Kingston and Sioux Lookout have taken top honours in the Count Me In! Community Challenge, an Ontario-wide energy conservation competition that included 83 municipalities and covered 56 percent of the population.

The winners were announced at the annual conference of the Association of Municipalities of Ontario (AMO) on August 19. The province-wide Count Me In! Community Challenge was held Friday, August 14 between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m., coinciding with the anniversary of the 2003 North American blackout that plunged some 50 million people into darkness. A total of 20,277 individuals pledged to take on 226,472 acts of conservation through the challenge.

Count Me In! Community Challenge Day is the final element of an overall spring-summer energy conservation campaign organized by the OPA and its partners. It began with a Leadership Summit on April 23 and was followed by Ontario’s second province-wide Energy Conservation Week, May 17 to 23. More than 175 conservation-related events were held across the province in conjunction with Energy Conservation Week.

The winners of the Count Me In! Community Challenge are Kingston for electricity consumption reduction (megawatt-hours) and Sioux Lookout for pledges per capita.

Kingston won the Woodstock Cup for achieving a drop of 7.8 percent in electricity consumption during the 12-hour assessment period, compared with August 13. Sioux Lookout won the trophy for conservation pledges: 593 individuals made a commitment in a community with a population of 5,183 (11.44 percent).

Count Me In! is part of a broader effort to help Ontario achieve the most ambitious conservation targets in North America -- the equivalent of taking one in five electricity users off the grid by the end of 2025 -- and to create a true culture of conservation.

To view the 2009 ECW Highlights, please click here.

For more information on the 2009 Energy Conservation Week and the Count Me In! challenge visit: www.countmeinontario.ca.