Building Energy Resilience

I have the good fortune to work on leading commercial and industrial energy efficiency programs in three states in the Northeast. Two of these states undertake rigorous measurement and verification (M&V) to ensure they are delivering the savings they are claiming. In all three cases the states and their program administrators (PAs) are running programs that are pushing the boundaries of energy efficiency as they continue to advance savings in mature markets that have been served by energy efficiency programs for decades. My firm also works to implement energy efficiency projects for our select group of highly committed clients. We find energy efficiency opportunities in new construction projects that include leading international architectural and engineering firms, in retro-commissioning (RCx) projects and in energy efficiency upgrade projects.

In a previous blog post, I discussed the features of the new Energy Star Portfolio Manager, a free online tool for benchmarking your building’s energy usage. Recently a client introduced me to another online benchmarking tool called Wegowise. This client has been successfully using Wegowise for their multi-family buildings. They started using it before multi-family was included in Portfolio Manager, and continue to use it because they like the easy to use interface, the automated features and how their building’s energy usage is displayed in a simple way that is easy to understand/analyze.

We live and work in an age where communication can happen in an instant. Emails circumnavigate the globe in a couple of seconds, text messages ding on our phones as soon as they’re sent and usually expect an immediate response, and our cell phones can be called no matter where we are or what time of day it is. While this hyper connectivity does have the potential to streamline how we interact and do business and make our lives easier, I am finding effective communication to be more and more difficult. From what I’ve observed, people are simply overwhelmed by the volume of input they are receiving. This results in their inability to respond to requests in a timely fashion or, if they do respond, it is often incomplete, misses the point, or is unclear because of a misunderstanding of the original request (likely due to the fact that they didn’t think they had the time to listen to the entire voicemail or read the whole email).

I came across Ben Franklin’s famous saying “A penny saved is a penny earned” and it got me thinking about energy saving. Just like a heat pump seems to make energy for free (which it doesn’t, but that’s another story), saving energy through energy efficiency is a cumulative principal that saves much more than the actual kW or gallon of fuel that you’re not using. Consider the generation, distribution and transmission costs of the energy itself. By the time the kW is available at your circuit breaker, you’ve already lost 65-70% of the energy potential of that lump of coal or gallon of crude oil.

We spent last Thanksgiving in the Philadelphia area with my wife’s family, as we typically do every year. Though it’s not our usual habit, on Black Friday we ventured out to the local Target Store to do some shopping. As I recall, our purpose was to stock up on snacks for our toddler for the trip back to Vermont--it definitely was not to do holiday shopping on the most notoriously crazy shopping day of the year! While the trip to Target was fairly mundane, unbeknownst to us, as we swiped our bank debit cards to pay at checkout, our card information became unsecure in a complex data breach orchestrated from half a world away, reportedly in Eastern Europe and Russia.

It is well known that energy efficiency investments provide opportunities to reduce energy costs and opportunities to leverage incentive dollars. As we have discussed recently in this blog, the relative attractiveness of energy efficiency investments may be evaluated in terms of first cost, simple payback, and life cycle cost. But for a given investment alternative, is it advantageous to finance?

Things have been moving slowly with my home replacement project so there hasn’t been much news. We are advancing towards spring construction (if Vermont’s winter ever ends), but are facing some unexpected challenges. The thing that we are finding most surprising about this process is that there is no roadmap. Originally we had thought that our architect and builder would guide us through the process, but they have been unable to provide much information regarding financing. Here are few of the things we are dealing with now:

Although I have commissioned a number of LEED New Construction projects, I have recently become involved in the LEED accreditation process for Existing Buildings (LEED EB). As part of the energy prerequisite, one requirement is to conduct an Energy Audit that is equivalent to ASHRAE Level 1 Energy Audit. This is the first of three levels of audits that ASHRAE has designed and more and more existing buildings are turning to this process to define energy savings opportunities within their buildings. Whether you are striving for LEED EB energy credit, or are focused on improving the longevity and operation of your building, a Level 1 Audit is a good place to define the roadmap to realizing these goals.

Energy savings opportunities can be difficult to implement at times because of the perceived financial impacts they may have on a project. All too often a short-sighted view is taken with regard to a marginal increase in project cost vs. the long term cost reduction impacts that marginal cost will achieve.

Investments in energy efficiency are often evaluated in terms of their relative financial performance. In the realm of building energy efficiency, the relative financial performance of investment alternatives is typically quantified in terms of a simple payback. Simple payback calculations may be helpful for initial screening and ranking of project alternatives, however, they can oversimplify financial evaluation to the point that the best performing alternatives are not properly quantified and identified. Life Cycle Cost (LCC) analyses, in comparison, include a comprehensive examination of all of the costs and savings attributable to the investment.