The Building Advisor

Portland-based PECI has won an $18.8 million contract from the California Energy Commission to manage an “EnergySmart Jobs” program that will create more than 200 California jobs.

The “EnergySmart Jobs” program will provide energy efficiency training throughout California to implement efficiency upgrades on commercial buildings. The company will also hire and retain over 200 contractor and energy surveyor positions. The program will focus on regions within California with lots of opportunity for efficiency savings and high unemployment.

The 18-month program is paid for with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding and is slated to deliver $13.9 million in initial energy savings for electricity rate payers during the first year and a half.

The program will also create three jobs in Portland, Sustainable Business Oregon reports.

Additional program partners include private contractors, utilities, manufacturers, and the California Conservation Corps. “The Conservation Corps ‘Corpsmembers’ are comprised of unemployed or otherwise economically disadvantaged people between the ages of 18 and 25, with the intention of helping those in greatest need get a ‘head start’ in the employment market,” according to PECI’s press release.

PECI has a longstanding relationship with the State of California, having delivered energy efficiency programs throughout the state for 20 years and employing 28 in the state.

Contractor Magazine recently published an article titled, “What Bad Looks Like” in which it described the state of the mechanical contracting industry.  It lists the largest contracting firms and provides breakdowns by markets served, type of work, and geography.  Not surprisingly, the bottom line is that the bottom line isn’t so good these days.

A “tough year.”  Yes, it’s been a bit tough.  And the only markets predicted to improve in the near term are healthcare, educational, public safety and transportation.

Fine, yes, the contracting business is a difficult one these days.  I think we all knew that.  But, what did we at AirAdvice take from this article?  I zeroed-in on two quotes from industry leaders:

• “As I’ve talked to our MCAA affiliates, I’ve said [energy savings retrofits] is the industry that we should own.  While we are going through this slow period, now is the time to renew ourselves and focus on green and sustainable initiatives. MCAA President Bob Armistead is taking the same charge and pushing it forward.” - Lonnie Coleman, president of Coleman-Spohn Corp., Cleveland, and past president of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America.
• “We’ll focus our energy on where the work is.  We’ll get in front of customers with good energy-saving ideas on how to take cost out of their businesses.” – Tony Guzzi, President and COO of EMCOR Group.

Could be just me, but I think they’re saying that energy savings is where it’s at for contractors right now.  So, there’s the bright spot and it is bright indeed.  The vast majority of buildings that are going to be here in 20-25 years are here now.  Retrofitting those buildings to new standards of energy efficiency, and driving down their operating costs, is THE opportunity for contractors.  Lonnie Coleman is right – contractors should own this business.

Image courtesy of Blue Ridge Blue Collar Girl blog

New York is definitely where its at these days, what with those mandatory benchmarking laws swinging into effect and the Empire State Building’s and sustainable upgrades showing folks how it’s done.

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) posted a byline in the Huffington Post on the iconic spire (did you know it is officially a Wonder of the World?), outlining the genius of the Empire State Building’s overhaul:

“…the retrofit will deliver improved windows, high-efficiency light bulbs, and among many other things, renovated heating and cooling systems at a cost of $13 million after netting out other savings. By 2013, this plan will have reduced the Empire State Building’s energy usage by 40%. The $4.4 million in annual energy savings will have completely paid for the costs of the retrofit project 3 years after completion.”

The story behind the retrofits is told at the Empire State Building sustainability exhibit, where a glowing cube and other interactive elements beckon visitors to look underneath the landmark at the energy saving innovations beneath.

Right now, the Empire State Building consumes the energy equivalent of 40,000 single-family homes.

Rep. Maloney writes about how she convened a hearing to learn more about the Empire State Building’s energy efficiency progress. She emerged learning a few things, one of them being,

“…government has a role to play in shining a spotlight on the economic, environmental and consumer benefits of retrofits, but it is the private and non-profit sectors that will roll up their sleeves, nail down the economics and make these retrofits happen.”

