Total Facility Awareness

Energy Conservation Manual

I have been collecting several books on energy conservation.  Of all of these books, for larger operations like a commercial building, the "Energy Efficiency Manual: for everyone who uses energy, pays for utilities, designs and builds, is interested in energy conservation and the environment (Energy Efficiency Manual)" by Donald R. Wulfinghoff is a great resource.

This is a how-to and source book for energy conservation. It lets you improve efficiency and save money in all types of buildings and plants, ranging from individual houses to commercial buildings to large institutions and industrial plants.

It's for everyone who uses energy, pays for utilities, manages property, operates energy systems, designs, builds, and values conservation and the environment. It provides a comprehensive set of critical factors:

• "Ratings" and "Selection Scorecards" identify your best conservation opportunities.
• "Traps & Tricks" ensure success.
• "Economics" estimate savings and costs.

If you operate or own a building/residence, use this book to help you....

• Cut Energy Costs and Protect the Environment
• Improving Comfort, Safety, And Reliability
• Find the Right Improvements for Your Building or Plant
• Reference Notes broaden your knowledge of utility rates, high-efficiency motors, variable-speed drives, environmentally safe refrigerants, lighting technology, energy management computers, people sensors, and many other vital subjects.
• Avoid Expensive Mistakes. Each Measure includes Traps & Tricks to guide you around pitfalls that can spoil your work. You get tips gained from practical experience that minimize effort, save cost, and protect your savings in the long term.

Energy Efficiency Manual

Enterprise Integration

I was sorting through YouTube looking up interesting videos on Green Technology and saw this video.  It seems to do a good job explaining what facility integration can achieve. 

The Facility Heart Transplant

I am starting to wonder whether ESCOs should be getting so much business.  The whole concept of performance contracting has some fundamental flaws that need to be addressed.

If you were feeling heart palpitations, would you walk into your doctor and ask for a heart transplant?  Would he give it to you?  No, he would stick you on an EKG, do some blood work, take a CAT scan, and run a bunch of other tests.  So, why do customers let ESCOs/Performance Contractors come in and replace a whole bunch of equipment? 

Because ESCOs make it easy.  Because ESCOs know how to finance it.  Because no one has the data that really tells them how their current facility is performing, so owners speculate their is a better way and ESCOs are Johnny on the spot.

If your building had a 10 ton Chiller but really only need a 7 ton chiller, do you think the ESCO would point it out?  If your ESCO found a way to save you $400K with a 5 year return, and you had generally indicated you were OK with a 10 year return, do you think the ESCO might sell you some extra equipment with less of return, promise 10 years with a $250K savings and pocket the rest?  Would you blame them for doing it?

Owners need to understand the real performance of their buildings to get real value from their ESCO.  Handing the keys over to the ESCO is like giving your teenager the keys to the Ferrari and telling them not to go over 40.

Instead of going to the ESCO, owners should first implement a real time facility management system that lets them gather the data to understand real performance.  That data will show off the top a bunch of commissioning errors that account for 10%-20% of the facility energy bill.  With the building properly commissioned and a real performance scorecard, its time to call the ESCO to replace the 10 ton chiller with a 7 ton chiller.

Implementing a real time data system is getting a lot cheaper.  You may have legacy equipment, but there are several vendors with software that can extract data from these systems.  Then there are outfits like Interval Data Systems and Texas A&M that understand commissioning errors.

It is a lot easier today to implement a real time system that pays back in months vs. the years promised by the ESCOs.  Start with the CAT scan before moving to the heart transplant.

Facility Costs

According to the National Institute of Standards (NIST) , more than $16B is wasted each year in the US because the software used to design, build and operate buildings is not well integrated.  This lack of interoperability results in expensive changes in the construction process, and poor maintenance in the operation phase.  I suspect they have just scratched the surface in terms of cost.

NIST really is just aiming at maintenance and support.  In parallel to NIST's thinking, I believe there is a similar cost in energy.  Many buildings do not have the real time systems in place that can correlate building design intent, real energy costs, and the condition of equipment over time.  Based on the retro commission market, it may be fair to say that poor building system interoperability might account for 20% of the energy cost in a facility.  I looked it up, a 20% improvement in facility energy cost would reduce the nations energy bill by more than $20B .

This means lack of interoperability might account for a waste in excess of $36 B per year.  That is a big number to me.

Its about information stupid!

Why do people keep talking about protocols and data (Bacnet, Modbus, LON)?  Why do they keep talking about wireless (Zigbee, Mesh, Wifi)?  Why do they keep talking about the standards definition of what a light switch can do?  Would you explain the value of email by discussing what kind of hard drive you had?

