Building Energy Resilience

Most state and utility energy efficiency programs undergo a “process evaluation” to assess how well the programs achieve their objectives, and how the programs could do better. Process evaluations can provide essential feedback from the perspective of program administrators, end-users (e.g., households and building owners) and suppliers (e.g., mechanical and lighting contractors). Feedback is great for improvement, right? Well, yes, if you can act on it, and if acting on it will have impact.

In a previous blog post, Jennifer Chiodo discussed why energy benchmarking is beneficial for everyone, whether it’s for a residential building or a commercial building. Benchmarking allows you as the building owner to not only understand how your building is doing from an energy standpoint over time, but it also compares the building to other similar buildings in its class. Using the Energy Star Portfolio Manager online benchmarking tool, you can monitor a building’s energy usage over time by setting goals and comparing the overall energy use intensity to a baseline year.

The term retrocommissioning, (commissioning for existing buildings), frequently rises in conversations when commercial building owners, operators and facility managers gather to talk about how to make their HVAC systems work better. There are many reasons why.

Have you ever wondered how utilities and energy agencies run energy efficiency programs for installing recommended products such as variable frequency drives and LED lighting? Evaluation, Measurement and Verification (EM&V) is a crucial part of evaluating energy efficiency programs. EM&V provides an assessment of how well the program is performing. This goes beyond assessing the performance of the installed energy efficient measures; it also provides an assessment of how customers perceive and use the program. EM&V makes energy programs sustainable by providing feedback through multiple and diverse sources of information.

With the holiday season in full swing and airline travel at one of its annual peaks, I thought I’d take the opportunity to geek-out on the subject of HVAC systems on commercial airplanes.

Wireless networks are everywhere in 2014. I have on my person 3 wireless networks happening at any given moment (4G LTE, Bluetooth, and Wi-Fi). I am a walking source of radio everywhere I go. And this is only the beginning. As more wireless devices proliferate for personal and commercial use, the spectrum will only grow more crowded and complicated. Are you prepared as wireless technology penetrates the HVAC automation market? Do you understand how radio propagates with respect to data and networks? I hope to scratch the surface and share some of this with you in the following paragraphs.

For a recent commissioning project, part of our scope of work was to test an emergency power system for a data center. Because this data center was a very important part of the client company’s work, the system and all components needed to work as intended by the design, and it was crucial that it be tested with all aspects involved before the data center was utilized. This was to ensure there would be no loss of power to the data center servers if any issues were identified. In order to properly test this mission critical system, we not only needed to understand how each component worked, but we also needed to put together full testing documents that included the relationship between all of the components. To make the entire process more fluent, we suggested a coordinated effort for creating documents and testing the system.

Despite my relatively short amount of time working in the building commissioning field, I have been able to witness firsthand the serious consequences resulting from a lack of HVAC preventive maintenance (PM) in a facility. From dirty filters and coils to broken outside air dampers, lack of PM can lead to premature equipment failure, poor indoor air quality, an assortment of other problems, and usually increased energy and maintenance costs for a building owner. Indeed, it can be challenging for a facilities team to stick to a preventive maintenance plan after they have fallen into a reactive maintenance mode, but the advantages of a more proactive approach can be beneficial to everyone on the facilities team, as well as the building owner.

I take climate change very seriously and do what I can in my personal life and through my career in energy efficient building commissioning to mitigate my impact on the environment. But I am also cautious of doomsayers who call for unrealistic achievements or all is lost. So I was motivated to do some investigating recently when I read that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states that “global emissions need to hit zero by 2100 to keep global warming below 2°C by the turn of the century.” That struck me as such an idealistic goal. Can we really do that? I decided I wanted to educate myself and, of course, found that this iceberg is deeper than I expected, and the answer is not simple. In this post I’d like to share its complexity and, in a subsequent post, I will speak to my interpretation of realistic goals.

Replacement Chiller Needed – But What’s the Cooling Load?

We were hired recently by a commercial customer to work on the replacement of a ~120 ton chiller plant dating back to at least the 1980s. When we were brought on board, the plan was to install a 165 ton chiller to replace the existing unit. The facility had no building management system (DDC) and therefore the owner didn’t have the ability to accurately assess the building’s actual cooling load. In our experience, many customers in our area who do not have process loads actually have had cooling loads come down over the past 20 years. This trend is likely due to reduced lighting waste heat resulting from lighting efficiency upgrades and improved windows (low-e). We decided it may be a good idea to meter the plant to determine actual loads before sizing the new chiller plant.