Big Energy Event Is . . . An Electrical Show!

By Joe Salimando                  www.eleblog.com

As an information junkie, I really liked the World Energy Engineering Congress. Held annually, it came to Washington, D.C. back in December. One of the event’s neat-o aspects was that, at any given time, there were 12 sessions running . . . experts talking about how they’ve saved energy, how you might save energy, techniques, regulations, solar, wind, ideas, financing, biomass dissent – and much, much more.

WEEC is one of three annual national shindigs sponsored by the Association of Energy Engineers (the others are Globalcon and the Energy Management Congress, and there’s also a West Coast EMC – see www.aeecenter.org for info on 2011 renewals. Next year’s WEEC, by the way, will be held Oct. 12-14 in Chicago.

Please take a gander at the nearby photo. Unfortunately, my photo-taking isn’t so hot. In the photo below, you might be able to see much (but not all) of the exhibit hall. In wandering around to look at various booths, listen to exhibitors, and try to learn something, I learned this: WEEC 2010 was an ELECTRICAL show.

Foreground at right, Schneider Electric; adjacent to it, Sensor Switch; in the distance at left (maybe you can’t see this?) – Leviton.

Just look at the pic. The big names you can see up-front, left to right, are: Leviton, Sensor Switch (unit of Acuity Brands, sister company to Lithonia), and, in the foreground, Schneider Electric.

In walking around, I stopped by the booths of electrical distributors Gexpro, Graybar, and WESCO. Nissan’s booth had a car in it.  Additionally, there were numerous LED suppliers (I had not previous heard of most of them).

Graybar’s booth at the World Energy Engineering Congress seemed geared to talking to government officials.

With 12 sessions going on at any one moment and a two-day trade show of some size, I could not possibly be everywhere. Here’s stuff you might want to know:

Changes To Energy-Saving Thinking

“Outcome-based energy codes” are coming – part of an important trend. Green people and others are not happy with what the nation is getting from iexisting building energy-efficiency codes. .  . which can be summed up as: Buildings with swell energy efficiency accomplishments on paper that (for some significant fraction of ‘em) underperform dramatically.

Jeff Harris, VP for programs at the Alliance to Save Energy, slapped a doozy of a slide on the wall: The actual energy performance of LEED-certified buildings. To sum up: It’s all over the map; some of these buildings are energy hogs. “The number of LEED energy credits [earned by a building],” Harris said, “is not a particularly clear predictor of energy consumption . . . this tends to get people worked up!”

Why should the real-world building differ so dramatically from what was designed? Why are some LEED buildings underperforming? Harris provided a list of reasons, including – plug loads, comfort settings, occupancy of the building and actual operations . . . and the fact that the building as designed and the thing delivered can often be distant cousins (he called this “de-value engineering”).

[What does this mean in the real world? I can provide one quick example: You design a building in a certain way, to use a range of X to Y amount of kilowatt-hours a day. But Ms. Moneypenny, an executive secretary on the 11^th floor, has been bone-rattling cold all her life (she could stand to gain a few pounds). She buys (or gets the employer to buy) a space heater. For some piece of the year, the 1,500-watt unit is “on” . . . chewing up unanticipated kWH, day after day.]

Add to that, Harris noted, “operator action/inaction.” I have, personally, heard (and read) a lot of talk about this. Building operators are not trained to use the tools built into a building, I’ve heard (such as building automation, energy management systems, lighting controls, etc.).

What’s behind all of this is a thought process that seems to include, even though it is not ever explicitly expressed:

a. We design great buildings, the damn construction guys louse ‘em up before they’re occupied.

b. We give the building owner a great building, but he hires a $10-an-hour idiot to operate the thing, and all of our great stuff isn’t used. We built in 19 different strategies, but they run the thing like a brick.

c. We’ve got to build a very tight box around the building owners, so they stop this nonsense and do what they should be doing.

Among the things Harris said, according to my notes:

• We might have to “require a certificate of occupancy, later on in a building’s life.” In other words, an existing building’s energy performance would have to meet certain specified levels . . . or that all-important certificate might be pulled (by the municipal authority), or might just expire.

• To get buildings to perform as designed, he said, we need “to move from design-bid-build to design-build-operate.”

• A question that’s under discussion in green/efficiency circles, he said, was “how do we hold the [building] owner accountable?” Do you hold the owner responsible for what tenants do? What happens when a building’s owner changes? What happens when the building’s use mutates (from commercial building, say, to high-rise residential)? And: For how long do we insist on this accountability?

All this might be interesting (if you’re an electrical contractor) — or a bit scary (if you own a building!). And: It might also seem futuristic, as these ongoing discussions have not (yet) led to specific actions. However, this stuff gets talked about first, then all of a sudden it is . . . in a local law.

Short Bites

To finish this off (there will be a bit more next time), here are some shorties from the WEEC:

CSP, to be or not to be – I sat in on a session on Concentrating Solar Power. I thought I needed to educate myself on this. Included: The idea of putting a bunch of mirrors in the desert to relay the Sun’s relays to a central point, boil water, and create electricity. I learn something, I think . . .but then a few weeks ago read about a research piece that “reports global CSP under siege by PV.”  The gist: Solar PV is getting so cheap it might just drive CSP from the market.

Everyone wants in on the game – One 20-minute on-the-show-floor presentation came from Hess, which I had always thought was in the oil-and-gas business. It turns out that the company has a new Energy Solutions Group. They will do something for a client company (first, it probably has to be pretty big) called “energy risk-reward rebalancing.”

We were green before anyone – that was the gist of Al Thumann’s speech in the opening session. He’s the generalissimo of the AEE. He noted that the org’s prime certification, the Certified Energy Manager designation, is something that’s been around for 29 years.

Keynote speaker – Tom Friedman, New York Times columnist and three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, spoke at the opening session. He’s very green, I guess; I’ve read his stuff extensively (not the books, but his 700-word column in the Times).  Of course, you might wonder at the “greenness” of a guy who regularly jets all over the world to get fodder for his columns and books, but never mind. To sum up what I heard in December in D.C., and what you can get from his writings: (a) I’ve got the solution to all of the world’s problems; (b) why doesn’t everyone just do what I recommend?; (c) those that can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the logic and brilliance of what I’m saying . . . really must come to terms with their own idiocy.