The Fine Art of Making Energy Visible

July 31, 2014

Imagine you’re a professional football player in the midst of the game. Except that in this game there’s no scoreboard to be found, and no yard-lines or boundaries painted on the grass-nobody knows which end-zone belongs to which team, and the coaches are just as confused. You might be a legendary player on a team destined for the Super Bowl, but without clear signposts, markers, and displays, you’re soon playing blind for fans who are left scratching their heads…or worse. Under these circumstances, any match will end in chaos. Opportunities for brilliant plays, sudden threats, potential strategies, and long-term challenges will never show themselves. Fly blind long enough, and the grey fog of apathy will be all that remains on an empty patchwork of grass and mud.

No major-league team would tolerate such conditions, yet this is exactly how venerated enterprises have played the energy management game since the turn of the industrial revolution. For generations, energy was cheap enough that the industrialized world could lull itself into believing that it would stay cheap forever, but things are changing fast. Energy is getting more expensive, and that, along with increasing regulation and the fierceness of global competition (amidst global warming), are driving a transformation in the business world’s attitude toward energy efficiency. That transformation is also driving disruptive innovations in the market for tools and equipment that support companies in continuously improving energy efficiency. These innovations are propelling new kinds of energy strategies within, and among, businesses, governments, and regulators.

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Typical homeowners might still be content to guess at what inputs draw what current, to have just one meter on the house that tells only the local utility how much power comes in. They might be content to gripe about increasing bills and offer the kids the proverbial “turn out the lights when you’re not using them.” But in the new reality of increasing prices and carbon regulations enterprises are demanding high-precision, real-time maps of how energy moves through their facilities. They want various kinds of sub-metering equipment that they can easily install, read, adapt, understand, and use to develop highly targeted, whole-systems strategies for reducing energy consumption and increasing energy efficiency while continuing to perform at optimum.

Sub-metering European Style
For anyone questioning that an attitude adjustment is underway in the business world, one need only look to Europe, where the sea change is old news. ND Metering Solutions is a UK-based company that designs and manufactures electrical sub-metering equipment, mainly specialized for retrofitting into existing buildings. The retrofit sub-metering market is still eclipsed by the market for sub-meters designed for tenant-billing applications (condos, apartment complexes, and shopping malls), and the market for new-builds (the big-box store going up in your neighborhood). Nevertheless ND’s target retrofit market has been large and well established in the UK and Europe for a decade, and ND dominates the niche by a comfortable margin.

ND is so confident that demand for its modular sub-meters specialized for easy installation in existing facilities will shortly explode in the US that it’s begun rolling them out on American soil.

Richard Morgan, Sales Director at ND Metering Solutions notes that while the market for sub-metering equipment-essential to the new world of business-energy management-has matured far faster in Europe than in the US, “you guys [in the US] are catching up fast. You had a nice holiday with shale-gas, but the price is only going one way. A lot of organizations are getting wise that to run an efficient ship, they have to control that variable cost of energy, usually one of the three top costs in their organization. To not have visibility on that is criminal, just from a good business perspective, irrespective of the green perspective.”

Efficiency As a Resource
One of the boldest experiments in energy efficiency collaboration in the US is now well underway in Vermont, where cold winters and other factors drive some of the highest energy costs in the country. It’s spearheaded by a new kind of utility known as Efficiency Vermont and run by the non-profit Vermont Energy Investment Corporation (VEIC). This new utility is the first of its kind, though similar initiatives have emerged in Oregon, Washington DC, and the Ohio region. Efficiency Vermont provides electricity to stakeholders, not by building power plants, but by helping existing consumers use less energy and use it wisely.

“We’re responsible for reducing the state’s use of electricity on the demand side because, if we can reduce electric demand overall, it reduces the need for expensive new power plants and transmission lines down the road,” says Kelly Lucci, Public Affairs Manager for the VEIC.

Efficiency Vermont’s three-year plans set targets around energy savings and megawatt-hours reduced, as well as customer groups served statewide, ranging from low-income households and small farmers, to some of the largest businesses and institutions in the state.

“Typically, we’re able to achieve [statewide] reductions of 1.5 to 2% a year,” says Lucci. Based on our work since 2000, about 13.1% of Vermont’s electricity is actually coming from energy efficiency.”

While Efficiency Vermont offers help and incentives to every major customer group, a collaborative pilot program bringing together some of the state’s largest businesses has become one of its crowing jewels. “About 60% of the electricity use in Vermont is attributed to the Commercial and Industrial sector, so we recognize the importance of strong partnerships with large and small businesses,” says Greg Baker, one of Efficiency Vermont’s Senior Account Managers. “Anything businesses can do to save energy is something we want to be a part of.”

