Tag Archives: Green Building

India’s First LEED’s Green Building targets “Net Zero” with High Efficiency Solar Power

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New Delhi, India (SPX) Sep 19, 2013 – SunPower has announced that Swadeshi Civil Infrastructure has completed the installation of a 930-kilowatt (kW) SunPower solar system on the rooftop of the Indira Paryavaran Bhavan building…

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The state-of-the art landmark will be India’s first net zero energy building. Its design emphasizes conservation featuring trees to reduce adverse environmental impact, adequate natural light and shaded landscaped areas to reduce ambient temperature.

The building is targeted to achieve Platinum from the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green building rating system, known as LEED INDIA. It also is expected to receive a five star Green Rating for Integrated Habitat Assessment from the rating system developed by the Energy and Resource Institute and supported by the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, the nodal ministry of Indian government.<

See on www.solardaily.com

Google obtains a Renewable Energy Power Purchase Agreement in Texas

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Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The structure of this agreement is similar to our earlier commitments in Iowa and Oklahoma. Due to the current structure of the market, we can’t consume the renewable energy produced by the wind farm directly, but the impact on our overall carbon footprint and the amount of renewable energy on the grid is the same as if we could consume it. After purchasing the renewable energy, we’ll retire the renewable energy credits (RECs) and sell the energy itself to the wholesale market. We’ll apply any additional RECs produced under this agreement to reduce our carbon footprint elsewhere.<

See on googleblog.blogspot.ca

Developing an Energy Management Program for Your Business

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Today more than ever, businesses are concerned with maximizing operational efficiency, minimizing costs, and seeking out untapped revenue streams. At the same

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Large energy users like many commercial, institutional, and industrial organizations have a unique opportunity to act as a “virtual power plant” while reducing their real-time demand for electricity—and opening up a new revenue stream. This strategy, known as demand response, is not only a cost-free way to reduce energy usage, but also it generates payments for participating businesses simply for being on call.

Demand response providers work with commercial, institutional, and industrial businesses to identify ways for facilities to reduce energy consumption without affecting business operations, comfort, or product quality. In turn, those facilities agree to reduce their demand during strategic times so that utilities and grid operators can improve reliability during times of peak demand. Demand response also helps increase economic efficiency in regional energy markets and integrate renewable generation capacity into generation systems.

Demand response can be considered a form of strategic energy efficiency, but what about long-term, persistent energy efficiency, a second key to a comprehensive energy management program? In even the most high-tech, LEED Platinum certified buildings, it can be very difficult to ensure efficient operation over time. […]<

See on www.dailyenergyreport.com

Inside look at General Motors’ new hyper-green data center

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WARREN, Michigan—General Motors has gone through a major transformation … a three-year effort to reclaims its own IT after 20 years of outsourcing.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The first physical manifestation of that transformation is here at Warren, where GM has built the first of two enterprise data centers. The $150 million Warren Enterprise Data Center will cut the company’s energy consumption for its enterprise IT infrastructure by 70 percent, according to GM’s CIO Randy Mott. If those numbers hold up, the center will pay for itself with that and other savings from construction within three years. […]

The data center is part of a much larger “digital transformation” at the company, Mott said. GM is consolidating its IT operations from 23 data centers scattered around the globe (most of them leased) and hiring its own system engineers and developers for the first time since 1996. Within the next three to five years, GM expects to hire 8,500 new IT employees with 1,600 of them in Warren. “We’re already at about the 7,000 mark for internal IT from our start point of about 1,700,” Mott said. […]

So far, three of the company’s 23 legacy data centers have been rolled into the new Warren data center. That’s eliminated a significant chunk of the company’s wide-area network costs. “We have 8,000 engineers at (Vehicle Engineering Center) here,” Liedel said. And those engineers are pushing around big chunks of data—the “math” for computer-aided design, computer aided manufacturing, and a wide range of high-performance computing simulations.

“Now with the data center on the same campus, we’re not paying for the WAN bandwidth we had before,” Liedel explained. “We’ve got dark fiber here on the campus, and the other major concentration of engineers is at Milford at the Proving Ground.” Milford and Warren are connected over fiber via dens wave division multiplexing, providing 10 channels of 10-gigabit-per-second bandwidth.<

See on arstechnica.com

Virtual Energy Audits: The Next Big Thing in Buildings?

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Virtual energy audits use software to collect meter data, weather information, etc. and algorithms to develop energy efficiency recommendations.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The goal of any energy audit is to identify savings by analyzing data, determining how and where a building is using energy, and then providing operational and capital energy efficiency measures that improve overall performance.

A traditional ASHRAE Level II Audit includes a manual inspection of data related to a facility’s Building Envelope, Lighting, Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC), Domestic Hot Water (DHW), Plug Loads, and Compressed Air and Process Uses (for manufacturing, service, or processing facilities). Analysis is conducted to quantify baseloads and account for seasonal variation. A Level II Audit will also include an evaluation of lighting, air quality, temperature, ventilation, humidity, and other conditions that may affect energy performance and occupant comfort. The process also includes detailed discussions with the building owners, managers, and tenants – there is a lot you can learn just by talking to people about what they think is working and not, what the financial objectives of the organization are, and how that should feed into the recommendations.  […]

Ok, I get it: So what’s a virtual energy audit?

