Demand response offering greater savings for building integration

While factories can scale down production, other types of buildings can easily benefit from demand response in subtler ways.

The potential energy savings are probably the most important benefit of any building integration, but all too often people fail to appreciate how these very same savings can contribute even more through the use of a demand response program. Intelligent Utility highlights some of the biggest opportunities for buildings to take part in these programs, even if they cannot necessarily just shut the lights off.

Demand response programs are an increasingly common tool used by utilities to help balance the electrical load on the grid.

Both individuals and businesses are able to sign up for the program, pledging to cut consumption by a certain amount when called upon generally in exchange for a flat rebate and a price per kilowatt of reduced consumption – though for residential clients and smaller businesses this process might be handled remotely by the utility.

Intelligent Utility looks at five of the biggest energy consumers – factories, hospitals, schools and universities, data centers and commercial buildings – and ways that they can often take part in these programs.

Factories have likely the greatest potential, because they can scale back their production processes if the savings from the demand response program are worth the cost. Most other buildings are not so fortunate, since data centers must handle whatever data is thrown their way, while schools, hospitals and commercial buildings often must have access to all their equipment at any given point and need to maintain a consistent comfortable temperature.

Plenty of options, and growing interest
However, all of these buildings have at least one important opportunity to cut down their energy consumption when the time comes – pre-chilling. This technique ramps up the air conditioning system for some time before the demand event, letting this cold air keep the temperature relatively comfortable throughout. With an efficient HVAC system and effective building controls, this approach can allow almost any building to take part in demand response systems.

With sufficiently advanced automatic lighting controls and newer, more efficient lighting installations, essentially all of these buildings should also be able to curtail some of their energy usage by dimming lights or turning them off completely in areas where they are not necessarily needed.

In addition to these options, many factories and data centers, as well as some commercial buildings, can actually use demand events as an opportunity to make use of on-site backup generators. By drawing from a building’s own generators rather than the grid, these buildings can simultaneously avoid the high energy costs at peak hours and get an added payment for curtailing their energy usage.

While building integration is not always mentioned as a critical aspect of demand response, Today’s Facility Manager reports that the U.S. Green Building Council and the Environmental Defense Fund have started a drive to incorporate these programs into all Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design-certified buildings. The new Automated Demand Response program hopes to tap into the huge momentum that LEED has generated in recent years.

Honeywell Direct Coupled Actuators

A Honeywell smoke damper actuator

A lot of the focus in the HVAC industry is placed on big centralized equipment, yet a substantial amount of the waste and inefficiency within ventilation systems comes from the smaller bits and pieces scattered throughout the building. One of the often overlooked opportunities for improving building efficiency is the use of direct coupled actuators.

Honeywell offers a whole range of highly efficient actuators specifically designed to control valves and dampers for a variety of specific applications.

Direct coupled smoke damper actuators help to effectively control smoke and other potentially dangerous substances in the air moving through the HVAC system. The simplified command system responds rapidly to a single-pole controller, giving it a rapid response to any indication of problems.

In addition, CCI also carries Honeywell spring return and fail-in-place direct coupled actuators for systems in which the valves and dampers need to either close completely or remain open in the event of a loss of power or some other type of failure. Many of the actuators can be effectively implemented in both variable control systems and simpler on-off applications.

These devices give planners a degree of flexibility in how to design HVAC systems and can ensure that any upgrades will fit in with the safety systems already in place.

The big advantage of these technologies, however, is not just in the variety of different options offered. Honeywell’s direct coupled actuators also offer an impressive torque for their size, allowing them to be used for types of valves and dampers even in smaller systems. By combining powerful, precise control systems with markedly lower energy requirements, these direct coupled actuators can provide significant energy savings from an often unnoticed part of an HVAC system.

Looking for Valves & Valve Actuators or Dampers & Damper Actuators? Visit ControlConsultantsOnline.com or call us at 781-335-8353.

