Clean energy: getting a pulse on Vancouver

Pulse Energy is based on a simple idea: Using less energy makes bottom-line sense. But implementing simple ideas requires minds schooled in complexity

Vancouver, seductive and beautiful, remains too much a branch-plant kind of town. Compared with Seattle and Portland, to say nothing of northern California, it needs more innovation to push homegrown enterprises to do business outside the local market.

David Helliwell, 38, is trying to do just that. In five years, Mr. Helliwell and his silent partner, a man who made a lot of money developing and selling a large business, has built Pulse Energy into a company that employs 50 people, has enjoyed close to 100-per-cent quarter-over-quarter growth and, if all goes well, might be employing hundreds of people in the near future. From a company whose first contract in 2006 was with an aboriginal band of 100 people, Pulse now works throughout Western Canada and is branching out to other countries.

Mr. Helliwell is building the company from Vancouver, his hometown but a place he’d left to work for many years in Paris, Ottawa and Australia, where he tried his hand at being a professional surfer. He also worked for a year with his father, John, a distinguished economist at the University of British Columbia, on researching the “brain drain,” a hot-button issue a decade ago.

His father thought the fear overblown, said so vigorously in his writings, and might now take some satisfaction in seeing that his son’s company has recently recruited two high-flying professionals from Orbitz in Chicago.

“People from around the world want to live here,” David Helliwell said the other day. “We can play a role in making Vancouver a hub for clean technology.”

Pulse Energy is based on a simple idea: Using less energy makes bottom-line sense. Implementing simple ideas, however, requires minds schooled in complexity to maximize results. So Pulse’s employees include electrical engineers, mathematicians and computer engineers working on software systems to help companies evaluate their energy efficiency and introduce better ways of making further efficiency gains.

Bottom-line improvement gets married with social objectives at Pulse, because the knock-on impacts of greater energy efficiency include fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. The marriage might explain, in part, why three former heads of the Vancouver chapter of Engineers Without Borders are working for Pulse.

Commercial property owners are a prime target for Pulse, as are public institutions with many buildings such as health and education departments and universities. Pulse designed energy efficiency programs for the Vancouver Olympics, and company representatives are off to London to advise Olympic officials on the 2012 Summer Games.