Real decision makers worry about what needs to be done to lean up the enterprise and deliver a better product to the customer.  They don't care about how it is done, other than wanting an open solution.  They care about the money.  They care about customer satisfaction.  Real deicsion makers don't go to the Zigbee, Lon, or Bacnet standards meetings :-(

Standards meetings are important and as an industry we have a lot of great people working on tough issues - all but one: "Show me the money"

Folowing the lessons of the IT industry, true savings probably comes from convergence at the information layer.  What's the information layer?  Its the point at which data from the building control system, lighting system, security system and ERP system are integrated and presented in a clear way so that a smart person can make a smart informed decision.

I know of an integration company that used one of those middle-ware products to connect into a family of high schools.  The facility manager wanted to have total visibility into operations.  The product was perfect.  It linked to all the protocols, systems and devices without incident.  Amazingly....  It linked in so well that the customer did not quite believe it was working, but ultimately he believed he had 100% visibility.  He had the data at its most granular level of detail.  So, that is good right?  Sort of....

What happened next is a circuit breaker failed somewhere on one of the systems, that led to other systems not operating, and ultimately 100's of alarms showing up in his "Data Console".  He was more likely to think he was under attack then to realize that one circuit breaker had failed.  He had data!

He needed information.  He needed a solution that knew how the chiller, fans, VAV, etc were all interconnected to the same core system.  He needed an information layer that could determine root cause.  At the end of the day, his job is to go fix the circuit breaker, not reverse engineer the building automation system.

A system that sets off 100 alarms is a data system.  A system that tells the user the circuit breaker failed is an information system.  100 alarms is a data paralysis.  1 circuit breaker alert is a productive information system.

Its about information stupid!

Smart Buildings?

I keep hearing about Smart Buildings.  The notion being that a building can be smart enough to fix itself, manage its own energy, or somehow optimize itself.  Why don't we talk about smart people? 

The reality in life is that people are smart, buildings are dumb.  Buildings will always be dumb (sorry to the coalition of under achieving buildings).  In the late 90's corporations realized that computers were not going to make companies more competitive.  Competition and efficiency comes from smart people using computers to make better decisions.  And the people running buildings are smart!

So what is missing?  Why do we still talk about building inefficiency?  Why do we talk about the notion of a smart building? Because......

We are not effectively addressing the need to deliver information (rather than data) to our smart facilities folks.  Rather than leading our team, building a business case, or developing a strategy for change, we buy the latest control system believing somehow that it will make up for our lack of leadership.  We outsource performance improvement to an ESCO.  We suffer proprietary solutions because somehow we think a magic bullet will make our building smart.

Does your team have the tools that let them understand the enterprise objectives and determine how the facility operations help deliver a better product or reduce cost?  We think about square feet in terms of rent, energy on maintenance.  Do we think about the fact that for every 200sq feet in our facility there is a person, who is helping make money for the firm, defend the country, or educate our children.  What we do every day running our facility also impacts how that person performs.  An what that person does every day effects how our facility performs.

So I ask again, does your team have the tools that let them understand the enterprise objectives and determine how the facility operations help deliver a better product or reduce cost?

What is a facility Manager to do?

How is the world of facilities changing?  What role does a facility manager play in total operations?  What do you do when the CEO starts calling you to his office and starts to talk about IT, the CIO, cost, compliance, etc?  You know what is wrong in operations but there never seems to be the right amount of money.  Why all this attention now?

The role of the facility is changing, whether you are at a university, a large enterprise, or a government facility.  Energy is becoming a pressing cost that is out of control.  Buildings are aging faster than they should.  Activists are talking about green and sustainability.

In the 90's a major transformation occurred in information technology.  The Gartner Group started to educate the market to think about IT in the context of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).  TCO changed the nature of IT from being a cost center to being a strategic weapon in a competitive world.  Energy, maintenance, supply chain management, compliance, and homeland security introduce a new market pressure on facilities that requires the facility manager to start thinking about their role as 1) a cost center or 2) a strategic weapon on reducing operation costs and improving operational quality.

It is now time for the concept of TCO to be applied to the facility.

The Efficent Enterprise

The modern facility is becoming more and more complex to manage.  As corporations adapt their enterprise systems to respond in real time, facility managers need to adapt to help their enterprise deliver higher quality services at a lower cost.

This Blog, Total Facility Awareness, is about fully integrating todays facility so that it uses less energy, is easier to maintain, is compliant with regulatory agencies, and is secure from threats of all types.