Simple addition brings building integration to steam heat

As much as building automation systems involve some impressively advanced technologies, in many cases it still has to find ways to adapt to completely out-dated equipment. Greentech Media reports that a new startup founded by an electrical engineer from Columbia University could offer many homes and businesses, particularly in cities in the Northeast, an opportunity to add automatic temperature controls to buildings that may not even have individual thermostats.

Marshall Cox founded Radiator Labs while studying for his Ph.D. at Columbia after a visit from his brother spurred him to develop an innovative mechanism to give New York City apartments the control they have always lacked over temperature.

Many of the older apartment buildings in the city, as well as many commercial properties, still use steam heat radiators, which suffer from a variety of problems from high heat losses in pipes to poor distribution. But one of the biggest issues is simply that these radiators are all set centrally from the boiler room, and ultimately tend to crank up the heat based on the coldest room in the building – meaning that warmer rooms end up wedging open a window in the middle of winter simply to cool off.

According to GTM, anywhere between 15 and 30 percent of steam heat gets lost because of this type of waste, which makes these already inefficient systems all the more expensive.

Adding in control
The problem is that building integration relies as much on controls as on information gathering, so such inflexible centralized systems can be problematic.

This is where Radiator Labs comes in. Cox took the concept of the radiator cover – usually a decorative box intended to hide the bulky fixture – and decided to make it more practical.

Cox put together a heavily insulated cover, even including reflective materials to trap infrared light, that can effectively trap the heat from the radiator. In the side of the box, he installed a quiet-running, variable-speed fan that could distribute this captured heat. An automatic temperature control installed in the room would allow individual tenants to choose what temperature they want to keep their rooms, giving them the opportunity to dramatically cut down on their energy usage.

Commercial market
The big market for these devices is expected to come from the multi-unit residential sector, as Radiator Labs aims to make them affordable enough for individuals and families. However, TriplePundit reports that the market for older commercial buildings is hardly minor either. The Empire State Building recently implemented a massive upgrade project for its steam heat system, installing thousands of reflective panels behind each of its radiators in order to send more heat toward where people are actually working.

And, particularly in large buildings such as that, integrating all of the individual radiators into a single network could help the boilers fueling the system run more efficiently. While the system would still have to cater to the coldest room in the building, it would be easier to determine where exactly that cutoff lies and to use only as much fuel as is needed.

Building automation systems can help employee health

Building automation systems can help employee health

The “green” benefits of sustainable energy solutions have long been trumpeted, and more and more businesses are becoming aware of the financial benefits and striving to implement as many building automation systems at they can. But one aspect that companies may not have fully considered is their employees’ health.In a recent article in Triple Pundit, Andrew Burger discusses the potential health benefits for employees of measures like automatic temperature control. Burger points to a recent EPA report on indoor air quality, The Inside Story: A Guide to Indoor Air Quality, which notes that indoor air quality can be significantly worse than outdoor air quality in a variety of measures, and that unfortunately “many Americans spend a lot of time in offices with mechanical heating, cooling, and ventilation systems.”

Indeed, Burger points to sections of the report that paint a dire picture of what can happen if HVAC is poorly maintained.

“Indoor air pollutants can be circulated from portions of the building used for specialized purposes, such as restaurants, print shops, and dry-cleaning stores, into offices in the same building,” the report says.

Other strategies to improve employee health
A GREENGUARD Environmental Institute report provides a number of other strategies to take on poor indoor air. HVAC systems are key to indoor air quality, and the report provides a list of some of the most important HVAC procedures, among them “changing filters, cleaning coils, flushing the condensate system, lubricating moving parts, replacing components designed to wear out at appropriate intervals… and inspecting for signs of damage or premature equipment failure.” These, the report says, will have a huge effect on the quality of a building’s climate, and staff should keep abreast of the list to make sure their facilities are kept in top condition.

