14/05/2009 by David Slade.

Discussions of Open Systems tend to be long on technical concepts but short on concrete value propositions. I think that is partly because the term “Open” usually gets applied to systems in a technical context rather than a business context and partly because it is just easier to talk about “Open” in abstract terms. But, energy managers and facility directors can not take “abstract” to the CFO for funding nor can they take “technical” to the CEO for approval. To get Open Systems project approval from C-level executives requires that we translate Open Systems concepts into concrete value propositions. Defining OpenEMS and clarifying how it applies to particular organizations is a powerful tool for accomplishing that translation.
(Open Energy Management Systems) is a philosophy of doing business where energy-related product and service providers collaborate and interact through standards-based solutions to deliver maximum value to building owners and operators. In an OpenEMS environment, while equipment, software and services may come from different providers they interoperate quietly and efficiently in the background — allowing building owner/operators to focus on their core business.

There is typically a broad range of suppliers making up the “energy ecosystem” for an owner/operator. The owner/operator may work with utilities, mechanical service providers, alarm monitoring services, bill-pay-audit services, electrical contractors, sustainability consultants, demand-response aggregators and other energy-related product and service providers. Whether these providers are external suppliers or internal service groups, they are all part of the process of acquiring, using, controlling and managing the use of energy in a building.

One way to view an energy ecosystem is to think of it as a building owner/operators supply chain for energy. It includes all of the organizations that impact the sourcing, utilization and management of energy. Just like in manufacturing and retail supply chains, there are substantial value creation opportunities in improving the efficiency of interaction among the stakeholders in an energy ecosystem. OpenEMS is about accelerating the flow of information among those stakeholders while reducing the cost of transactions … and these can dramatically increase efficiency.

Improving the efficiency of interactions through links among business processes and information systems serving stakeholders in an energy ecosystem yields maximum owner/operator value. OpenEMS is the most cost-effective way to link these systems and share required business and technical information among the broad range players. This will result in substantial gains that flow to all of the stakeholders and benefit everyone through lower overall costs of doing business.

Who Benefits from OpenEMS?

OpenEMS offers substantial benefits to building owner/operators in a variety of operating scenarios. OpenEMS can lower costs, reduce environmental footprints and increase productivity of facility management staff. Owner/operators achieve lower costs through direct reductions in energy use, better utilization of service resources and lower exception processing costs. But owner/operators are not the only ones who benefit.

Commercial and industrial buildings account for a large fraction of the total energy used in the UK & US. There is tremendous potential for reducing building energy use through improved energy efficiency. There is also tremendous potential for improving the effectiveness of energy utilization in buildings through automated interaction among building systems, utilities and facility management systems. OpenEMS enables these interactions and as a result, benefits not only building owner/operators but also product and service suppliers as well as society as a whole.

Where Can You Get OpenEMS?

OpenEMS doesn’t come in a box, off the shelf, or through the mail. It is a web of business and technical connections among a building owner/operator and their suppliers. Of course, those connections require a technical foundation, or information platform, that bridges the gap between building automation (where BACnet is the key technology) and IT (where Web Services is the key technology). For a building owner/operator, that foundation will necessarily encompass their energy management system and that is why energy management system selection is a critical issue.

Energy management systems, and the companies that support and maintain them, must be full participants in the energy ecosystems of building owner/operators. This requires a different kind of system and a different kind of company. It requires energy management systems that support transparent industry-wide interconnection. Vendor-specific “standards” will not be sufficient. Collaboration among supplier companies will be equally important. No one company can optimally fulfill all roles in an energy ecosystem. As such, selecting an energy management system with the goal of implementing OpenEMS means selecting a partner as well as a product.

In a world of volatile rate structures, dynamic regulation and uncertain economics, energy management systems must do much more than just manage and optimize energy use. They must be integral components in energy ecosystems where they create a foundation for OpenEMS. Energy management suppliers must do more, too. By definition, no single supplier can deliver on the full value of OpenEMS, so best-in-class suppliers must work together to serve a building owner’s diverse and often complex energy management and information needs. In future columns I will walk through some specific scenarios where collaborative suppliers and OpenEMS can deliver concrete value to building owner/operators.

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14/05/2009 by David Slade.

The value proposition exists for all stakeholders, from the developer who saves from a lower capital cost to the operator and/or tenant who saves from a lower operational cost and to the end user who obtains a better user experience.

Without an intelligent infrastructure in the buildings they manage, facilities managers will increasingly find it difficult to monitor utility consumption, the first vital step in achieving energy savings and improving the bottom line.

As utility charges increase, and become punitive for organisations that show little progress in reducing their energy consumption, for example, the pressure is on management to establish a usage base against which future consumption can be managed.