Across the Empire State, buildings are smartening up, with no little thanks to OptimumEnergy. The Sun-Herald.com picked up this press release from OptimumEnergy, maker of software to increase energy efficiency through HVAC, which trumpets the company’s latest New York state deals (including the 1271 Avenue of the Americas building in New York City; a GE Healthcare manufacturing facility in Troy; and Westfield Group’s Sunrise shopping center in Massapequa). OptimumEnergy estimates its reduction software to save 9.9M kWh annually across the building portfolio.

In honor of that The Building Advisor offers you this break from our regularly scheduled programming.

“Empire State of Mind”

In other news this week, EarthTechling decided to accentuate the negative in its coverage of the recent report from Pike Research, “Commercial Green Retrofit Interest Low.” Yes, they do point out the $41.1 billion potential savings from retrofits for new construction over the next 10 years. On the downside, nobody cares, apparently.

New York will fix that!

Images courtesy Doobybrain.com, Inhabitat and YouTube.

AirAdvice is happy to share some great news from our commercial building contractors.

Last week, AirAdvice completed over 100 energy benchmarks for the month of May – 111, to be exact.

That means a couple of things. One is that our new automated functionality is doing a lot of people a lot of good.

The second is kind of obvious until you think about it. Over the past 30 days, our BuildingAdvice commercial building contractors took the first step in identifying energy efficiency opportunities for their properties by using the BuildingAdvice product. As we like to say, energy benchmarking is the on-ramp to energy services for contractors and the on-ramp to savings for commercial property owners. Identifying how your building is performing right now gives you the information you need to make the best  decisions possible: when to spend, and when to take advantage of no- or low-cost adjustments.

And, there are still a few days left to go in the month!

Below is a chart reflecting energy benchmark activity over the past year. That steep, sharp line you see shows how BuildingAdvice benchmarks have shot up in activity since February of this year – the same month we released our upgrade allowing for the fastest, easiest energy benchmarking ever.

As Zack Buquet, AirAdvice Energy Services Business Consultant puts it: “This is a great indication that our clients are starting to get it, and to utilize the system. Everyone on the team plays a part in successfully bringing BuildingAdvice energy service solutions to market, including mechanical service contractors, energy engineers, and property ownership and management.”

Now think about how much energy usage and commercial building operating cost could be reduced by creating this kind of spike for energy efficiency audits, BuildingAdvice’s most comprehensive report for uncovering energy efficiency savings potential.

The mind boggles!

One of the most interesting buildings I have seen in a while came from a building we were helping with in Northern California, specifically the Bay Area.  The building is fairly typical, mostly warehouse space with some office associated (~75,000sqft).  The building had three rooftop units with gas heat of a decent efficiency.  The tricky part of this building is that it currently has a 50 cent per square foot benchmark metric that translated to the lowest watt per square foot energy usage we have encountered for such a large space.  Where is the savings going to come from in a retrofit situation?  The client felt motivated to look at a retrofit to fix the comfort issues and add some efficiency into the system along with the final lighting retrofit.

The key to understanding this building was the comfort complaints.  They basically complained from the morning on till the end of the day after the morning warm up sequence stopped.  This is where real performance data from the tenants space is so critical to an assessment of energy opportunities.  The performance data from the tenant space for temperature showed that they were not even getting the cooling equipment to kick on, and as we probed around for whether the economizer was operating because the carbon dioxide levels rose pretty high over what is typically seen in commercial spaces.  The story began to be quite clear why so many comfort complaints were rolling in and why the energy use was so low.

The economizer was not firing, and the cooling equipment was also not turning on to satisfy the cooling load.  At first glance, this is a great comfort win and an energy penalty to fix the cooling equipment.  We were looking into a retrofit when we began this conversation and so taking that efficiency upgrade and the easy lighting changes, along with getting the economizer functioning for free cooling opportunities.  The client could offset the increase in energy costs from fixing equipment that previously did not operate with some efficiency improvements.  Since we were operating from a baseline that did not include those cooling and fan usages across the previous year, our savings estimates are very very conservative and the savings is likely to increase over what was predicted.  A tough building but a win overall!

