Category: The Energy Entry

Which technology is right for your energy efficient lighting retrofit?

LED is the lighting technology everyone’s talking about. LEDs are in our flashlights, our cars — and increasingly — a viable option for energy efficient lighting retrofit projects. But how do you decide if LED lighting is the right technology for your project?

Precision-Paragon [P2] is encouraging businesses to first consider a lighting project’s goals, and then decide if LED, fluorescent, high-intensity discharge or even induction lighting is the best fit for those goals.

“We’ve been seeing quite a few projects being driven by technology, and that’s really the tail wagging the dog,” said Lou Preston, [P2] national marketing director. “Companies are picking a lighting technology and forcing it into their project, when something else might be a better fit.”

Because every lighting project is unique, there is no single technology that’s right for every project.

“There’s a reason we manufacture more than 100 fixtures, instead of just one,” said Preston. “When our customers come to us with advice, we pride ourselves on helping them pick the best fixtures for their project, regardless of technology.”

Imagine two businesses that both need outdoor parking lot lighting. One is a gas station that needs bright 24-hour lighting to attract freeway drivers to its pumps. The other is an apartment complex that needs safety lighting in its parking area from dusk till dawn. At their core, both of these projects need outdoor parking lot lighting, but it would be impossible to pick one fixture that would meet the needs of both projects.

Every technology offers a unique mix of advantages, like initial fixture costs, return on investment, annual energy costs, maintenance costs, light level metrics, aesthetics and controllability. Some lights may save money at the outset, but five years later they could require expensive maintenance. Others could require a significant up-front investment, but quickly pay for themselves with big energy or maintenance savings.

“Our engineers are famous for saying ‘it depends,’” says Preston. “If you ask us what the best lighting technology is, that’s the answer you’re going to get.”  Even once a project’s goals have been fully defined, there might be several reasonable technology choices for a single project. That’s why Preston feels it’s important to get as much information as possible before making a technology decision.

“It’s a simple equation. More information leads to better decisions,” explains Preston. “Once you understand both your lighting project’s needs and your technology options, you’ll be able to pick the technology that best meets those needs.”

8 Steps To Picking The Right Lighting Technology

Read the complete article at Sustainability Facility

Intermittent renewables at high penetrations will bring new challenges for the grid. But how big will they be? And is it true that wind and solar will necessarily need storage or natural gas back-up at high levels?

The International Energy Agency (IEA) wanted to know, so it modeled a variety of high-penetration scenarios in eight geographic regions around the world. Hugo Chandler, a senior policy analyst with the IEA, explains the organization’s findings to Climate Progress:

Variability is not just some new phenomenon in grid management. What we found is that renewable energy is not fundamentally different. The criticisms of renewables often neglect the complementarities between different technologies and the way they can balance each other out if spread over certain regions and energy types.

Grid operators are constantly working to balance available supply with demand — it’s what they do. There are always natural variations that cause spikes in demand, reductions in supply, or create disturbances in frequency and voltage. Once you see there are a variety of ways to properly manage that variability, you start whittling away at the argument that you always need storage or a megawatt of natural gas backup for every megawatt of renewable energy.

Theoretical modeling is important. But what companies are doing in reality?

Here are five of the top methods for integrating renewable energy into the grid — proving that intermittency isn’t the showstopper that critics make it out to be. Explanations of each of these with videos are below

Read the complete article at Grist

 

SAN FRANCISCO, CA — EnerNOC’s Gregg Dixon compares the competition between on-site renewable energy generation versus reducing energy demand to an MTV celebrity death match.

Which is more valuable?

In one corner we have on-site renewable energy projects that tend to carry more sex appeal, largely due to the industry’s great job of marketing itself; there’s even a renewable girls calendar. In the other corner are demand response and energy efficiency, which many would agree are anything but sexy.

The complex answer is both, Dixon said during a webcast held at GreenBiz.com’s VERGE virtual conference. Employing many strategies and technologies are going to ultimately maximize energy management programs, but companies have to find a way to “reduce before they produce.”

“If we don’t get efficient first, it’s the equivalent of not filling the hulls of a ship while replacing the masts and sail,” Dixon said.

There is plenty of research supporting that energy efficiency is the single-largest untapped source for energy management, Dixon said. On a relative cost basis, energy efficiency “blows renewable energy out of the water.” Some predict solar energy could reach cost parity with the expected electric retail rates within five years, Dixon said, but noted these types of predictions aren’t new.

Read the complete article at GreenBiz.com

 

The International Organization for Standardization has released ISO 50001, a standard for energy management systems.

The standard aims to help organizations establish the systems and processes to improve their energy performance, including efficiency and consumption. The ISO says the standard is applicable to all types and sizes of organizations.

ISO 50001 is designed to help companies make better use of their energy-consuming assets, evaluate and prioritize the implementation of energy-efficient technology, and promote efficiency throughout the supply chain. It is designed to integrate with other management standards, especially ISO 14001 on environmental management and ISO 9001 on quality management.

The new standard specifies requirements for measurement, documentation and reporting, and for equipment design and procurement processes. It does not prescribe specific performance criteria, though it does require participating companies to commit to continual energy performance improvements.

Read the complete article at Environmental Leader

A brochure giving an overview of the standard target=”_blank”is available here.

 

Buildings consume more than 70 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. Much of that energy goes wasted due to building inefficiencies. It is well documented that improving building energy efficiency can reduce energy use and costs by up to 50 percent. So why don’t more building owners take steps to improve building energy performance? Simply put, they don’t know where to begin.

Most owners don’t know how well or poorly their buildings use energy. This type of information is not typically included in a monthly energy bill. Consequently, many owners are spending hundreds and even thousands of dollars more than they need to on energy. In this economy, owners cannot afford to waste a single dollar on unnecessary expenses.

San Francisco city officials want to make sure more owners have the information they need to reel in energy waste and spending. Next week, the city’s Board of Supervisors will conduct its first reading of a proposed ordinance that would make benchmarking standard for commercial property owners.

Read more at GreenBiz Green Buildings: