Category: The Energy Entry

by John McDermott, as posted in Environmental Leader

Data from millions of businesses, institutions and manufacturers show that sustainability issues fall into four main categories: rising energy costs, growing disposal costs, limited water supplyand health concerns over the quality of indoor air.

Energy is often the largest line item in an operations facility management bill. So, monitoring and reducing excess energy use throughout your facility can lead to savings. My company worked with one of our 3,000 supplier partners, Fluke Corporation, to identify these top places to look for energy losses in commercial buildings.

According to Fluke Corporation, a significant amount of energy loss is actually temperature-related. Hot or cold air leaks from a building are obvious examples. It took energy to condition that air, and when it dissipates due to a leak, you’ve wasted that energy. Many other systems and pieces of equipment also manifest their energy in terms of heat. Motors, pumps and electrical boxes will generate heat and lose energy efficiency as they begin to fail.
Continue reading Places to Look for Energy Losses in Commercial Buildings

U.S. commercial building owners could save an average of 38 percent on their heating and cooling bills if they installed a handful of energy efficiency controls that make their heating, ventilation and air conditioning, also known as HVAC, systems more energy efficient, according to a recent report from the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.  The estimated savings were based on computer modeling and simulation of building energy usage. The controls that could provide these savings are not widely available commercially, but the report’s authors hope their analysis will encourage manufacturers to expand their production.

“Investing in an American economy that is built to last includes taking advantage of all of America’s energy resources while working to improve efficiency,” said U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “By making heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in buildings more energy efficient, American businesses can save a significant amount of money by saving energy.”

Completed for the Department of Energy, the report examines options for improving the efficiency of commercial rooftop systems called packaged HVACs, which combine compressors, fans and heat exchangers into one unit. Packaged HVACs regulate temperatures inside more than 60 percent of the commercial building floor space in the United States, where commercial buildings consume as much energy as about 90 million typical American homes each year. And about 35 percent of that is used by HVAC systems, which are often poorly maintained or ignored, causing them to run inefficiently.

“The potential savings from adding advanced controls to existing packaged air conditioners with gas furnaces is enormous,” said PNNL engineer Srinivas Katipamula, who led the study. “The estimated savings depend on local climate and energy prices and range from a whopping 67 percent cost savings in San Francisco to a still-substantial 28 percent in Seattle.”

For the report, Katipamula and his PNNL colleagues considered implementing four different control methods to existing rooftop packaged HVACs:

Read the complete article at Environmental Protection

By Anjeanette Damon 

Reno – A year ago, a Reno clean energy businessman warned the Public Utilities Commission that if it didn’t set a few standards for NV Energy’s wind rebate program, its customers could end up footing the bill for turbines that rarely produce electricity.

One reason behind his concern: To be eligible for rebates, customers didn’t need to prove that the wind actually blows enough to justify installing a turbine on their property.

“This could allow unscrupulous developers to sell turbines to unsuspecting customers who will not generate electricity from an installed turbine because there is no wind to power the turbine,”Clean Energy Center managing member Rich Hamilton told the PUC last May. “This problem is especially vexing because ratepayer money could be contributing to the cost of such turbines, which could give the Wind Generations program and the wind industry a black eye.”

The PUC agreed that such a standard would be a good idea but sided with NV Energy’s position that it was too early to move forward with it just yet.

A year later, however, Hamilton’s warning appears to have been spot on.

The electricity produced by NV Energy’s $46 million wind rebate program has fallen far short of expectations.

In a startling example, the city of Reno’s wind turbines — for which the city received more than $150,000 in rate-payer funded rebates — produced dramatically less electricity than the manufacturers of its turbines promised.

“These manufacturers, when they gave us the turbines, they said they were designed to be mounted on a parapet at this height, and that’s what we did,” said Jason Geddes, who runs the city of Reno’s renewable energy program. “But when we started getting actual wind flow patterns, we realized their claims were wrong.”

As first reported by the Reno Gazette-Journal, one turbine that cost the city $21,000 to install saved the city $4 on its energy bill. Overall, $416,000 worth of turbines have netted the city $2,800 in energy savings.

Read the complete article at Las Vegas Sun

Did you know that the US spends between $30 and $50 billion every month on foreign oil?  I find that number to be huge and think that we need to reduce that amount if we want to remain competitive, independent, and environmentally friendly. It doesn’t make long-term economic sense to spend so many of our resources on an environmentally toxic substance that also needs to be transported halfway around the world. If the goals are energy independence, sustainability and local jobs, some say the US should drill for domestic oil and other fossil fuel resources that are within US borders.