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

Lighting controls, like any control system has the power to realize a significant amount of savings because you can control specific times when the lights can and cannot be used.  Lighting systems in buildings are typically designed to provide to much light for today’s needs, they usually do not take into account the use of natural daylight, and they are left on when no one is using them.  Lighting controls can address all of these wasteful issues and with reliable paybacks of less than 2 years in many cases.

The top 5 use of lighting controls are:

1. Scheduling automatically turns lights off or to dimmed levels based on the time of day.
2. Occupancy sensors turn the lights off when a room or space is vacant.
3. Daylight harvesting dims or shuts off lights when enough daylight is present to satisfy light levels.
4. Demand response/load shedding reduces light loads at peak electricity price times.
5. Personal light controls allows users to dim lights their preferred levels.

A recent study conducted by Johnson Controls in conjunction with the International Facilities Management Association revealed many of the realities plaguing the adoption of energy efficiency in a marketplace ripe for lowering operating costs.  The top three conclusions of the survey are very key to understanding how energy efficiency will shape our lives once some clarity on the future crystallizes.

1. Energy Efficiency has never been more important – 71% of the 1400 surveyed felt they were paying more attention to the energy spend than a year ago.
2. Limited capital means declining investment – 41% of respondents said they lacked sufficient funds to make investments
3. Too much uncertainty surrounding carbon policy, incentives & energy prices – 85% of respondents believe legislation is coming within 2 years mandating a carbon cap, but without it there is little incentive to drive action.

To review a few more of the important statistics this survey has determined, click on the Sustainable Facility article link: http://www.sustainablefacility.com/CDA/Articles/Industry_Watch/BNP_GUID_9-5-2006_A_10000000000000586236

And for additional commentary on the study, see the YourEnergyForum blog at http://www.yourenergyforum.com/index.html.

Good article at FacilitiesNet about the importance of HVAC maintenance relative to costs savings.  This is verification of what we are constantly hearing and saying ourselves – that in order to sell maintenance plans, you need to tie them to cost savings.  There are several ways to do this, including energy efficiency from well-maintained equipment, avoidance of hefty repair or replacement costs, and avoidance of costly downtime.

The key is to speak in the language of the building’s decision maker – financial.  They are not usually from a building operation or facility management background, so trying to make your case using the language of those fields is going to be far less effective than taking the time and effort to quantify the cost savings and presenting that information up front.

They also point out the importance of documentation.  Without it, your chances of getting a planned maintenance agreement drop dramatically.

It surprises a lot of people to learn just how much can be saved through proper maintenance.  The article points out, “Organizations that have implemented comprehensive planned and predictive maintenance programs show dramatic decreases in maintenance costs. And when factors are included, such as extended equipment life, reduced energy use, less frequent system downtime, and decreased interruptions to building operations, organizations that have implemented comprehensive maintenance programs find that their total costs can be as much as 50 percent lower than the costs for those organizations that continue maintain equipment reactively.”

How are you quantifying the energy and other costs that you can save your customers through your planned maintenance agreements?

$13.2 million project.  Will save $4.4 million in energy costs per year.  And reduce energy consumption by 40%.

What monstrosity of a building is this?  The Empire State Building in New York, which is undergoing a major sustainability retrofit to become a leading example of economic and environmental revitalization.

What’s even better is that they truly are making an example out of it.  Check out the website dedicated to the project which includes interactive retrofit puzzles, explanatory documents, videos, and images, and even tools available for immediate download.  With the Clinton Climate Initiative as one of the main facilitators of the Empire State Building’s retrofit project, part of the mission is to help educate others in the industry.

Even if you don’t work on buildings of this size or projects of this magnitude, this serves as a very informative and inspiring example of what is possible in reducing energy consumption in existing buildings.