Your workers are your best asset
Workers cost a bundle to train and can take months or years to really achieve competency at their jobs. They can be the best asset a company has, and so their health is the company’s crown jewel – and allergies or a spreading cold can be productivity’s worst enemy. Books like Roy Baumeister’s Willpower have chronicled the negative effects a simple cold can have on an employee’s productivity. Your fortunes rise and fall with the employees you hire. So businesses out there, considered yourself warned of the dangers of inadequate building controls.

Control Consultants, Inc. carries products to help your building environment and Indoor Air Quality (IAQ). Contact us and visit our online store to learn more about products like the Prestige IAQ Thermostat and the Honeywell Analytics sensors.

Efficiency still strong on the rebound

A growing chorus of energy efficiency experts are arguing that the much-discussed “rebound effect” is nowhere near as big a concern as many efficiency critics have suggested, according to Scientific American.

The rebound effect, first introduced in the middle of the 19th century by English economist William Stanley Jevons, suggests that the more you improve the efficiency with which you can use a resource, in his case referring to coal, the more it is likely to be used. For modern businesses, the argument runs that investing heavily in efficient heating, lighting or other major energy costs will simply lead to increased and often wasteful use of these resources.

While the idea of sustainability has taken on an increasingly prominent place in the modern business world, most companies still are not interested in committing to efficiency upgrades unless they expect to see some serious energy savings from the investment. That’s what makes the concept of the rebound effect so worrisome, since it suggests that the energy that businesses could be saving from efficiency upgrades is just as likely to get wasted in other ways once improvements are put into effect.

Missing the mark
The problem is that recent research hasn’t found anything like the kind of rebound effect that proponents of the theory would suggest. Larry Dale, a researcher in the energy efficiency standards group at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, estimates that the average rebound effect is probably only around 10 percent, meaning households and businesses can still see massive energy savings from efficiency investments.

A study of the rebound effect in American households from Carnegie Mellon University pegs the number at somewhere between 15 and 25 percent. By comparison, the researchers pointed out, some efficiency critics estimate the effect could be stronger than 100 percent, meaning that the gains made from efficiency investments get wiped out and then some.

“The rebound effect is small, but in the policy realm where I operate, it gets raised a lot, mostly by people who want to convince the world our energy problems can’t be solved and that energy efficiency is ultimately not going to achieve anything,” Center for American Progress fellow Joseph Romm told Scientific American. “Because it’s a political argument, it’s relatively impervious to the facts.”

Out of human hands
In recent years, one of the big benefits for businesses looking to invest in efficiency is that they don’t necessarily need to trust employees or managers not to be wasteful.

The increasingly sophisticated building automation systems being used by many businesses have allowed companies to make responsible and cost-effective use of energy a matter of course rather than a question of faith. These building controls help to maximize the benefits of any efficiency upgrades while also providing a greater degree of transparency into energy costs.

The latter has been seen as one of the most important trends in energy efficiency.

“The single biggest weakness in our energy efficiency policies in this country is our failure to properly analyze, incorporate and account [for] the benefits,” said Steve Crowell, chairman and CEO of the Conservation Services Group.

Microsoft takes building integration to a new level

The Microsoft headquarters outside of Seattle is an example of an integrated campus of buildings.

Control Consultants, Inc. helps our customers create and support intelligent buildings. So, we’re always on the lookout for how companies are using building controls and creating intelligent buildings. We see companies and universities with campuses doing some pretty amazing building integration projects.

Microsoft ranks second on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of the greenest companies. That drive for sustainability and a strong interest in energy savings recently led to the development of the one of the most sophisticated building controls networks in the world.

Growing pains
Microsoft got its start as a company in the 1970s, but its much acclaimed Redmond, Washington, campus didn’t open until 1986, according to National Geographic.

At the time, the still-young company’s headquarters featured only four buildings on 88 acres of land. Fast forward 27 years and that number has grown to as much as 500 acres with 125 different buildings.