In a recent interview I had with T.Boone Pickens, he mentioned that if we switched large trucks to natural gas instead of diesel we could reduce foreign oil dependency by 50 percent. I agree with him, but also think we should focus more on geothermal energy and call for a “drill, baby, drill” campaign that all political parties can endorse as it will save money and help our environment, while creating domestic jobs that would be difficult to outsource to other countries. To accomplish this requires a slight change in policy to remove some unfair barriers, but let me first explain the benefits of geothermal.

Geothermal Quick Facts

Geothermal energy is the only commercially available renewable energy that offers 100 percent uptime reliability. It uses extremely simple technology, has low operating maintenance costs and results in far fewer emissions by using the earth’s thermal energy instead of fossil fuels. Geothermal energy represents a broad spectrum of applications, including utility scale power as well as solutions for buildings and homes.

For example, utilities use hot spots in the earth’s crust to make steam and then drive a turbine to make electricity. In addition to using our US-based resources to make kWhs, utility-scale geothermal steam generation plants are also eligible for Renewable Energy Credits (RECs), just like solar and wind energy projects.

Read the complete article at Environmental Leader

from Environmental Leader:

LED lighting firm Lemnis Lighting has launched three lines of its Pharox LED bulbs, including one priced at just $4.95.

Pharox BLU (pictured), Pharox XL and the Energy Star-qualified Pharox PRO are targeted at range of LED customers from general home owners to customers seeking a professional quality bulb.

The lowest-priced bulb, the 200-lumen Pharox BLU, costs $4.95, and is sold exclusively through pharox-led.com.

Price has been a widespread barrier to LED adoption, but as the latest issue of EL Insights points out, LEDs could eventually become even cheaper than  today’s  traditional  lighting. The Department of Energy predicts that the price of LED OEM lamps and LED packages will drop by about 30 percent each year from 2010 to 2015 and 10 to 15 percent per year from then to 2020.

Lemnis says a typical 40-watt incandescent bulb costs approximately $5.69 per year to use at $0.13 per kWh, three hours a day. The equivalent Pharox 350 lumen bulb, including the BLU, XL and PRO lines, costs $0.85 per year in energy use. As these LED bulbs last between 15,000 – 35,000 hours, in most cases they pay for themselves in less than two years, Lemnis says.

Earlier this month, smart energy products firm Noribachi streamlined pricing of its LED and solar lighting, resulting in reductions of up to 31 percent across the LED product line.

This is the fourth post in a mini-series on the rebound effect. Here are posts one, two, and three.

Let’s briefly review what we’ve covered so far in my rebound series:

1. Climate change means we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a lot, beginning immediately.
2. There are two ways to reduce GHG emissions from energy: increase low-carbon energy supply and/or decrease total energy consumption.
3. Ramping up clean energy supply can’t be done fast enough to keep us within our carbon budget, certainly not in the short- to mid-term, if at all. So we’ve got to use less energy.
4. There are two ways to reduce energy demand: reduce the energy intensity of the global economy and/or reduce the growth of the global economy.
5. Substantially reducing global energy intensity turns out to be extremely difficult, thanks in part to the rebound effect.
6. If energy intensity can’t be reduced quickly enough, then the only answer left (other than failing to stabilize global temperature at all) is slowing GDP growth. Yikes.

So where does this leave us? In my mind, two big questions remain, regarding Nos. 5 and 6.

Read the complete article at GRIST

February 15, 2012

The Energy Department today announced new voluntary energy-saving specifications for lighting troffers – rectangular overhead fixtures used in commercial buildings – as well as parking lot and parking structure lighting. The new performance criteria were developed by the Department of Energy’s Commercial Building Energy Alliances (CBEAs), which bring together major U.S. companies from a wide range of sectors to identify and implement successful energy efficiency and cost-saving practices. Building operators can voluntarily adopt these specifications for new buildings or building upgrades to reduce their energy bills and carbon emissions.

The potential to reduce the nation’s energy use through better lighting choices is enormous. On average, over half of the lighting fixtures in commercial buildings operate for more than 10 hours a day and collectively consume more than 87 terawatt hours of electricity annually, which is equivalent to the energy used by nearly 3 million homes. These new commercial lighting specifications can reduce energy use by more than 40% compared with conventional lighting and have the potential to save businesses up to $5 billion annually.