Efficiency Vermont’s account managers assist and advise the 300 largest businesses in the state, which consume 25% of the state’s energy. They provide customized consulting on both strategic planning and tactical implementation and work with companies to look at their energy use as a comprehensive whole. Services include return on investment (ROI) calculations for everything from capital investments to employee engagement initiatives. Operating as a third-party consultant with no need to sell product, Efficiency Vermont account managers are empowered to look at client’s energy situations comprehensively and objectively. They’re also empowered to offer financial incentives, and as part of a statewide utility, they can call on a small army of technical staff.

“I can pull different resources internally from our large technical staff to analyze specific opportunities, whether process opportunities, lighting opportunities, or HVAC opportunities,” says Baker. “We have experts that I can pull as needed, and customers get a lot of staff supporting them, but only when they need it.”

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See It to Believe It
Of those 300 huge energy consumers in the state, nine of the largest have spent the last year collaborating with Efficiency Vermont and each other, learning how to play the energy reduction and efficiency game as part of the Continuous Energy Improvement pilot program. Companies participating in the program, the Efficiency Vermont account managers and advisers, local utilities and regulators all watching closely are recognizing that while reduction and efficiency tactics vary from company to company, and industry to industry, the top-level gameplan always begins with the same bold play. It all starts with “making energy visible.”

“It continually surprises me that companies don’t know how much energy their processes use,” says Baker, adding that metering, sub-metering, and dashboards-which compile meter data into compelling displays that put accurate, actionable data into decision makers’ hands-are a critical part of the solution. “Customers have operated for hundreds of years without ever understanding their true energy costs,” he says.

Noting that Stratton Mountain Ski Resort is one of the companies in the pilot program-and hardly singling them out-he notes, “Ski areas know snowmaking uses a lot of energy, but do they know how much broken down by snow-gun, pump, or compressor? No. There’s a placeholder in their cost projections, but it’s not broken down to each area or piece of equipment. Businesses are realizing that to be cost-competitive, they need to find where they’re going to get the biggest bang for their buck.”

One might say that making energy visible across a large enterprise begins with creating a kind of “energy information infrastructure.” The ideal infrastructure can be thought of as something that accurately reads and posts all the energy inputs and outputs within a building as real-time data, installs easily, adapts as processes evolve within the facility, beyond-pays for itself with the energy reductions and efficiencies it makes possible, displays energy trends with the elegance of an iPhone for all who need to know, inspires the people who use the building, verifies the impact of optimizations and helps sustain them, and helps the utility manage its load as well. While that might sound like a tall order, it may not be as far off as it sounds.

A Hospital Is Examined Thoroughly
As one of the participants in Efficiency Vermont’s Continuous Energy Improvement pilot, the Central Vermont Medical Center (CVMC) is well into the process of integrating just such an energy information infrastructure into a hospital complex that’s seen numerous add-ons and remodels since its commissioning in 1967.

The system coming to life within CVMC’s walls is laying the foundation for a run to achieve and eventually surpass the EPA’s coveted Energy Star designation, awarded to hospitals achieving the nationwide 75th percentile in energy performance. CVMC is currently in the 56th percentile, but projects now in the pipeline and proposals under consideration promise to bring the goal within sight, along with further goals of being more efficient overall, creating a better environment for all stakeholders, saving money and reducing the cost of health care in the community.

Integrating energy information infrastructure into any large enterprise and using it to make informed decisions is complex, but it’s especially so for a hospital serving 66,000 people. When Tim Perrin, the Efficiency Vermont Senior Account Manager assigned to CVMC, Liebert Engineering Inc. (the engineering partner on the project for the last four years), and support staff conducted the initial energy audit, they found the complexity of the moving parts to be staggering and the audit became a two-and-a-half-year odyssey into the building’s workings.

Since hospitals must perform air exchanges almost continuously and maintain strict standards regarding temperature and humidity at all times, HVAC is their greatest driver of energy use. With no initial understanding of how well their HVAC was working, project engineers found that building-wide component-by-component inspection, documentation, repair, and modification to fit metering equipment were needed to make sure the HVAC and other systems were even working to existing specs-before they could start benchmarking. Capital investment was also an integral part of the process. Early on the team settled on an ROI goal of three years or less on any capital investment, has since achieved an average of two and a half years, and has found that some investments, such as bringing in a Templifier heat pump/water heater system for a cool half million, have paid off almost immediately.