It’s not as if they tore down all the old buildings when they ran out of space either. New facilities were added as they were needed, with varying levels of building integration, differing points of emphasis and nearly three decades of different levels of technology.

What this led to was a set of facilities with all the enormous energy demands of a modern high-tech company combined with all the normal issues of any office building, and no way to get reliable information on what repairs needed to be done where or what costs could be cut easily cut with better management.

Bringing it all together
The company had considered a $60 million update that would put its facilities all on a single footing, giving them a coherent system with which to monitor and control their energy usage. But facilities and energy director Darrel Smith felt like that approach would cost too much money and, ultimately, fail to address the issue that got the company to that point in the first place – the lack of a platform to integrate all of the data it was generating.

Instead, with all the resources of the largest software company in the world, the Microsoft facilities team decided it would create its own system, aiming instead to take advantage of the sensors and controls that were already in place, centralizing and normalizing the flow of data.

The platform they created has been implemented in 13 different buildings across the facility, and has already started saving millions of dollars in maintenance and energy costs while also reducing the amount of unproductive time spent climbing up rooftops and inspecting individual components around the buildings.

“I used to spend 70 percent of my time gathering and compiling data and only about 30 percent of my time doing engineering,” said facilities manager Jonathan Grove. “Our smart buildings work serves up data for me in easily consumable formats, so now I get to spend 95 percent of my time doing engineering, which is great.”

Intelligent buildings work a lot like you do

Buildings breathe, just in a slightly different way.

Designing intelligent buildings is not always a glamorous task. It takes keen attention to detail, finding even small ways to improve controls for everything from lights to air conditioning compressors, as well as more obscure problems. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be a compelling vision of the purpose of building automation systems.

Dave Bartlett serves as the vice president of industry solutions and smarter buildings at computing giant IBM, as well as the company’s recognized “building whisperer.” Speaking in an interview with Nature of Business Radio, he offered an interesting conception of what intelligent buildings are meant to be, and how they’re supposed to function – like any other organism.

In many ways, buildings share a lot characteristics with living beings, featuring everything from their own lungs (HVAC systems) to waste management systems. And the purposes of all these components are not as dissimilar as they seem at first. Your lungs are there to provide oxygen to the trillions of individual cells, not some holistic sense of “you,” just like a building’s HVAC system is intended purely to provide a healthy and comfortable environment for the people and equipment inside.

“Ultimately, if our buildings aren’t maintaining a safer, more secure and productive workplace, then it doesn’t matter how much technology you fill with them,” said Bartlett. “If people aren’t seeing a difference in their quality of life, productivity, health and safety within the building and the environment, is it really smarter?”

Traditionally, the biggest difference between living organisms and buildings – aside from the materials involved, of course – was that most buildings lacked the necessary internal sensors to respond fluidly to changing circumstances. The human body, for example, can clearly react to visual, auditory and tactile sensations, but it also takes many actions based on measurements of internal stimuli.

When the body starts to get too hot, regardless of the reason, it triggers sweat glands that are designed to help you cool off. Buildings, meanwhile, had some often unreliable thermostats and not a whole lot else.

Bartlett notes, however, that better sensors are increasingly allowing buildings to respond to the actual needs of inhabitants rather than following proscribed or routine actions. A perfect example would be cycling air from outside, which previously would have followed a schedule based on industry standards. Now, sensors located throughout the building can help determine the levels of carbon dioxide within a building and indicate the best times to cycle air to create the most comfortable atmosphere with the least energy expenditure.

Without these types of systems, buildings can waste a lot of energy or create an unhealthy work environment, “like you’re breathing way too fast or too hard for what you need to do.”

In a piece for The Huffington Post last year, Bartlett argued that “big data,” combined with improved sensors, is one of the most important tools available for cutting the environmental impact and the overall maintenance costs for buildings. While not every company has the expertise to handle all this information, there are a growing array of resources for them to draw upon in order to benefit from improved efficiency.