By: Joe Salimando
NECA contractors make buildings smart. Now, the U.S. government, all sorts of utilities (from investor-owned to municipal operating companies), and platoons of electrical manufacturers and technology vendors are preparing to take an old, in-need-of-major-retrofits national transmission & distribution system and convert it into The Smart Grid (TSG).
There’s a lot to think about, plan for, and change in establishing TSG. Some estimate the project, which essentially just got started, will take 20 years. Powerline contractors can look forward to a great deal of work on this front . . . for decades!
And there’s more. How does TSG interface with smart buildings? Like most of the efforts in this area, we are now learning – just now – what’s possible, what’s probable, and what’s fantasy-like (but still, maybe, do-able).
For more info, here are three recently posted pieces to further your thinking:
Connecting Smart Buildings to TSG – by Jim Young of Realcomm, a company that has positioned itself “@ the intersection of commercial real estate, corporate real estate & technology.” From his early-November piece:
“The benefits of the smart grid begin to get very interesting when you start talking about how a commercial building owner could gain financially from this concept. Just imagine you’re at 30,000 feet looking down on NYC and picture all the buildings being turned into individual solar power plants that could sell unused energy back to utilities via smart grid technologies.
“There are some who have speculated that this could be a significant income stream for owners and operators once the idea is adequately developed. This idea was introduced at Realcomm 2 years ago by ProLogis who had begun putting solar power plants on the top of the very large, flat, well-suited roofs of their industrial buildings.”
Retrofitting Existing Commercial Buildings for TSG – by Harry Sim of Cypress Envirosystems, a part of the December online issue of Automated Buildings. He has a proprietary technology, and provides this perspective:
“A majority of commercial buildings still use pneumatic thermostats which are not programmable and non-communicating. Retrofitting them to conventional DDC involves opening up walls and ceilings, running cabling and replacing actuators, and incurring expensive labor and tenant disruption.
“The costs run into several thousand dollars per thermostat; payback on retrofits is often seven years or longer, and is the reason that most existing pneumatic installations are not upgraded even today. Similarly, retrofitting lighting controls traditionally involve high cost and disruption due to the same reasons.”
After reading that, perhaps it’s more comprehensible why many (especially at the NJATC and JATC level) have talked about training electricians for work on direct digital control (DDC).
Lumenergi’s ‘Spiel’ On Lighting & TSG – an 11/10 blog from Joe Salimando (on TEDMAG.com) providing coverage of a 20-minute presentation by Michael D’Amour of Lumenergi at the World Energy Engineering Congress. Title of the presentation: “Why Lighting is the Best End Point on TSG.” It included this:
“Only 3% of lighting in U.S. buildings is controlled, D’Amour said. I’m not sure from where this data came, but if it’s true, it’s yet another indicator that we in the electrical industry have not been doing our jobs. D’Amour said the other 97% is controlled only via a switch (an on-off switch).
“Essentially, the idea here is to create a ‘smart building’ – one that can respond to load-shedding requests by reduce its lighting energy use. The reduction has to be automatic (i.e., it’s not going to happen via a utility e-mail to the facility manager — that’s too ‘iffy’). The building, D’Amour said, has to ‘drop kilowatts instantaneously.’
“I can’t tell you much about Lumenergi’s product. But I think the ideas put forward in this brief talk are solid. If you’ve been asking — what the heck is TSG? . . . answers are below [links for more info in the blog]. If you’ve been wondering “where does the electrical distribution biz, and the electrical contractors who work with us, fit in this TSG stuff?” . . . above is one damn big piece of the pie.”