Putting in place software solutions that help monitor consumption and check utility invoices for accuracy will also go a long way to helping facilities managers confidently manage their domains.

Gaining ground in the Building Automation Systems (BAS) arena is Software as a Service (SaaS) which is increasingly being implemented as an essential tool for facilities managers to better manage a single system or multiple systems of their property portfolios. There is a good business case when it comes to utility consumption and costs.

SaaS is application software remotely hosted and managed by a service provider that takes responsibility for ensuring the application is always up to date, integrating this where necessary with third-parties, such as telecommunications companies, electrical meters and municipal administrations.

In isolation, each of these administrative tasks has mainly nuisance value for the facilities manager if they are managed in house.

Each application must be individually upgraded and managed. New tariffs loaded and kept up to date and this is fiddly, time-consuming and not core to the business and therefore often is incorrect which causes more administration to rectify.

What we are increasingly doing with construction projects in which we are involved is to design the facility with SaaS in mind and ensure the components are included in the intelligent infrastructure of the building or complex.

This means that as components that need to be managed are installed – such as air conditioners, lighting systems, PABXs, lifts systems, fire alarm, security, access control systems – the communications infrastructure that enables their remote management is already in place and so implementation is straightforward. There is no need for a retrofit.

Having SaaS implemented from the start of occupation of the premises enables facilities managers to accurately manage consumption of services and implement energy saving measures.

“ICS Controls” Without the base measurements of energy consumption, for example, there is no way to accurately measure whether consumption-reduction strategies are being effective and saving operational costs. If you are going for a green star-rated building you will need this information to claim your green building council points.

But using SaaS is only the most obvious of benefits intelligent building infrastructure brings to facilities management. The profession should take a more proactive stance in persuading building developers to plan for future Information and Communication Technology (ICT) needs before construction starts.

A building’s integrated ICT platform needs to accommodate a variety of systems needed for the efficient operation of the building and tenant experience. These include security access controls, air conditioning, lighting, emergency evacuation systems, public address and promotional systems as well as tenant company-specific IT requirements.

There must be sufficient flexibility in the design of the intelligent backbone to allow for future inclusion of feature-rich services that were perhaps not initially envisaged or available at the time of planning.

Making allowances for expansion of services will contribute substantially to the owners ability to attract high-value tenants on long-term leases, thereby ensuring an attractive return on investment.

Having in place the intelligent infrastructure on which to implement building management systems gives facilities managers the tools to manage, for example:

• Energy data - - intelligent energy management, such as monitoring room temperatures in a data centre and turning air conditioners on and off within pre-determined temperature ranges, without the need for human intervention.
• Environmental data - enables, for example, individually adjusted ambient temperatures for reception areas and offices within the same building.
• Maintenance data – gives management the necessary information to be proactive in managing the facilities, such as escalators, access controls, power supply and telecommunications.
• Occupancy data – means having at management’s desktops accurate information about interactions with tenants and determining the profitability of rented space and facility usage, and
• Location data – this gives accurate information on the whereabouts of company assets and triggers alerts when these assets are moved.
The value proposition exists for all stakeholders, from the developer who saves from a lower capital cost to the operator and/or tenant who saves from a lower operational cost and to the end user who obtains a better user experience.

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14/05/2009 by David Slade.

An argument could be made that our preoccupation with intelligent buildings has been very focused on mechanical service controls with a bit of lighting control added. By that I mean the underlying communications architecture that has paid the price of entry for buildings to truly become both intelligent and green. In fact new technology just hitting the market for “energy business intelligence” will truly transform our industry.

For nearly a decade the buildings industry has talked of convergence and intelligent buildings. However I would argue that in spite of many developments the paradigm in our industry has not been shattered. That paradigm has to do with people. We have been preoccupied in the buildings space by standards like BACnet and LON and operator interfaces like browsers, but the fundamental fact remains: these tools are only intelligible to people who know buildings. In short all of the effort has been on the plumbing that carries data, but there has yet to be a fundamental sea change in the way that buildings and systems are actually controlled.

Over the most recent decade my emphasis has been on buildings and on the the importance of efficiency, demand response and smart grid. The timing is now for these ideas to be the emphasis in buildings. Of course with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act there are 767 billion reasons why that is true. For the UK its different, with new regulations come in imposing this requirements i.e.Welsh assembly on including BREEAM ‘very good’ rating in the conditions of planning approval. The construction sector companies are poised to build their entire business model around opportunities presented and that makes sense. However, it is also the right time to do this and it is the right thing to do. My personal belief is that no one is better positioned to seize this opportunity than the integration community. With the downturn in new construction many buildings professionals are scrambling to redefine themselves. Energy was seen as the most important business opportunity for the next three to five years, but the question of how to pursue it remains.

