Tag Archives: HVAC

Asbestos – Best Practice Approach To Roof Refurbishment

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Excellent article on legacy asbestos insulated roofing systems and remediation methods.

Architecture, Design & Innovation

For any demolition, refurbishment or repair project, the presence of asbestos in the building can have far reaching cost and health & safety implications. And it’s not an uncommon problem. Asbestos was widely used as a roofing material right the way through to the 1970s thanks to its durability and fire resistance benefits at low cost.

The use of asbestos as a building material is a legacy of the built environment that today’s roofing contractors are often tasked with tackling, as those roofs originally specified in the 1950s, 60s and 70s fail and need to be replaced.  Sometimes, there may be no other option than to remove the asbestos roof and incur the project delays and added costs that specialist remediation involves. However, while the Control of Asbestos regulations 2012 ensures that building owners are accountable for preventing any risk of exposure to asbestos fibres from their building, contractors do…

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Boston Housing Authority to invest $11m in energy efficiency and infrastructure upgrades for Public Housing

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The Malden Housing Authority will spend more than $11 million to make its public housing units more energy efficient, work officials believe will pay for itself.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>The 250-unit complex has a central power plant with utilities distributed to each building through pipes installed in the 1950s. The pipes are in poor condition, Finn said, which results in uneven distribution of heat and water pressure. “Those pipes are a problem; they are aging in place,” he said.

The new system will feature one energy-efficient boiler for every two units in the 58 Housing Authority buildings on Newman Road, Finn said. The old pipes will remain and could be used by the authority or the city as underground electricity conduits, he said. The work on Newman Road is expected to cost $4.3 million.

The Housing Authority received the 20-year $11.27 million bond through MassDevelopment , an entity created by the Legislature in 1998 to act as a finance and development authority.

“We’re pleased to support the Malden Housing Authority with this low-cost financing to improve homes for low-income families, reduce the cost of utilities for the authority’s developments, and to support the Commonwealth’s goal of improving energy technologies and efficiencies, resulting in reduced cost,” MassDevelopment chief executive Marty Jones said in a prepared statement.

For the bond financing agreement, the authority will pay a fixed interest rate of 4.12 percent to East Boston Savings Bank, which is loaning the funds. But the bank was only able to do that by entering into an interest-rate swap agreement with another institution, PNC Bank.

The move allowed East Boston Savings Bank to offer a fixed-rate loan, which the Housing Authority needed in order to comply with federal housing standards, said Joseph Leary, vice president of East Boston Savings Bank.<

See on www.bostonglobe.com

Fuel cell switched on at Cal State San Bernardino

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A new 1.4 MW utility-owned a fuel cell is now in full operation at Cal State San Bernardino.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>”Electricity generated by the fuel cell is going straight into the Edison grid, and the university will be able to utilize the waste heat it produces to preheat the campus heating system, resulting in an estimated annual savings of $120,000 from avoided natural gas costs,” said Tony Simpson, senior director of facilities services at Cal State San Bernardino.

The combined heat and power configuration —known as cogeneration — of the fuel cell will reduce the campus’s carbon dioxide emissions by lessening reliance on the high temperature hot water generators currently in operation. The fuel cell will continue to use natural gas to generate ultra-clean electricity through an electrochemical reaction, but because there is no combustion, unhealthful emissions are reduced.

Additionally, the fuel cell is highly efficient, generating more power from a given unit of fuel and lower greenhouse gas emissions compared to combustion-based power sources in a similar size range. Cogeneration DFC power plants can achieve total thermal efficiencies up to 90 percent, depending on the application.<

See on www.elp.com

How Real Estate Energy Managers Can Use Big Data to Schedule Building Energy Retrofits

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Big Data remains a fairly nebulous concept for many real estate professionals, including those who stand to gain tremendously from it right now: real estate energy managers.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>To effectively time energy retrofit measures, energy managers can first develop those measures. New energy analytical tools such as FirstFuel identify and develop measures, and even estimate a range for capital cost. It does this analysis remotely over the course of a day just by analyzing hourly electricity data (which is sometimes also stored by the utility); no time-intensive on-site energy audit is required. Another new tool is Retroficiency, which provides a high-level look at energy performance improvement potential using the same interval data and, with minimal additional data from the IWMS, can further develop retrofit measures to investment-grade level.

After identifying energy-retrofit measures for the portfolio using remote energy analysis tools or more standard on-site energy analysis, energy managers can create a new retrofit measures database in the IWMS. Having this new database on hand enables managers to integrate energy retrofit opportunities with space management, maintenance and capital upgrade needs, and potentially other real estate issues. Such integration drives down the incremental cost of an energy retrofit, which is the gross cost minus the avoided cost of otherwise required capital or space upgrades.<

See on blog.rmi.org

Federal Energy Management Program: Online Training – Live & On-Demand – CEU’s

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FEMP trains Federal agency managers about the latest energy requirements, best practices, and technologies through eTraining Courses, First Thursday Seminars, and webinars.

See on apps1.eere.energy.gov

DIY Reserve Study Site Launched

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CALABASAS, Calif., Oct. 24, 2013 /PRNewswire-iReach/ — Association Reserves, a well-known provider of reserve study services in the United States, recently announced its decision to launch a new website dedicated to their Do-it-Yourself Reserve Study kit.

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>According to an article written using data from Association Reserves’ 30,000 reserve studies, 70 percent of associations in the United States are “underfunded.” This puts many organizations at an increased risk of special assessments, deferred maintenance, declining property values, and board member liability. According to the company, by accounting for the ongoing cost of common area deterioration and then properly funding reserves, boards are able to responsibly prepare for their associations’ future expenses.

“Our goal is to eliminate all excuses for board members not to be aware of the current strength of their Association’s reserve fund and the funding plan necessary to perform common area repairs & replacement in a timely manner,” says Robert Nordlund, PE, RS, the company’s founder. “The path from underfunded to appropriately-funded is a journey and a Reserve Study provides the necessary road map.”<

See on www.prnewswire.com

Manufacturer’s Energy Efficient Heat Recovery Unit Runs High in Energy Awards

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Vent-Axia has made the final shortlist in the prestigious Energy Awards 2013, which recognise and reward companies leading the way in reducing carbon emissions. Vent-Axia’s Lo-Carbon Kinetic Plus E…

Duane Tilden‘s insight:

>Consuming as little as 20W, the Kinetic Plus E only costs around £20 a year to run, offering 94% thermal efficiency and potentially recovering 10 or 20 times more energy than it costs to operate. This offers homeowners an attractive cost saving as we enter the winter months and rising fuel costs.<

See on kirhammond.wordpress.com

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