Top Innovators
Mary Bernard is Supervisor, Residential Program Performance at the Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator.
The Ontario Independent Electricity System Operator won the Fortnightly Top Innovator 2025 award ''Maria Telkes Top Innovator in Distributed Energy'' for its Save on Energy Peak Perks Program.
PUF's Kerry Worthington: Talk about the innovation and its positive impact.
Mary Bernard: I'm the supervisor of a team called Residential Program Performance, and we're responsible for residential programs under the Save on Energy banner. I'm with the Independent Electricity System Operator, which manages the transmission grid in Ontario, among other things.
The innovation is the Save on Energy Peak Perks program, a residential demand response program that has grown to be the largest virtual power plant ever in Canada. We have opened it up to small businesses, as well. It essentially adjusts the smart thermostats of participants on high-demand days.
Participants get seventy-five dollars for enrolling in the program in the form of a prepaid MasterCard, and a twenty-dollar prepaid MasterCard for every year they stay in the program. We only adjust temperatures up to two degrees Celsius and normally do a pre-cooling prior to an activation event so people stay comfortable in their homes.
What's innovative about our program — lots of places have smart thermostat programs — is how big it's grown. We launched in late June 2023. By January 2024, we had reached one hundred thousand participants.