Consumers Commandeer the Smart Grid

October 28, 2009

Well, okay, they didn't really commandeer it, and it's really more about smart metering than smart grid, but, this is an interesting, inexpensive offering that helps you see how you're using electricity. The EnergyDetective (TED) provides instant feedback on your electricity consumption, which can help you trim electric bills by ten to twenty percent. To put a TED in my house would be about $240, so a ten percent utility bill savings would mean the TED pays for itself within a year.

Car Batteries, Dreamers and a Voice of Reason

October 17, 2009

The dreamers are dreaming up the Holy Trinity, a vision where electric vehicles, smart buildings and the smart grid come together in a synergistic marriage that transforms the way we use energy; that lets us ditch the oil-powered car. It is an intoxicating view that offers to solve multiple problems, and create whole new worlds of human enterprise and purpose. But the dream is hampered by at least this issue: finding a cost effective, production scale energy storage solution to help power those electric vehicles. Current thinking focuses on the lithium ion battery.

John Peterson, an energy sector lawyer focused on "guiding small growth-oriented companies through the corporate finance process" offers a sensible, constructive critique that the electric vehicle actually derails our quest to end our oil dependency. 

The Ultimate Energy Saving Tool: Trust

October 10, 2009

Here is an odd leap from the abstract to the concrete. It will make sense, though, if you follow the thinking. Trust me.

To found a construction project in trust is to save money (and energy, more on this later). This I know in my bones from having lived on projects founded in trust, that go on to be successful by all the usual measures: budget, function, grand opening dates, reputation of the facility, reputation and profitability of the organizations that put it up. On the other hand are projects shaped by people who are niggardly in advancing trust to the undertaking, where collapse and failure is the inevitable, miserable result.

Rex Miller et. al. just published The Commercial Real Estate Revolution, which I've just begun, but can already tell is on target about much of what ails the construction industry, described by the book as "broken." On the first page Revolution claims there is a 50 percent waste factor in the $1.3 trillion U.S. construction market (need more proof though to swallow that 50 percent number). And that a good portion of the waste results from lack of trust.

Paperless

October 04, 2009

We went paperless. 

On the construction project just completed, we used a paperless submittal process. For those not familiar with how a commercial construction project is managed, the submittal process is a last check before materials are ordered and building components fabricated. Subcontractors provide shop drawings, cut sheets, and samples to ensure the right things are procured, and to coordinate the work before a dozen guys with tools are standing around ready to install them.

The submittal usually involves lots of big paper (think of the blue lines you see architects rolling out in TV ads or movies) in multiple copies, and the byzantine, time consuming practice of transcribing notes (by hand!) to each of those copies. 

Photo: ღĴęNňζ™(OFF) on flickr

Try This Pairing: Big Companies and Urban Wind

September 20, 2009

Urban wind offers much: power made where it's used in dense urban settings, a new layer stacked atop the traditional renewable offerings, no big transmission obstacles to choke an urban wind project and keep it from seeing the light of day, wind dovetails well with the other urban renewable: solar (which of course is at work when the sun's up, whereas wind is usually working harder at night when the sun is down and the night breezes blow).

Meanwhile, corporations everywhere are setting up green storefronts, then scrambling to put product behind their "we are sustainable" storefront. As they do, urban wind struggles on in the "garages" of so many start-ups. 

You two ought to get together. 

Appliance Makers are the Good Guys

September 15, 2009

Toby Considine calls himself an "integrator of the un-integratable." He works as an infrastructure analyst, an in-house consulting resource to the Facilities Services group at the University of North Carolina and occasionally advises building owners and engineering companies on business strategies.

In a recent blog, Energy Collisions and Autonomous Appliances, he points out that appliance makers, "are starved for information," particularly when it comes to pricing energy in applicances that work in a smart grid. As Toby sees it, the appliance makers are the good guys and the energy suppliers the curmudgeon defenders of old world, fixed-price electricity. The energy suppliers need to give it up, and provide the price signal information the appliance makers crave.

Big Fat Roof

September 01, 2009

Oh yeah, the guy with the big fat walls? He has a big fat roof too. Three quarter inch concrete shingles that contribute to his skinny little utility bill. 

When neighbors replace their roofs on account of hail damage, he doesn't. 

Big Fat Walls

August 31, 2009

Went Saturday to the house of a guy that's in the concrete business, and he has big, fat concrete walls. So big and fat that he says they have an R-value of fifty something (most commercial construction walls use materials that have R-values of, maybe, 19). (Which means the wall assembly has an R-value of less than 19 because of gaps between the stuff that's rated R-19--a concrete wall wouldn't have stud gaps and fewer of the other gaps that you get in a typical wall). 

He expected a five year payback, but got it much sooner (granted, he might of gotten a deal on his concrete supply). He said his utility bills are thirty percent of his neighbors, who have equivalently sized houses.

I'm interested.

His big, fat concrete walls were made with concrete insulating forms. The drawback? It's hard to move walls if you didn't think things through.

The upside, though, is pretty tantalizing.

And, consider this: you'd probably be more comfortable in a big fat wall house if you were Alyssa Danigelis trying to live without AC for the summer.

Photo: ramon2002 on flickr

Code Green

August 30, 2009

LEED is a voluntary system to measure how sustainable a building is. In my happy thinking, LEED was a stepping stone that would simply dissappear once its underlying benefits were widely understood (we choose to build green because logic compels it). The more sensible evolution, though, might be to codify those parts of LEED that have broad, implementable benefit. 

Truth is, in the budget and time constrained world of the construction project, we don't always do what logic compels, but we do tend to do what the building code compels. For example, the International Building Code (used for much of what gets built in the US), requires fire sprinklers in most buildings. And while we know in our bones that fire sprinklers save lives and reduce property damage at a level that probably matches cost (and human life is worth...?), sprinklers would be on the budget chopping block for many projects were they not required by code. 

So those pieces of LEED that prove to have irrefutable societal benefit could be moved from the voluntary, experimental world of LEED to enforceable code, so that they would not be sacrificed on the twin altars of the deadline and the budget. LEED could continue to serve indefinitely as a testing lab for the development of code-worthy sustainable construction practice.

Here's one article on the anounced collaboration between the US Green Building Council (LEED) and the International Code Council (International Building Code) to develop a model green building code.

Photo: Georg Hoermann on flickr

[Post-script: Here's the original editorial that prompted the post: Why the World Needs Another Green Building Standard ]

Massive, Explosive ... Micro-Curtailment

July 06, 2009

This is a story about how you can curtail people's AC without them noticing, and the big opportunity this represents to do a little micro-curtailing.

We had an air conditioning problem in the pretty new building we'd just turned over (fried a variable frequency drive motor on the building's only air handling unit). The building occupants were sweating, we were sweating. 

We fixed the problem, but the following morning it was already 75 degrees in a couple of rooms (in Texas in June); temperatures were forecast above the century mark that afternoon. Our panicked owners were concerned that we hadn't really fixed the AC, and that those rooms would get into the upper seventies as they hosted a national theology conference. It was simply unacceptable that they'd have rooms with temperatures in the upper seventies.