Posts Tagged ‘energy conservation’

BOMA Sponsors Second ‘Kilowatt Crackdown’ in Seattle

April 8th, 2010 by Kevin Skurski

Get ready, the BOMA Seattle/King County Kilowatt Crackdown entry deadline is coming up April 30th.

This friendly competition for a cause pits property against property for energy usage. How do you play? Benchmark your building for 2009, and (as the web site says) “you might qualify for a FREE Scoping Study to identify low-cost, operational areas to save energy. You’ll receive an assessment of your building’s energy use, and a list of energy-saving opportunities to explore with your staff and preferred service contractors.”

(Sound familiar? We call those ECM’s, or energy conservation measures. In other words, a list of energy-savings opportunities from BuildingAdvice’s Energy Savings Assessment and Audit Reports that could make a Kilowatt Crackdown a snap in Portland.)

The last and most crucial step in the Crackdown is to tune up your building as you see fit. Awards will be given in in both 2011 and 2012, allowing lots of time to plan, execute, and evaluate your efficiency adjustments.

The first annual Puget Sound Kilowatt Crackdown was launched in early 2008, and with 53 competing properties, combined energy savings from the participating buildings was found to be equal to the annual electric consumption of 1,000 Northwest homes, or over 700,000 gallons gasoline.

Similar competitions have taken place in Orlando and Louisville.

(Image courtesy of kaboro.wordpress.com)

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Top 10 Basic Control Strategies

February 5th, 2010 by Lucas Klesch

Which comes first – energy savings or tenant comfort? This is a question we often hear when discussing control strategies. While energy savings and tenant comfort are both important considerations, the good news is that they often are not mutually exclusive. There are many control strategies capable of improving tenant comfort while achieving significatn energy savings. Moreover, the following strategies are relatively easy to understand and can be implemented with almost any type of HVAC system:

  1. Close OA during night cycle and morning warm up
  2. Turn fans off at night (unless heating called for)
  3. Hot/Chilled water temp. reset with respect to OA temp.
  4. Lock out exhaust fans locked at night
  5. Reset SA temperature with respect to zone needing most heating/ cooling
  6. Time clock control of equipment (e.g. boiler, pneumatic air, fans, etc.)
  7. Economizer cycle
  8. Optimum start/stop
  9. Demand Limiting
  10. Duty Cycle

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Posted in Energy management, Energy savings | Comment »

Cap & Trade Bill to Create Billions in Revenue

June 10th, 2009 by Lucas Klesch

The Congressional Budget Office reported that the legislation on Cap & Trade once enacted would result in $24.4bn in profit from $845.6bn in revenue from 2010 to 2019.

The report estimates that the bulk of this money would come from the selling of offset emissions (greenhouse gas credits) at a price of $15 per tonne in 2011 rising to $26 in 2019.

Imagine if you could factor in that additional savings from doing an efficiency project to your building what the ROI would look like!  Even capitol projects will look extremely attractive.  This is going to work just like utility incentives do but with a much higher $/sqft impact on the ROI.

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Posted in Energy management, Real world stories, Sustainability | Comment »

The Simple Case for Data Center Energy Benchmarking

March 18th, 2009 by Lucas Klesch

Lawrence Berkeley National Labs threw out a statistic that stated data center energy costs can be 100 times higher than those of typical buildings.  Another statistic thrown around by EPA is that data centers accounted for 1.5% of overall US electrical spend in 2006 and it is expected to increase by 1% or more by 2011.  Poor energy efficiency can obviously have a dramatic effect on the bottom line, reduce the competitiveness of the data center and may even reduce up time which is so crucial to the data world.

Typically data centers have been reluctant to participate in Benchmarking of energy performance through EnergyStar because they do not want to document how costly poor data center management and design is, and they fear the looming carbon tax through cap and trade.  It is understandable that the industry is concerned about being an open book for criticism given some of the real constraints on server rooms in terms of temperature control, power reliability and particulate reduction.  Being from an industry that needs data and servers to work flawlessly every minute of every day, we understand this, but every one already knows you are typically a high energy user.

The good news is that starting at Benchmarking and allocation of energy end uses within a building with data centers, we can understand how energy is used and begin to clean up the inefficiencies. Benchmarking is a tool for understanding across an organization and can serve these important purposes:

  1. to establish a baseline of typical energy use
  2. to provide comparison to similar facilities
  3. to highlight improvement opportunities
  4. to highlight maintenance and operating issues
  5. to highlight best practices for future improvements

In this day and age it should be universally understand that awareness, i.e. know where you are at, always leads to a better place.  Energy cost reduction drops to the bottom line and in the case of data centers can reduce inefficient operation, provide more uptime and customer satisfaction, and positions you for the future where that energy savings translates to less carbon use and cash through trading on an open market.  Its almost like double-dipping on the profits from energy reduction.  How can that be bad?

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Posted in Energy management, Sustainability | Comment »