Building Energy Resilience

In my last blog post, I discussed the short- to medium-term hiring of an Energy Auditor. But if your firm is dedicated to energy efficiency as a matter of doing business, you are looking for a person to act in a long-term role of an Energy Manager. This position doesn't have to be full-time and it can be held by an outside consultant, but you want someone who will learn your facility, your equipment, your employees’ needs and your process needs. This can’t be a tactical strike as the energy audit is, because an audit is only a snapshot. If energy management is a goal, you need someone who will stay with your business and keep abreast of the changing needs and circumstances. This takes a high level, managerial decision to invest in the efficiency of the facility.

In my last blog post, I described the fact that there are a number of energy professionals, each with their own credentials and each of whom brings a different skill to the table. For a business owner, the variety of these professions may be a bit daunting. What type of professional do I hire to address my energy concerns?

Here at Cx Associates, we are actively searching for ways to use less paper in our commissioning process and around the office. When it is feasible, I try to complete any and all reading, researching, or note taking directly on my computer. My pursuit of going paperless is never entirely successful, but utilizing a tablet in the field has been helpful. Rather than print out drawings, specifications and other project documents, I generally download everything to one of the office iPads prior to my visit. If you haven’t already, check out my colleague Ben Fowler’s blog posts about popular apps we use on a regular basis. There are specific apps designed for reading and marking up PDF documents, as well as many others that can make a paperless approach more appealing.

I wish I had more time to work on my BIG IDEAS. I believe in supporting a strong local economy wherever possible and one place where I dream of a better model is a green energy investment fund (GEIF).

Not too long ago, data center energy efficiency was an obscure and almost irrelevant topic of discussion for building managers and engineers. As our economy becomes increasingly digitized and productive, more and larger data centers have been developed to meet the digital demand. The media has recently reported that data centers now use close to 2 percent of global annual energy consumption. At this level of energy consumption, data center energy efficiency has rapidly become an important consideration for achieving energy conservation goals.

Are your lights on when you aren’t in your office? Do you have a problem with glare on screens or even direct line of sight glare? Bad lighting is a problem. Good lighting design is about more than energy efficiency, but should never be accomplished absent consideration of energy performance. In my last blog post I raised my concerns about the lack of progress in regulating lighting efficiency in Chapter 9 of ASHRAE 90.1. While the rest of the standard has made considerable strides in raising the bar driving more engineers and architects to learn and apply increasingly sophisticated solutions in their building designs, Chapter 9 effectively gives lighting designers a pass relative to efficiency. This translates to less efficient buildings overall as lighting efficiency “gains” in Chapter 9 are traded off against less efficient approaches to building envelope or HVAC design. In this post I want to talk solutions.

The International Space Station (ISS) recently had a breakdown in its external active thermal cooling system (the “EATCS”, because NASA loves acronyms!) that helps to keep systems inside and outside of the space station cool. For a little review of basics physics, let’s recall that space is a vacuum. In the same way that a vacuum flask keeps coffee piping hot for hours and hours, the Space Station is basically wrapped in a vacuum flask that keeps it from heating or cooling through ways in which we are typically familiar with. It can’t cool itself through conduction (i.e., heat passing through the outer wall) or convection (i.e., air moving heat away from the outer wall, thereby cooling it). These modes of heat transfer can’t work in space because there is no air surrounding the station to pass off waste heat to!

At the USGBC Greenbuild Conference held in November of this year, the new LEED Version 4 was officially launched. This updated version has evolved due to a more market-driven green building market. The requirements for a LEED certified green building are more economically feasible and becoming the new standard for construction. In order to continue to drive the market towards greener construction, LEED Version 4 has made some significant changes, including more requirements (pre-requisites) and additional credits. A big portion of this change is focused on the energy performance of the building, which affects our commissioning process.

The job description of an Energy Manager has been quite loose since its inception, because it can mean something different depending on the needs of the recipient and the qualifications of the provider. To date, there are no standardized credentials of an Energy Manager and it is “buyers beware” within the industry. As a building owner or facilities manager, it's difficult to know what level of energy management options there are and what type of professional to hire for the task.

I have been involved with hundreds of projects in one capacity or another where I’ve designed or commissioned HVAC systems. With only a few exceptions, it’s been my experience that ductwork is never installed exactly as drawn. Most of the time it’s close. Usually, this is due to a lack of coordination during design requiring in-field modifications or a lack of detail when it comes to equipment hookups. We all expect design engineers to have their designs perfectly coordinated and their equipment details to be exact. I was on the design side for more than 10 years and I can tell you that there is never enough fee or enough time in the design schedule for that to be a reality. Until that changes, we’d all better expect field modifications.