Essentially a virtual energy audit is much like a traditional audit: the goal is to synthesize a whole bunch of data and come up with a list of recommendations that are going to deliver you the biggest bang for your buck. Unlike a detailed ASHRAE Level II audit, it’s better to think of virtual audits as delivering against the 80/20 rule. For a lot less physical effort, it’s going to get you about 80% of the detailed insights that a traditional ASHRAE Level II energy audit would deliver. And for many organizations, that’s OK – because their biggest, most obvious energy hogs are the ones driving the biggest bills at the end of the month.<

See on energysmart.enernoc.com

Call for Energy Efficient Air-Conditioning with Technological Development

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Innovations could cut the growing amount of energy used for air-conditioning and refrigeration

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Conventional air conditioners employ refrigerants such as chlorofluorocarbons to absorb heat from the room to be cooled. That heat is then expelled outside, requiring electrically powered pumps and compressors.

One idea to conserve energy is to replace coolant fluids and gases—which are often super-powered greenhouse gases capable of trapping more than 1,000 times more heat than CO2—with solid materials, such as bismuth telluride.

A new device from Sheetak, developed in part with ARPA-E funding, uses electricity to change a thermoelectric solid to absorb heat, and could lead to cheaper air conditioners or refrigerators.

Such refrigerators, which lack moving parts and are therefore less likely to break down, can be lifesavers in remote, rural areas for keeping medicines cool or food fresh.<

See on www.scientificamerican.com

Monitoring Motivates Less Electricity Use

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Researchers found that families that were simply told they were in a study to track electricity use reduced electricity use more than 2.5 percent.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The general phenomenon is called the Hawthorne effect: study subjects change their behavior because they’re being observed. So researchers collaborated with a utility to test for the Hawthorne effect in electricity use.

They monitored almost 5,600 randomly selected households. Half received a postcard saying that their energy use would be monitored for a month for research purposes. They also got four follow-up reminder postcards over the month. They received no other information, instructions or incentives.

The control group monitored for the study got no notifications. That group continued using the same amount of electricity. But the families being tracked reduced energy use 2.7 percent. And when the study period ended, their energy use shot back up. The report is in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. [Daniel Schwartz et al., The Hawthorne effect and energy awareness]<

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Proliferation of wireless devices and networks detrimental to environment

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Cloud computing should be driving sustainable development, but its turning us into energy consuming monsters, write Stuart Newstead and Howard Williams

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>There is a familiarity and comfort in our almost-everywhere connection to always-on communications networks and to the ever-increasing array of services they deliver us. We don’t just consume these network services directly, they give us what economists call “options” – options to connect, options to seek out new services, options to find new information. Clearly we don’t use this network services 24/7, but we value highly the options for instantaneous and simultaneous access at any time.

Cloud-based applications – those stored and managed by massive data centres run by the likes of Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple – are providing step changes in the financial and environmental efficiency of delivering these services. But the centralising power of the cloud has its corollary in the dispersing effect of wireless networks and devices.

In wireless networks and devices we see fragmentation, duplication and a fundamental shift from mains power and green sources of energy to battery powered always-on devices. In environmental terms here lies the rub. Rather than the “aggregation of marginal gains” (the Sir Dave Brailsford strategy that has propelled success in British cycling), in which lots of tiny improvements add up to a large visible improvement, we are witnessing the aggregation of environmental disadvantages from billions of low-powered but fundamentally energy-inefficient antennas and devices providing the ‘last metre’ connectivity to global networks.

Wireless networks and devices, technologies that should drive sustainable development, are turning into energy-consuming monsters.<

See on www.theguardian.com

Energy Management – Determining Load Factor to Maximize Control

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Understanding load factor is an important component to energy management and learning how to take control of your electricity use.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Load factor is a ratio or percentage of the consistency of your electricity consumption – in other words, load factor is a way to answer the “how ‘spikey’ is your load?” question. The easiest way to understand your own load factor is by looking at your real-time energy data. Not only will your energy data indicate your load factor, but it will also highlight other important aspects of your electricity use over time that will enable you to make smarter energy management decisions.

While looking at your real-time energy data is the best way to accurately get your load factor, you can approximate it from your utility bill information. To manually find out your load factor, divide your total consumption (in kWh) by the number of hours in your billing period. Then, divide the result by your peak demand during the billing period, and the number you compute is your load factor. A load factor closer to 1, or 100%, indicates that you are using energy more evenly or consistently over time. It might also mean you are reducing your peak demand or otherwise avoiding spikes.<

See on energysmart.enernoc.com

Detroit Completes One of Nation’s Largest LED Parking Garage Retrofits – WSJ.com

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Sixty-one Acres of LED Lighting will reduce garage energy-use by 80 percent; Entire property by 7 percent

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>LED technology is one of the highest performing, currently available methods of lighting. Energy savings of 50 to 80 percent are common when compared to the lamps that are typically used in garages. LED lamps also have much longer operating lives, resulting in fewer materials and transportation resources needed over time. The MGM Grand Detroit LED retrofit, will save enough electricity to power more than 350 average homes per year. […]

Earlier this year, the company initiated a program to install 1,600 induction technology lighting fixtures covering 160 acres of open lot parking area at its resorts in Las Vegas. These lamps are ideal for the hot Las Vegas climate and will have an operating life of up to 20 years. An estimated 2.7 million kWh will be saved annually following the project’s completion.

Additionally, MGM Resorts recently announced the planned installation of one of the largest rooftop solar photovoltaic arrays in the world at the Mandalay Bay Resort Convention Center. The 6.2-megawatt installation will be MGM Resorts’ first commercial solar project in the United States and will generate enough electricity to power the equivalent of 1,000 homes.<

See on online.wsj.com