The new CBEA High Efficiency Troffer Specification provides minimum performance levels for LED and fluorescent troffers used in commercial buildings, including offices and restaurants. The new specification delivers energy savings of between 15% and 45% compared with conventional systems. The specification also includes an optional section on lighting controls, which can boost savings up to 75% by employing technologies such as motion sensors and timers.

DOE also released updated specifications for high-efficiency parking lot and parking structure lighting. Both public and private organizations are increasingly using systems that meet DOE’s high efficiency parking lot lighting specification. This specification typically reduces energy use by 50% compared with conventional parking lot lighting. Some early adopters of the new specifications include Walmart, Lowe’s, and Cleveland Clinic.

WalMart now uses energy-saving lights that meet the specification in new parking lot sites, and is upgrading more than 250 existing lots. The company reports energy savings of 58% compared with ASHRAE Standard 90.1-2010, a widely used commercial building code. Lowe’s has tested lighting systems that meet the specification at several sites and plans to expand their use. Based on these and other successful installations, others, such as MGM Resorts International and the U.S. General Services Administration, are also considering upgrading their lighting to meet the new specification.

Through the CBEA, the Energy Department collaborates with building owners, operators, and manufacturers to develop minimum performance requirements that are voluntarily adopted by CBEA members. Increased adoption of energy-saving specifications can help American businesses cut costs, reduce energy use, and increase their competitiveness.

The Energy Department’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) accelerates development and facilitates deployment of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies and market-based solutions that strengthen U.S. energy security, environmental quality, and economic vitality. Learn more about EERE’s support ofbuilding technologies, and about the Department’s Commercial Buildings Energy Alliances.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 1, 2012)

Consistent appraisals of homes and businesses outfitted with photovoltaic (PV) installations are a real challenge for the nation’s real estate industry, but a new tool developed by Sandia National Laboratories and Solar Power Electric™ and licensed by Sandia addresses that issue. Sandia scientists, in partnership with Jamie Johnson of Solar Power Electric™, have developed PV Value^TM, an electronic form to standardize appraisals. Funded by the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the tool will provide appraisers, real estate agents and mortgage underwriters with more accurate values for PV systems.

“Previous methods for appraising PV installations on new or existing construction have been challenging because they were not using standard appraisal practices,” said Geoff Klise, the Sandia researcher who co-developed the tool. “Typically, appraisers develop the value of a property improvement based on comparable properties with similar improvements as well as prevailing market conditions. If there aren’t PV systems nearby, there is no way to make an improvement comparison. When a PV system is undervalued or not valued at all, it essentially ignores the value of the electricity being produced and the potential savings over the lifetime of the system. By developing a standard methodology for appraisers when comparables are not available, homeowners will have more incentive to install PV systems, even if they consider moving a few years after system installation.”

The tool uses an Excel spreadsheet, tied to real-time lending information and market fluctuations, to determine the worth of a PV system. An appraiser enters such variables as the ZIP code where the system is located, the system size in watts, the derate factor — which takes into account shading and other factors that affect a system’s output — tracking, tilt and azimuth, along with a few other factors, and the spreadsheet returns the value of the system as a function of a pre-determined risk spread. The solar resource calculation in the spreadsheet is based on the PVWatts^TM simulator developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which allows the spreadsheet to value a PV system anywhere in the U.S.

“With PV Value™, appraisers can quickly calculate the present value of energy that a PV system can be estimated to produce during its remaining useful lifetime, similar to the appraisal industry’s income approach,” said Johnson. “Additionally, a property owner thinking about installing PV can now estimate the remaining present value of energy for their future PV system and what it could be worth to a purchaser of their property at any point in time in the event a sale of the property takes place before the estimated payback date is reached.”

The tool is being embraced by the Appraisal Institute, which is the nation’s largest professional association of real estate appraisers. “From my perspective as an appraiser, I see that this is a great tool to assist the appraiser in valuations, and it connects to the Appraisal Institute’s recent Residential Green and Energy Efficient Addendum. It’s an easy, user-friendly spreadsheet that will not bog the appraiser down with a lot of extra time in calculations, and if they fill out the addenda properly, they’ll be able to make the inputs and come up with some numbers fairly quickly,” said Sandy Adomatis, SRA, a real estate appraiser and member of the Appraisal Institute.

Although the tool is licensed for solar PV installations, it could be used for other large green features in a home that generate income, such as wind turbines. The spreadsheet, user manual and webinar explaining the tool are available for download at http://pv.sandia.gov/pvvalue.

Solar Power Electric™ located in Port Charlotte, Fla., is an electrical contracting and solar integration company specializing in the installation of commercial and residential photovoltaic systems.