” says Gordon Duff, Chief Executive Officer of Trackflow.

Since the company’s inception four years ago, Trackflow’s system has been utilized to provide huge savings in utility costs by numerous organizations, including major oil companies who have relied on Trackflow for more efficient operations at their gas plants, pumping and compression operations, as well as shut-in gas wells where co-generated power is sold back to the power grid based on cost-efficient spark spread parameters.

“Our clients are delighted to see that they can have control over their utility bills by utilizing our technology," says Duff. "Utility costs are starting to become a bottom-line issue with many companies. The cost of power in Alberta is among the highest in the country and it's an issue that is really starting to come to the forefront with many companies.”

Simply put, Trackflow eliminates the high peak costs from clients’ power bills.

“By fully utilizing our system, companies have saved 17 per cent from their power bills,” says Duff. “By our calculations, we believe that if we had about 80 per cent of the industrial power users in Alberta using Trackflow, we could reduce Alberta’s power generation needs by about 12 per cent, by moving load to off peak times.”

Trackflow was founded four years ago in response to the wild swings in power prices following provincial power deregulation. “We are also meter service providers providing meter reading and reporting services to many clients,” says Duff.

“One of the members of our Board of Directors (Tim Stauft), who was Vice-President of Midstream Operations with TransCanada PipeLines, was responsible for the Cochrane gas plant when deregulation began,” says Duff. “Because the prices were trading so crazily at different times of the day, he found they had to have people monitoring the power price and then trying to respond manually and turn devices on and off in response to the price swings.

“That’s when people started thinking that there must be a better way – and there was. Trackflow was founded and its software was created as a solution to the problems associated with deregulation.”

Trackflow’s system can be programmed to increase efficiency of a company's production through a system of alarms at various price levels geared to the user’s specific requirements.

“Trackflow can send alarms when the power price hits $150 (per megawatt), then another at $175,” explains Duff.

“Once the price hits some critical level, say $400 or $500, which it often does, then the program is capable of turning off fans, motors and generators. Then, it can turn them back on once the price hits a more reasonable level and returns to the parameters as set by the user.”

Through Trackflow, a company can avoid pumping reservoirs full of water when power rates are peaking. “Our system can shut down the system at a fixed rate and then resume pumping after midnight at significantly lower prices,” says Duff. “Companies are recognizing that utilizing our system to operate at lower utility prices leads to tremendous savings.”

Although Trackflow’s primary focus is electricity and it is working with an LDC in the Toronto area to offer this service to its 450 commercial industrial clients, the company is also equipped to monitor water meters.

“We believe water will be a critical aspect of our business in the future,” says Duff. “Once water starts to get costly, its use will have to be managed by the users.”

Trackflow’s system is also capable of monitoring data from gas wells.

If your business isn’t equipped to take advantage of erratic utility rates, Trackflow is your only option. For further information and pricing, complete the online form at www.trackflow.com, e-mail jewen@trackflow.com or phone 403-262-4788.