Building Energy Resilience

On a recent project at a large hospital Cx Associates examined the feasibility of consolidating two air handlers into one single air handler.  One of the air handlers is nearing the end of its useful life, and is the reason this project was brought to Cx Associates.  While making an in-kind replacement was looked at, the replacement of this air handler presented an opportunity to replace another that was also aging, and located in a position that would be difficult to replace in the future.  By combining the two air handlers into a single air handler there was an opportunity to essentially upgrade two air handlers at once at a lower cost than replacing them individually at different times.  Maintenance advantages can also be realized by reducing the number of air handlers to maintain in the facility by one.

In a recent blog post, I shared my experience as an Owners’ Project Manager for a mechanical system upgrade in an office building for a large organization in Burlington, Vermont. This role has provided me with several new related projects in a healthcare facility, each varying in type and having a very different effect on the overall environment of the organization. In the healthcare environment, I have become familiar with its unique construction challenges. This post will discuss a couple of these challenges and approaches for preventing these challenges from adversely affecting the overall success of the project.

Vermont is a small, hilly state in the northeast corner of the US, and is often claimed to be the “second cloudiest” state in the nation (a subjective statistic). Although our state has been adopting solar in leaps and bounds, there is a debate over whether solar is an applicable technology in our state and, nationally, if solar should be subsidized now that the production costs have decreased dramatically. I decided to research the history of subsidies and production costs of various fuels to determine if solar deserves to be an incentivized fuel source for electric generation.

Image via Wikipedia.

My whole life I’ve been a computer geek.  Ever since I got my first TI-99/4 I started realizing that computers were a blank canvas of technology that I couldn’t resist drawing on.  This passion carried me into Information Systems for my degree in college.  In college I received an internship at a local Building Automation Systems (BAS) contractor programming HVAC systems.  Through that internship I learned the value of using networked computer systems to generate actionable information, and how to automate a decision process from that information. 

In 2020 federal standards will go into effect that will render lighting energy efficiency measures for screw-in lamps (standard A-lamp light bulbs) extinct.  This will have a big impact on residential energy efficiency programs, but what about the programs and savings for the commercial market?  Most of the commercial and industrial built environment is illuminated by linear fluorescent lamps.  While the baseline efficiency mandated for these lamps does continue to improve, the advent of LED lighting presents a major opportunity to re-light commercial and industrial spaces, potentially increasing lighting savings in this market just when savings are disappearing in the residential market.

In commercial buildings all air handlers, whether they are mass produced roof top units or custom built indoor units, are built and installed with an outside air intake and damper.  This outside air intake and damper has a large effect on both the energy use of a building and the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of a building.  When performing retro-commissioning, Cx Associates often finds these outside air dampers are not adjusted properly (or are broken entirely) leading to either high energy use or poor IEQ. By optimizing air handling units, energy savings or improved comfort (or both) can sometimes be achieved.

On January 25, 2016, the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruled on Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) v. Electric Power Supply Association (EPSA). The ruling, which was 6-2 in FERC’s favor, is great news for the bright future of a practice which can help grid operators better match electrical grid power supply and demand in real-time, known as Demand Response.

What is Demand Response?

There are two ways to operate a building: passively or actively. Operating passively means the building performs its intended function – the lights are on and the building is temperate – but no one is monitoring and analyzing the operating costs or planning for equipment issues.  Actively operating a building involves close monitoring of the building operating costs, thoughtful maintenance of building systems and their operating schedules, and capital planning for future equipment replacements. There is a new (relatively inexpensive) tool emerging on the market that can help both of these types of building managers move toward simple, effective, and knowledgeable operating oversight.

A friend of mine recently sent me an article from the Automatedbuildings.com online magazine entitled “Death of the Controls Industry” written by Therese Sullivan (Principal of Building Context Ltd).   The article contains summary of a presentation given by Darren Wright, Director at Arup.   Darren Wright makes the case that we have a major problem in the building energy market, and it’s directly attributable to the controls business model still not being open source. 

When you’re asked to review someone else’s building automation system (BAS) programming, it’s a bit of a daunting task.  This is because those of us who program building systems (or really any computer-driven system) for a living figure out that there are a million different ways to capture the same process in any given programming language. Usually no two people will do it the same way.