The Templifier has allowed the hospital to get rid of the boilers it had relied upon, instead recovering the heat from the condensers on the chillers to use for building heating.

And it all had to be done so that staff and patients were hardly aware that it was happening. “One of the markers is doing all of this without negatively changing the patient experience or the health and safety of the hospital, which is first and foremost because of infection control,” says Richard Morley, Vice President of Support Services at CVMC.

The goal of achieving it all “behind the curtain” is happening as well. “We did this with zero impact on patients, with regard to air exchanges, temperature and humidity,” adds Gregory Liebert, principle at Liebert Engineering. “We’ve never had a complaint.”

The work began with building a solid foundation. “We could not have accomplished what we have without metering and centers of control,” says Liebert. “To do all of the analysis, we needed lots of sub-meters-power meters and flow meters. We had to tap into hydraulic, hydronic, and electrical sources to measure, change and note effect.” Starting at the top the team installed a real-time electrical-power pulse meter at the service entry to track the hospital’s kilowatt load and control peak demands. Next came a Building Automation System loaded with pressure transducers, temperature sensors, humidity sensors and airflow stations. Support staff can now track how fast any fan is running and have reams of streaming data to trend from. “When we suspect there’s a problem or when we want to optimize some component, we can look at its history,” says Morley.

Most recently, additional project partner Control Technologies has fitted the Building Automation System with a software package called SkySpark, developed by SkyFoundry, that continuously sweeps its SQL database with user-defined “if-then” rules. The software searches for conditions in the data and returns a message or “spark” when it finds what it’s seeking. SkySpark will help sustain energy savings by making sure that optimizations stay in effect. And all of this infrastructure will itself become the foundation of an ambitious project to make energy visible not only to energy engineers, but everyone on the hospital grounds. First data trends from the Building Automation System and SkySpark will be rolled into a dashboard for the right personnel to see. Then the hospital will unveil monitors throughout public and staff spaces so that everyone can see what’s happening.

“People will be able to see the effect of the work,” says Morley.

Baker notes that all of this technology is a great resource for large companies to understand their energy use, and adds that it also enables Efficiency Vermont to see how it can help. Not only can clients see their energy use; they can also see it as a function of the drivers within their business. They can see inflection points in the data as a function of drivers such as weather impacting HVAC use, and the strategic changes they themselves are making.

Streamlined Technology
Metering technology itself is becoming cheap enough now that the cost-benefit ratio is becoming highly desirable. New electrical meters by companies such as ND and many others can connect to multiple circuits. They’re getting smaller and can install much more easily than in the past. Similar trends apply to other sorts of meters being used as well. For instance, businesses using compressed air in their production cycles and processes are finding it’s no longer acceptable to lose the usual 2030% of flow to leaks and are driving growth and innovation in the market for compressed air meters.

According to the DOE Industrial Technologies Program, “Most businesses need some form of compressed air, whether for running a simple air tool or for more complicated tasks such as the operation of pneumatic controls.” HVAC systems, air start engines, and braking are among the other uses of compressed air. The DOE literature also says that 10% of electricity consumed at a typical industrial facility goes to compressed air generation, and in some instances this rises to 30%.

Compressed air itself is sometimes thought of as the “fourth utility,” after electric, gas and water because this air, kept at greater than atmospheric pressure, is channeled for the purpose of powering other processes. Only about 1020% of the electric energy input used to create compressed air goes to the end use; leaks will clearly lower this efficiency further.

Manufacturers such as Massachusetts-based CDI Meters, a common vendor to Efficiency Vermont and its clients, are responding to the call for efficiency in this process with cheaper, simpler, smaller meters that are easy to install, don’t impact system pressure, achieve temperature compensation through constituent materials, have vivid readouts (they can be seen from a distance) and make it easy to measure flow at many points along distribution systems.

Founder of CDI Meters, Roger Dennison, explains, “By metering air at or near the point of use, our customers are able to identify where air use in one process exceeds that in a similar process, where air use changes over time, and where air flow fails to stop when it should stop, indicating leakage or a control malfunction. Because the user can estimate the cost of providing compressed air to each end use, it becomes evident where repair, upgrade, or replacement of equipment would be worthwhile.”

Dennison talks about streamlining efficiency and offering ease of use to customers: “The thermal technology that we and others use is inherently sensitive to mass flow and insensitive to temperature and pressure, requiring only minor temperature and pressure correction. The result is a simple meter, with built-in temperature compensation, that reads out directly in mass flow, while some traditional meters require separate temperature sensors, pressure sensors and flow computers to determine mass flow of compressed air. Some common mechanical meters impose a significant pressure drop on the compressed air, with the result that the compressor must be run at a higher pressure to achieve the same pressure at the point of use.