The next frontier for integration will look like a variation on energy services and will be built around the idea bringing value propositions to owners. At the heart of that offer will be a hot new technology that might be called enterprise energy management on steroids. Energy Business Intelligence will be to buildings what the iPod was to music. To illustrate this point I will use an analogy to another Apple product, the iPhone. Consider the catchy television commercials we have all seen that talk about “aps” (applications) for the iPhone like calculating the calories in your lunch or finding your car. For all the intelligence that has been put into buildings, at the end of the day only an engineer can truly diagnose and trouble shoot a building automaton system. So what about the green in the title of this article, well only an energy engineer can measure and verify the effectiveness of the building system. The idea of energy business intelligence won’t transform our industry on day one, but its impact will be unquestioned.

So what is energy business intelligence? Well it is a Web Portal with Data Warehouses, Online Analytical Processing and SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) Web Services that overlays applications like “Key Performance Indicators” (KPI), WhatIf Decision Support System, Geographical Information System and Business Processes onto building systems to create an Enterprise Resource Planning and Financial Management tool for Energy as well as a real time management and energy policy enforcement tool for the building owner. The first tool of this type is called Global Energy Management for Sustainability (GEMS). The GEMS Web Portal allows owners to manage campus sustainability in real time. Converting terabytes of energy and building information is a major challenge and this tool is designed to change data into knowledge. For example, at the University of New Mexico this GEMS Web Portal publishes energy data and carbon footprint in real-time. Managers establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to assess effectiveness of facility operations campus wide or on a building by building basis. Operators use the Microsoft Virtual Earth tool to zoom in from space to the campus. Once a three dimensional campus map comes into view, the user can chose to select KPI icons, time periods and a host of other metrics. For example if an indicator like “energy cost per square foot” or “carbon footprint” is selected, campus buildings change color based on performance against a predetermined metric. A building in red needs attention because it is consuming too much, while those in green are in the zone. GEMS users can drill down into the automation system to troubleshoot problems, but the preferred approach will be for this to happen automatically. It will be possible for systems to be integrated and programmed to execute self-learning applications and optimize energy performance to achieve new levels of sustainability.

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14/05/2009 by David Slade.

As we get more smart grid programs throughout the US and UK there is already a long line forming of product and service providers clamoring for their piece of this new green energy market. But the developments so far are disappointing for this reason. Active members of our industry – you and I – have a unique understanding of the nature of the major loads served by these electric grids - buildings. But so far, I see very little appreciation or desire for effectively employing that special understanding into smart grid concepts that are likely to really work.

One of the big challenges in smart grid development is the effect the shift to renewable energy will have on electric grids. As renewable sources of electric power such as wind or solar begin to climb in percent of total power into the grid, the predictability of the overall power applied into grids will fall. Wind speed and solar isolation are hard to predict hours ahead, and even if we learn to do so, it will still leave us with those natural variances that will be difficult to manage.

This is a great challenge, but it is one that many of us who have worked in building energy system design and operations have special insight to resolve. And our solutions are likely to be much more economical and effective than what I am hearing being proposed. Instead of starting by installing specialized energy storage devices throughout the grid, would be developers of smart grids should look to the buildings themselves as the primary dynamic that can keep available power and loads balanced. As we enter this era of increased variability and reduced predictability of power sources, buildings themselves when properly configured and controlled can provide the needed balancing flexibility. From my perspective, there are two critical elements of the building energy system that can be exploited for smart grid applications without the need for any new systems. And there is a big additional benefit to starting here to develop truly smart grids:

1. Off-hour Standby Operation: It has been shown over a number of tests, that in many modern commercial buildings, less energy is used if the building is switched into a “standby” mode when unoccupied instead of shut down entirely and then restarted before the start of next occupancy. As building envelopes become more efficient, this will soon be true for nearly all buildings, both commercial and residential. In such operating schemes, energy use is very flexible, especially during standby hours and load characteristics can easily be changed to suit the variability requirements of the electric grid.
2. Building Thermal Inertia: Years ago a study to find what could be done to solve a developing electric peaking capacity shortfall in the business district of a major US city. We determined that by adding networked HVAC and Lighting control capabilities to major buildings in that area we could reduce total peak electric demand at any time by at least 30% for short periods of time without any noticeable effect on the building occupants. The thermal inertia property of buildings is quite well known among many in our industry. It was a key component of control strategies my firm and others used for many years in the early days of digital controls. This field needs to be reopened since it provides a far more economical and useful approach to managing the modern electric supply/demand equation than many of the other energy storage systems being considered.