“When a user considers monitoring air usage at many points throughout a plant, costs of cutting and threading or welding pipe become a major impediment,” he adds. “Our key contribution is that installing our meters requires only drilling two small holes and clamping the meter in place. A number of our customers have found it practical to install dozens of meters throughout a plant, making it evident where air usage is excessive, where it increases over time, and what savings are achieved when improvements are implemented.”

The Human Factor
But Efficiency Vermont and its Continuous Energy Improvement pilot participants are also under no illusion that installing great infrastructure is enough to hit the high notes. The most complex variable of all is the human one. It’s natural for the board of directors to care about energy prices, but not so much for employees waiting for Friday. Efficiency Vermont’s account managers are working closely with participating companies on how to engage employees.

When asked how one might go about inspiring the rank-and-file to change behavior, Baker says “That’s one of the biggest challenges in business, and one of the reasons these companies are working with us. It’s easy to write a large check for a new air compressor, but it takes a whole different approach to work with all your staff, especially for a business that’s been cutting staff. They understand that it’s challenging, and they’re finding a lot of benefit working with us.”

Marc Colety, Director of Procurement for another participating company, Mack Molding, concurs. As a contract manufacturer routinely using energy-intensive processes such as injection molding, metal machining, and laser cutting, Mack was one of the first companies that Efficiency Vermont reached out to. Aiming for 5% reduction in kilowatt-hour use for the same amount of production in fiscal 2014, Mack consistently upgrades hardware such as lighting and HVAC. The company is engaging Efficiency Vermont’s help in putting together an energy information infrastructure of its own. But at the utility’s behest, Mack is taking what Colety describes as an entirely new tack-cultivating an energy-conscious employee culture. “That’s a new approach for us,” says Colety. “Energy is the only thing we use that everyone in our building has a license to buy every time they flip a switch. Behavioral changes can have dramatic effects if they’re brought under control. I’d like to say we’re smart enough to think of the behavioral aspects, but that came from Efficiency Vermont showing us what behavior programs are achieving in other companies.”

Now in the beginning phase of its behavioral program, Mack is training employees to see how their actions on the job affect energy consumption. Colety is working to help employees see what equipment consumes and the effect of letting equipment run idle. With Efficiency Vermont’s help, employees are discovering the costs associated with office areas, HVAC, lighting, and other variables.

Baker asserts that employees can be engaged and inspired with incentives and recognition for bringing up great ideas, through healthy competition between departments and activities that inspire camaraderie. Even in the high-stakes world of an Emergency Room, Efficiency Vermont and CVMC decision makers are now confident that staff can be engaged with gusto-and no impact at all on the ER’s job of saving lives.

Looking at CVMC’s Emergency Rooms as the next opportunity for energy savings, Morley concedes. “We have to come out from behind the curtain now, because there are savings that will only come from employee participation. There are many rooms with equipment and lights on 24/7. The emergency rooms are too complex to have controls, and we can’t predict when they’re going to be needed, so we’re only going to achieve savings by training staff to think constantly about energy use and implementing policies that outline how to handle their department. It’s going to come down to behavioral changes. If I’m not using that room, I’m going to turn off the equipment and the lights, which has not been the norm.”

With the help, vision, and insight of staff on the floor, they’ve already accomplished tremendous savings in the operating rooms. Liebert admits to being nervous going into that process but adds that it became “almost seamless.” Perhaps what made the biggest difference in getting the OR staff to open up and change behavior, and what will do the same for the ER staff, was active listening. Project leaders made sure to maintain a continuous open dialogue with the staff, and acknowledged the difficulties of stepping outside of comfort zones. It took talking things through detail by detail and everyone at the table asking “why, why, why.”

“We’ve had great success, and we’re now saving incredible amounts of money without impacting the operating rooms at all,” says Morley, adding that the project leaders came to realize that with the behavioral component of CVMC’s energy transformation, the project structure had to flip on its head. In the early stages of visioning, planning, broad strategizing, and implementing infrastructure, the project was entirely top-down. It was directors who needed to be engaged and brought to the brainstorming table. But when focus shifts to energy-saving measures among the beds, the project becomes entirely bottom-up.

“The staff knows best,” says Liebert. “They can help us understand how the area works. The ideas and changes have to come from them and their understanding.” He also adds that the ER staff is highly engaged and full of ideas. “It’s going to be an interesting road, kind of fun.”

About the Author

Mark Scott Lavin

Mark Scott Lavin writes on efficiency and the environment.