But there is another enormous benefit achieved by focusing first on buildings as a means to balance electrical demand with available power. That is the substantial reduction in overall energy use that can accompany such a focus. It has been shown very clearly in many applications that the same smart building controls capable of off-hour standby modes and “whole building” demand control can also greatly reduce overall building energy use during the rest of the building operations hours. Many of us in the building industry know that capturing this energy could have a dramatic added effect in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that are at the core of the motivation toward smart grids. We know why many of the programs aimed at capturing those savings to date have performed so poorly and we could be part of the solution to correcting such failures in the future.

There are many reasons the building industry is largely bypassed in conversations about developing smart electric grids. But already having a plethora of smart ideas does not seem to me to be one of them. It’s time for all of us to speak up and be heard. Developing smart electric grids requires smart ideas and our industry can be a valuable contributor in developing them!

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14/05/2009 by David Slade.

The government’s to replace almost 50 million gas and electricity meters over 20 years is a golden prize for information and communications services firms.

Not only will it put an “always-on” communications link into every house, flat and office, and require the collection and storage of petabytes of information, but it has the potential to allow energy suppliers to control consumers’ energy consumption.

The government hopes information from smart meters will be enough to persuade consumers to use more off-peak energy. But if they do not, smart metering opens up the possibility for suppliers to ration consumption, by allowing them to switch off networked appliances at times of peak demand.

Key to this is the communications network. The government has proposed three possible scenarios. The option preferred by the government and energy suppliers is for a purpose-built independent third-party national network operator. This would allow energy suppliers to install and maintain the meters, without taking on the risks associated with running the communications and data storage network.

All homes with a telephone line already have a nominal 56kbps link. BT, the UK’s biggest fixed wire network operator, is keen to explore how this project might integrate with its plans, including its possible obligation, to provide to British homes.
The government’s to replace almost 50 million gas and electricity meters over 20 years is a golden prize for information and communications services firms.

Not only will it put an “always-on” communications link into every house, flat and office, and require the collection and storage of petabytes of information, but it has the potential to allow energy suppliers to control consumers’ energy consumption.

The government hopes information from smart meters will be enough to persuade consumers to use more off-peak energy. But if they do not, smart metering opens up the possibility for suppliers to ration consumption, by allowing them to switch off networked appliances at times of peak demand.
Key to this is the communications network. The government has proposed three possible scenarios. The option preferred by the government and energy suppliers is for a purpose-built independent third-party national network operator. This would allow energy suppliers to install and maintain the meters, without taking on the risks associated with running the communications and data storage network.

All homes with a telephone line already have a nominal 56kbps link. BT, the UK’s biggest fixed wire network operator, is keen to explore how this project might integrate with its plans, including its possible obligation, to provide a 2mbps broadbank link to British homes.

Reliable broadband essential

But linking smart meters to the telephone system, particularly a broadband network, might not work, says Mark England, managing director of electronics design specialist. Sentec licenses its smart meter designs to manufacturers which build units for the US and Italian markets.

He says broadband may be okay for consumers because they can usually afford to wait for their information. But energy firms cannot, especially if they are trying to manage consumption on the fly. Even though data rates of 100k a day may be all they need, the connection must be up 24×7. Britain’s broadband networks are not that reliable.

The government’s department of business (BERR) said it had talked to the energy department about whether a smart meter roll-out would make a universal broadband roll-out more cost-effective.

“Currently we believe that this is unlikely because firstly, the meters do not need the bandwidth of broadband, and secondly, energy suppliers need ‘always-on’ communications that consumers cannot switch off,” says a spokesman.

Smart meters offer the potential to introduce smart grids, which interconnect machines rather than people, says England. For example, the smart meter could become the portal to other networked devices such as home surveillance equipment, refrigerators or air-conditioning units. This would allow electricity suppliers (or owners) to switch devices on and off remotely to minimise peak loads.

It would also let suppliers offer innovative service packages, England says. One might be a consumer’s commitment to keep peak consumption below say 3kW in return for a cheaper price, but to suffer a trip if consumption goes above the limit.

“This means there is a lot more information flowing up and down in real time, so network reliability and guaranteed quality of service are mandatory,” he says.

England believes different physical networks will be optimised for the terrain. He says the cellular telephony network works fine in densely populated urban areas, but GSM modems presently cost more than the meter equipment. Rural areas may need cable and/or multiplexed wireless connections.

The key to cutting the UK’s carbon emissions is to reduce peak load and raise base load.

Petter Allison, director of smart metering at British Gas, told a recent conference that a 2% reduction in consumption would pay for the cost of smart meters. US experience suggests some consumers will change their behaviour. It shows cuts of 5% to 15% in energy consumption, says England.

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